BI Reality

The reality is :
1) Adoption level and usage of the reports drive the BI business and needs of services from vendor and shared service
2) Business pays for the enhancements and new reports
3) Data accuracy is most important (follow by the availability of reports) and often a lot of build defects or missing/incorrect business rules are realized at later stage. In a multiple SAP R/3 environments, data accuracy and feasibility to consolidate data from multiple systems relies on the data standards and business rules. The data standards is usually adopted in the source system and extracted to BI but in some cases, there will be a requirement to standardized the master data in the BI layer due to the complexity of getting it done in R/3. Eg. to measure the consolidated sales of the same product which is name differently in different systems.

Global and Regional Authorization Concept

Concept:
- Global AA role (A)
- Global role (B)
- Global composite role (A+B+E)

- Regional AA role (C)
- Regional role (D)
- Regional composite role (C+D)(E)

Authorization can be inserted into roles that are used to determine what type of content is available to specific user groups.

Authorization Objects
Authorization objects enable you to define complex authorizations by grouping up to 10 authorization fields in an AND relationship to check whether a user is allowed to perform certain action. To pass an authorization test for an object, the user must satisfy the authorization check for each field in the object.

SU21 to maintain the authorization objects. Major one starts with RS.

Analysis Authorization (AA)
AA define semantic data slices a user is allowed to see in reporting, eg all data belonging to company code variable xxx that goes through user exit during query runtime. Infoobjects has to be defined as authorization relevant.

AA (Authorization Analysis)

Demand IT in BI

Ensures the reports are utilized
Bridge between end users and BAU organization to obtain the fund for valid/required change
especially in master data changes and standardization
Ensures business users availability of UAT

Business Release in BI

Changes to be promoted in Production system for all the IT system in a big organization that include several regional instances has to adhere to the business release time line.

This is to ensure the impacts are accessed and minimal risk is introduced to the production environment. There is also a need to cross check the dependent changes that ensures the correct sequence of importing the changes in all different systems are followed.

This is very important as:

• Prevent newest changes to be overwritten by old transport(emphasize in orphan transport and transport not in build list)
• Datasource not imported first or replicated after . Eg shared datasources like 2LIS_02_SCL (Purchase Order History) which is shared between SRM and BI (Procurement solution).
• Data loading and transport sequence (top down dependency and cross solution dependency)
• Inactive objects discovered later and development system is opened for new changes, thus re-transport is impossible
• Shared datasource and dataflow are not impacted.eg OTIF(sales forecast) and COPA(sales volume)
• The conversion of logical system name is done in parallel (done in the same BR) for all the 'target' system like BI and APO that feeds on the same ERP system when the feed system change its logical system name.

Change Management in BI

The key success for a Global platform is to have strong governance. In order to produce strong governance in a big organization, a robust and effective process has to be in place. This include the deep understanding of a changes in business and technical that impact BI. One of the rule of thumb of change management in BI is changes in the target system won't impact the feed system but changes in the source system might impact the target system. For example: COPA realignment is done inR/3 which changes the historical master data but BI must reinitialize the delta. New characteristics are created under a new class for new/existing material group. In order to report on the new attributes , BI needs to regenerate its material classification datasource in R/3. A criteria needed to ensure successful change management is the ability to understand the root cause of the issues technically and functionally and address its risk and effort level accurately. Knowing how to identify and fill the gaps between in-source responsibility with outsource capability is equivalently important to drive an efficient BAU process and avoid redundant processes to take place.

The objective of a change process is to ensure there is a standard and control for changes that lands into the system in order to mitigate risk of defects and impacts. But the control must be flexible enough to hold different type of scenarios that range from project mode, project into bau transitioning mode, shadow support mode,post go live, warranty fix mode,technical go live, business go live and etc. Eg. during warranty period or post go live mode, it is impossible to demand for a CR for each fixes as it is not uncommon at all to spot handful of bugs and breaks in those period. At some cases, when project and demand IT team are not in agreement of the project release timeline, there will be a release for technical go live and only when there adoption of the BI reports by business users, the project is moved to the business release go live stage. Such scenario is very complex to handle in bau management and project resource management, especially the technical warranty period is lapsed but more issues were encountered during business go live. At such, the process of change management should be flexible enough to apply different level of control at different stage.

BI Readiness in the Global Arena

• Adoption level of the regional business users to utilize the BI reports as a reliable source to make decisions
• A BI roadmap that ensures strategical implementation, maintainability and governance that adhere to a tactical operational model
• Standard business rules that might impact the data mapping and conversion factor that needs to be in agreement by all regional stakeholders
• Readiness of standard master data
• Establishment of inter dependency between BI and ERP/APO/source system
• Existence of Demand IT and body to govern the functional changes
• Existence of Information Office to bridge the business users , the Demand IT, the Solution
• Delivery and the Solution Center
• Solid process and efficient of business release management process
• Strong governance and efficient change management process
• Good partnership of BAU organization with project and support team