Migration of SAP BO from version 3.1 to 4.1
About the Client:
Client is an American manufacturer of medical devices and patient monitoring systems founded in 1915. Headquartered in Skaneateles Falls, New York, it was family-owned until it was acquired in 2015.
Background:
Client was working with a legacy system which was not able to propel them for the next phase of evolution in their business. Client had a vision to merge with a larger entity to properly take on the extremely competitive medical devices business of North America.
Challenges:
Client has been facing a three-pronged challenge with their Visual Analytics
- Performance: Their legacy Visual Analytics system was not able to withstand huge data volume due to which dashboard and report took 15-20 minutes to load.
- Security: Security categorization based on departments was missing along with row level security which means anyone from any department can look at all the reports.
- Availability: System crash was a common issue with 15 minutes of downtime every second day, as the system was not able to cope with high number of requests from users.
Duration of the Project
4 months
Tools used
SAP BW, BO, Xcelsius,
Webi Report, Apache Load Balancer, Tomcat Web Server
Approach:
- Right Angle Solution (RAS) consultants and Business Analysts spoke to different business groups and understood the business structure
- RAS business analyst also analyzed user behavior based on the system data
- This was achieved by taking a look at the audit data on how the system has been used
- RAS also identified the Peak and Lowest point of usage of the system
- In this process RAS also looked at the existing application architecture and CPU and memory allocation
- A report was prepared by RAS with critical issues along with the recommendation
Solution:
- Identified how many services are required for the business, which helped cull the unnecessary services to free up the system memory
- Created services based on the usage of the business instead of what was available
- Scaled the system with respect to peak demand
- Added an Apache load balancer to the Tomcat web server to improve the performance on the front end
- Utilized the indexed crawling, by reducing the number of calls to the system
- Integrated SAP BW with BO and implemented single sign on
- Created user groups and inherited BW security in BO
Outcome:
- Response time for Dashboard and Reports decreased to 1 minute from 15 minutes earlier.
- Efficiency of 93.33% achieved
- Row level and department level security implemented
- System down time reduced to 15 minutes every quarter from 15 minutes every second day
- Efficiency of 96.8% achieved