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Former Member

Part 3

Reporting Gaps and Risks - yes you see these every day but you still have to document the Gaps and Risks.  Not everyone lives in our world. 

Reporting Gaps and Risks

·         Standards and Processes

o   Do not exist or are not uniform

§  Design, development and management processes are informal

§  Heavily customized development

§  Definition and calculation of KPI’s and reports should be standardized and consistent across business divisions and functional teams

§  No reuse nor sharing of reports, data, and information

§  Handoffs of reports are manual and out of SAP/BW

·         Data Governance

o   Non-standardized nor governed master data

§  Data ownership is undefined or conflicting

§  No trust of historical data

§  Data accuracy and consistency need improvement

§  Lots of data resides off the ERP system

·         Information and Analytics  

o   Requirements of certain KPI’s are driven from a limited Executive group

§  Not standardized or linked to business needs

§  Historical reporting.  Information reliant on lagging indicators

§  No sophisticated analytical tools and methods to support the decision making

·         BI Governance

o   IT Driven BI Governance

§  Technology-centric organization and implementations

§  No/little business participation in projects

§  Weak end-user skills.  No employee or manager self service but heavily IT dependent

§  No BI competency center exists

§  Data access limited to few key individuals

§  Role based security model should be developed

§  No service level agreements (SLA’s)

·         Application Architecture

o   Reporting “Silos” for each Business

§  Significant variances between business divisions

§  Limited access to data and information

§  Customized SAP queries/transactions slow down the data load and reporting

§  Need Ad-hoc patches & Upgrades. BW is lagged against SAP ECC and cannot meet the business needs

§  No enterprise standardization. Multiple systems and different methodologies are being used across divisions

·         SAP BI Skilled Resources

o   BI Center of Excellence does not exist as a formal entity

§  Current YOUR COMPANY’s sourcing and reporting landscape is scattered regionally with a vast array of different technologies. To create a sustainable BI Center of Excellence, YOUR COMPANY will have to ramp up the skill base on SAP BI tools and technology. Knowledge transfer objectives are part of the YOUR PROJECT Project Plan. It is expected the Program will source BI resource that will transition into the BI COE. Considerations are needed for a user adoption and training program associated with a global BI deployment

o   Adequate training of BI tools and communication of available reports will be provided to pertinent business users at various levels

·         YOUR PROJECT Deployment Challenges

o   Organization and Processes

§  Change of processes will lead to creation of new reports or elimination of old/existing reports

§  The focus and metrics have to be adjusted for the measurement of performance due to the organizational changes, for instance, plants will be cost centers instead of profit centers

§  Business users need to learn the BI tools, as well as some new reports,  and get rid of some old means or work practices

o   Systems

§  Co-existent SAP and BW systems will be standing for a period of time during the phased implementation until the new systems are rolled out to the whole company

§  Consistent and normalized master data needed for accurate reporting

o   Transition and knowledge transfer

§  Current YOUR COMPANY resources have limited knowledge of SAP BI toolset

§  Limited available resources to cover all functional areas of project could lead to gaps in delivering business requirements

o   Global deployment

§  Reporting needs would vary across the divisions and regions

§  Multiple data loads required to meet business requirements in different time zones

·         YOUR DIVISION and YOUR DIVISION specific Analytical needs (the initial assessment analyzed generic functional areas)

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