Tapping Into Business Intelligence

Operating in a dynamic business and community environment, the Water Corporation of Western Australia recognises the need to be nimble. For timely decision making, empowering its people with immediate access to effective business intelligence is crucial.

In 1998, the Water Corporation invested in an SAP platform to manage its multitude of business transactions. Subsequently, in 2000, they introduced the SAP business warehouse tool, SAP BW.

In 2009, they made the decision to upgrade to the SAP BI 7.0 business intelligence platform – with the help of CSC. Access to more timely business data was the main driving force.

The Challenges

Over time, the current BW 3.5 platform had begun to present increasing challenges.

• The nightly loading of transaction data from the Supplier Relationship Management system (SRM) to SAP BW 3.5 was taking 12 – 15 hours. This was impacting decision making the following day
  
  
• The BW 3.5 platform was no longer at the same level of release as the wider SAP environment which had been upgraded to ECC6 in 2008. This meant potentially high maintenance costs
  
  
• The Water Corporation needed to establish smoother integration with its other information management tools, including Business Objects
  
  
• An ageing platform, the SAP maintenance for BW 3.5 was coming to an end.

The Solution

The Water Corporation decided to upgrade to BI 7.0 to avoid additional cost and to enable access to improved functionality.

The lean, agile upgrade project managed by the joint Water Corporation and CSC team, spanned a period of four months from January to April 2010. The actual upgrade itself took three days – on time, on budget and with no surprises!

The most visible early benefit of the new system was the huge reduction in time to load data from the SRM to the new BI system. With load times falling by up to 60%, SRM data is now available the following day for timely decision making.

Now the Water Corporation has a clear roadmap for further improvement opportunities.

The Results

Water Corporation is realising additional benefits of the upgrade including:

• Ease of leveraging add-on features through consistency with the SAP component architecture
• Lower total cost of ownership through increased integration with the Business Objects toolsets
• Improved usability and user friendliness (with Business Objects front end) enables extension of business intelligence to a wider user community
• adding data from more key feeder systems