Lire cet article en Français
SAP BusinessObjects Migration
and Ensuring User Satisfaction:
Orange France Telecom
A long-awaited SAP BusinessObjects migration project
A migration can sometimes be an opportunity to rebuild business user satisfaction. This is in fact an opportunity that our customer Orange – France Telecom took advantage of, who in 2018, chose to migrate from SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SP03 to BI 4.2. SP05.
Vincent Gouedo, Project Manager in charge of this migration had to make sure that the migration of his project went smoothly, so as not to further impact business users: “We could not afford to make any mistakes, our users were dissatisfied because of the bugs and malfunctions we had and our major challenge was to raise the user perception“.
The XI 3.1 had not been supported by Orange for about 8 years! This version brought with it its share of dysfunctions particularly in terms of compatibility problems with certain web browsers (IE, Firefox) as well as performance problems.
Apart from user satisfaction, the criticality of the project documents, which was in fact a modest project, was also a key reason for the smooth migration. The documents of this project are intended for management control for budget supervision and are also included in the closing of the company’s accounts. Not only was it not possible to migrate without prior testing, but also the validation of the migration could not just cover a sample of the project but all the documents to be migrated.
The documents were therefore tested in their entirety, with particular attention to data and performance.
“To do this, we migrated all documents towards a sandbox that pointed to the same database in order to compare reports. 360Bind allowed us to run reports on both environments and then compare the data. Initially, 360Bind provided us with regressions on the run dates that we included in our documents. We isolated this false-positive and then completed the analysis”. In the end, relatively few documents were identified with regressions (83 documents to check, 4 with minor anomalies on the graphs or number format and 2 with malfunctions), but what was important for Vincent Gouedo was to be able to assure the users of the project that the migration had gone well with a supporting document, and 360Bind allowed him to do both: analysis and validation.
“360Suite allowed us to extend the uses and optimize several processes, thanks to these tools we have turnkey solutions rather than having to maintain JAVA and SDK skills that we don’t necessarily have in our teams”.
Personalized user support
Once the migration was completed and the users were reassured, our client didn’t stop there. The optimization work had only just begun. To continue this user satisfaction process, our client used 360Cast to automate and customize its publications. Some documents have the particularity of having prompt values that change according to the date they are executed. The content of the document depends on this prompt value.
For example, if the document is published in the first half of the month, the data from the previous month is used. If, on the other hand, the document is published in the second half of the month, then the data for the current month is used. This is made possible thanks to 360Cast, which allows the prompt value to be refreshed at the time of publication, using data stored in Excel or in a database. “Now thanks to this Excel document, our publications are dynamic and do not need to be retouched or rescheduled at each change of the analysis period”.
Finally, 360Cast allows the customer to further personalize the content dynamically by playing on the file names or the email subject. For example, you can include the date, the name of the recipient, or the content of the prompts. In SAP BusinessObjects, only a limited number of dynamic objects are available.
“What I find interesting about 360Suite is that we can group lots of features together to build a tailor-made solution, just like building our Lego© rocket. The combination of different modules allows us to do things we thought were impossible, especially automating a number of low-value-added tasks”.
Vincent Gouedo, SI MoA / MoE Project Manager
Conclusion
Prior to migration, the user perception of SAP BusinessObjects was literally negative, -63 (Net Promoter Score methodology). After the migration, no more annoying bugs, increased performance, the arrival of new functionalities and the certainty that the migration went well, the score gradually increased to +25 and then +60 at the end of the migration!
“We may have been on small volumes, but we had the advantage of eliminating the need for post-migration maintenance.”