Background

Cipher’s team worked together with SAP to deliver a successful implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management 10.0 in a Ramp-Up project in the Middle East.

This company had been working mainly with Microsoft Office documents to gather and report their performance results at different levels of the organization, including the corporate, groups and departments. This is not an unusual situation, especially when non-financial KPIs are evaluated.

The Tools

SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management 10.0 was selected as the tool that supports the process.

From the customer side, the project was led by the IT and the Corporate Planning and Budgeting teams, making sure the main collaborators from each group and department were involved to share their specific processes and examples that helped designing a solution that would be easy to maintain and scalable so they can reach other areas in the organization.

This project was completed on a distributed environment, with PIP (JPIP) on Unix Solaris, SSM Application Server (PAS) on Windows Server and utilizing their preferred database which is Oracle.

The Challenge

The Application Server (PAS) Models are maintained pulling data from BW for several KPIs, SQL Server for others and the rest are being loaded using Entry and Approval. This was particularly challenging because of the dimensionality of the KPIs and to make sure the update processes run at the same time.

The Process

The process follows a top-down approach, starting with the Corporate Planning and Budgeting department working with the upper management to define the main KPIs at that level and decide which of those will be mandatory for the rest of levels involved in the process.

Each group and department will use the mandatory KPIs as base and will define additional ones specific for their corresponding mission and send those to the Corporate Planning and Budgeting team for approval.

Once the KPI definition is done, the IT team is involved to investigate which KPIs can be sourced directly from SAP (BW Queries are created for those) and which ones are coming from other sources such as MS SQL Server or manual entry.

The Solution

The Application Server (PAS) Models are maintained pulling data from BW for several KPIs, SQL Server for others and the rest are being loaded using Entry and Approval. This was particularly challenging because of the dimensionality of the KPIs and to make sure the update processes run at the same time.

With the core structures in place, the templates, library and the new and improved “Define Scorecards” options in the Administrator Interface facilitated the process making it very easy for the administrators to configure and maintain the scorecards.

Initiatives and Sub-Initiatives (original Sub-Milestones) were created for each element of the organizational structure and assigned to the right Perspectives. With the Corporate and Group scorecards configured, the core team organized knowledge transfer sessions for the Cipher team to share the final work with the different collaborators at all levels, so they could continue creating the remaining scorecards for the different departments.

Last but not least, due to specific reporting requirements, SSM was connected to BusinessObjects BI in order to create those reports using the performance results generated at each level.

Getting the key end users involved and a good blue printing process were key to complete this successful project.