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How the Gustave Roussy Institute
successfully converted its UNV to UNX
with 360Suite
Converting UNV to UNX at the Gustave Roussy Institute
The Gustave Roussy Institute is the leading cancer research hospital in Europe and has been a user of SAP BusinessObjects for over 15 years to provide reporting on financial, HR, and medical activity. More specifically, SAP BusinessObjects plays a critical role in its day-to-day reporting on patient care. With over 10,000 reports on its platform, and the news of UNV ceasing to exist, Sylvain Renault, BI Manager, at the institute decided it was time to launch the project of converting all UNV to UNX. Converting the UNV across manually wasn’t going to be an option, but fortunately, Sylvain discovered a set of automated solutions that could… let’s read on.
What pushed the Gustave Roussy Institute to launch this project?
The “UNV are dead, long live UNX” wasn’t new information to the company but it, of course, played a part in why this conversion project was launched. Not only that, but it also came about from two other reasons:
- The goal of having one version of universes and pass everything into the IDT, instead of using the Universe Designer (UDT),
- If the company wanted to move to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), they would need to convert to UNX as a pre-requisite.
The real challenge for our customer was the sheer amount of reports in their SAP BusinessObjects and the assurance that every universe would be successfully converted to UNX. This could have been done manually but for Sylvain and his team, this was an unimaginable scenario. Fortunately, the stars aligned and he discovered the 360Suite solutions!
360Suite delivers!
Gustave Roussy Institute had over 8,000 reports to migrate over with each report having multiple universes. They decided to invest in our bulk repoint Web Intelligence (WebI) solution to handle this migration from UNV to UNX, because, let’s be honest, this step is the most manual and time-consuming part of the journey. They decided to convert the UNV first and then all the associated queries of reports. The difficulty was what to do with the reports based on custom queries, but thanks to the 360Suite support team, they established the following strategy: start by converting universes one by one and then migrating the reports. During the whole project, users were informed not to create new reports on the old UNV and that once the migration was over, the UNV were no longer accessible. Sylvain’s team still had access in case any regressions were found post-conversion to be able to compare the before and after to be able to fix any issues.
Expert advice from Sylvain Renault, BI Manager, at Gustave Roussy Institute:
“The behavior of a UNX is very different from a UNV so you need to pay attention to that. Before even migrating, make sure you verify the validity of the UNV in UNX. More specifically, check that all the elements exist, double-check the objects, and make sure there are no errors, then if all is good, you can start the conversion to UNX. After the conversion, re-validate the UNX again to ensure that the conversion was successful. From our experience, it was during this second validation that we noticed some inconsistencies e.g. with the Universes with contexts.”
NEW: 360Suite is now able to run end-to-end conversion projects. In 2023, we added the possibility to convert universes directly in our platform, including multi-source UNX to single-source UNX, so that you can successfully and safely convert your universes from one single place.
Planning on migrating to UNX?
Overall, this project took approximately seven months, starting with migrating the UNV with fewer reports that would have been impacted. This can change from company to company depending on the number of UNV to convert. 360Suite solutions automate the whole process to ensure a smooth and successful conversion.
Please feel free to contact us for a detailed cost study.
