An iconic global travel group with a history of over 180 years had grown to become a recognized brand in all major continents with over 21000 employees in its worldwide operations. Its expanding portfolio of chartered and scheduled passenger airlines, package airlines, cruise lines, hotels, and flights services needed to rapidly evolve to keep pace with changes in customer needs. The organization continued to evolve into multiple business lines and its list of subsidiaries and affiliates grew quickly. The company leadership evolved a strategy of focusing on their employees in the local offices and those of their global channel partners to ensure customer experience was consistent across the world. Streamlining recruitment and talent management was a key ingredient of this strategy and the company invested in Taleo as its talent management platform with SAP BO(Business objects) for Taleo reporting. On the back of its decision to sunset BO as the Taleo reporting platform to save on license costs, Oracle provided a project roadmap to the customer to migrate from BO to the OBIEE platform. As a reliable partner with a successful track record of completing such complex migrations within schedule and budget, DataTerrain was chosen by Oracle to lead this migration. DataTerrain was given the following mandates for the quick and efficient completion of this project -
•Perform 1-2-1 migration of Taleo reports from BO to OBIEE
•Ensure there is no business disruption during or due to the migration
•Provide suitable documentation for the customer to minimize maintenance effort
DataTerrain's proprietary automation-led lift and shift methodology for accelerated migration
DataTerrain SMEs(Subject Matter Experts) used their experience gained over numerous successful migrations to quickly customize their best-practices methodology to the unique needs of the customer. DataTerrain's automation tool was configured for the customer's unique environment and the migration project was executed in the following major phases -
1.AS-IS analysis, planning and preparation - As the first step, DataTerrain SMEs performed a thorough analysis of the SAP BO reports repository using the automation tool. Key information like business purpose, business SMEs, report owners, report execution times and frequency, batch schedules were considered for this analysis. Unique BO features and complex functions/queries that need to be implemented differently in OBIEE were identified. In addition, the following were reviewed using the automated tool to flag potential migration issues - complex implementations for classes. joins or relational definitions between classes, measures, and dimensions(objects) were noted, and appropriate actions were defined in the plan to address them. The analysis report created by the automation tool was used to create a detailed activity plan and agreed with Oracle.
2.Automated Lift and Shift migration and validation - DataTerrain's automated utility was configured to prepare for the automated migration based on the analysis and actions from the previous phase. The BO universe in the source environment and all its elements were transported to OBIEE RPD by following OBIEE best practices. During this process, complex business logic and individual elements across report layers of the BO universe were translated and metadata was transformed to the appropriate physical layer, business model layer, or presentation layer in RPD. The converted individual report formats, layouts, and data presentation were automatically validated to ensure exact one-to-one lift and shift from source to target systems. Any issues were identified and fixed early in this process to minimize customer effort in subsequent phases.
3.User Acceptance and Rollout - The validated reports from the previous phase were reviewed by key customer stakeholders as a part of the acceptance process. Since key users involvement was ensured throughout the major steps from project kick-off, no major gaps were identified during this phase. The target environment and approved reports were rolled out to production users after customer acceptance.
The DataTerrain Difference
Following the successful on-time and on-budget completion of this project, the customer team and Oracle noted the following as the critical success factors for successful project execution by DataTerrain -
1.Automated utility for Lift and shift preserving accumulated knowledge - DataTerrain's automated process carried forward the look and feel of reports from BO to OBIEE. This ensured that accumulated knowledge gained over decades of refinements was seamlessly retained and users could begin using the new environment with minimal orientation.
2.OBIEE Best practices - The migrated reports and the entire migration process adhered to OBIEE best practices recommended by Oracle and this ensured a smooth transition, easier adoption, and low technical debt.
3.Global Delivery Model - DataTerrain deployed its global delivery model to accelerate the round-the-clock execution of project activities and optimize the overall cost of this migration.
4.DataTerrain's close working relationships with Oracle - DataTerrain's reputation as a reliable partner and its close working relationships across layers of the Oracle organization enabled a faster turnaround for fixes required during the migration.
DataTerrain migrated the customer's Taleo reporting from BO to OBIEE with optimized cost while meeting or exceeding the standards laid out by Oracle and the customer. This has helped the customer reduced their TCO on their Taleo platform investments and they have benefited by using its latest features.
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