The latest in Business Intelligence Automation and over a decade of expertise were key factors in meeting an enormous pharmaceutical industry challenge. Beginning with the end in mind, DataTerrain swiftly executed several thousand BI reports transition to Oracle's Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
Many businesses and IT departments of various organizations face the same crucial decision-making situation: keeping the system internal to the company or outsourcing to cloud platforms. This question pertains not just to the company's BI (Business Intelligence) practices but also to all the organization's IT departments. For the customer in concern, the business data was highly sensitive, so the management decided to continue with an On-Premises Business Intelligence environment.
The customer has offices across the globe, and more than 5,000 users actively engage in the Business Intelligence systems daily. DataTerrain comprehended the innate need for multi-language support in reporting and analysis. Before the project commenced, a thorough discussion with the customer's internal Information Technology (IT) team was held to understand, analyze, and document the unique and important needs of the project. It is essential to have a complete and deep understanding of the customer's various distinctive requirements at the project's planning stages to ensure its smooth execution and successful completion.
To begin with, DataTerrain formed a highly experienced and expert team with internal IT leaders and users to formulate a list of critical time zones and, based on that list, prioritized them to identify the reports currently being used. The approach was to begin with the consumers of the reports to identify their specific or local requirements. This included the changes they advised from the current reporting system and the additional features/functionalities they preferred. As global localization was a key factor of this engagement, DataTerrain used the NLS features in this project extensively.
The customer's IT team identified around 2,000 reports and dashboards as the major reports being used. The next logical step in the project was consolidating reports for efficient management. DataTerrain extensively used an automation tool to upgrade the reports from Crystal reporting to OBIEE 11g/12c. Apart from manual testing cycles, various automation tools were employed for testing to compare results from PDF or Excel formats. The automation at various levels in this upgrade saved huge costs and time. The time saved was used to develop many standardizations and best practices to ensure the robustness of the reporting system for the future.
Careful planning and execution ensured the successful completion of the project in 12 months, achieved as per the original plan, aided by the great collaboration of the customer's internal IT team. The project included meetings across different time zones and effective change management processes. The DataTerrain team worked diligently in the various phases of the project: planning, customer requirement gathering, standardization of process, execution, and finally, ensuring on-time completion of deliverables.
DataTerrain detailed project documentation for easy understanding of the process and future reference. Specific care was taken to ensure that users of different countries could follow the independent process and management of the reporting system. The user manual and maintenance document were provided to the customer to enable easy editing of reports. The detailed documentation provided for every report (a vital project deliverable) alleviated many bottlenecks experienced due to the varied time zones and languages. The extensive documentation of the project served the users of the system, who found it to address many of their requirements and was widely appreciated.
The successful execution of the project and the smooth transition to the new system can be attributed to DataTerrain's systematic approach to the process, the speed and accuracy of the upgrade, and effective interaction with the internal IT team and business users of the reports. This upgrade involved two vendors (SAP Crystal report to Oracle OBIEE). Their distinct features had to be handled, and the issues raised due to their differences had to be resolved. DataTerrain's deep understanding of both systems (and extensive research) helped them overcome the different challenges in the process. It led to the project's successful completion to the customer's total satisfaction.
The upgrade project brought in more flexibility, scalability, and enhanced speed of report generation. The Data Visualization capability of OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) offers users a rich and modern visualization tool that makes comprehending business data easier and more effective. The system harnesses the enhanced capability of technology to offer users new business insights. It enables them to make faster, more informed business decisions with visual analytics and precise enterprise analytics. The accuracy and robustness of the system make it ideal for an organization that supports a very large number of users.
DataTerrain is available to meet your organization's Business Intelligence challenges of all sizes at connect@dataterrain.com.