SAP BusinessObjects XI

Migrating to SaP Businessobjects Xi SolutionS

A Mix of Technology And MeThodology

ContEnt

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Why Migrate to SAP BusinessObjects XI? Trusted information greater Business insight for More Users lower Tco Through Standardization Migration Requires a Mix of Technology and Methodology Technology Provides Automation The Steps to Making Migration a Reality focus Areas for Reviewing your Bi deployment Business Requirements

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User Requirements iT Requirements Plan for a Successful Migration help ensure Quick User Adoption of the new System Calculating the ROI of Migration conclusion The Right intelligence Platform for your Businesss Success

Overview
The SAP Businessobjects xi solutions integrate SAP Businessobjects prod ucts and the crystal Reports software onto a single platform, so you can con solidate and standardize your business intelligence (Bi) deployment and lower your total cost of ownership (Tco) with reduced system maintenance, hardware, enduser training, and support costs. The solutions include the SAP Businessobjects live office software, so you can integrate Bi information in your familiar Microsoft office applications, sharing accu rate, refreshable data in documents over the Web for collaborative decision making. our goal is to help protect your existing investment by giving you the tools you need to automate your migration tasks supporting you through your entire migration process via our education services, consulting services, and network of partners. This paper highlights some of the benefits of moving to the latest release of the SAP Businessobjects xi solutions. youll discover migration is not just about the technology its about methodology too. your migration will have a higher chance of success if you apply best practices.

Why MigratE to SaP BuSinESSoBjECtS Xi?

MAP yoUR Bi STRATegy To yoUR evolving BUSineSS needS

SAP Businessobjects xi solutions can help you and your company achieve competitive advantage and strategic differentiation via business intelligence. With the latest innovations in SAP Businessobjects xi solutions, you can go beyond what traditional Bi tools offer. you can readily adapt to changing business requirements and deliver trusted information to people, where and how they work.

By moving to the proven intelligence platform on which SAP Businessobjects Bi solutions are built, youre taking a big step toward finding a Bi strategy to better fit your business requirements. SAP Businessobjects xi solutions offer an excellent opportunity for all our customers to consolidate and standard ize their Bi. The solutions include the SAP Businessobjects desktop intelli gence software, making it easier for customers who have heavily invested in earlier releases of the software to pro tect their existing investment and still move to the intelligence platform.

SAP Businessobjects xi solutions have been built to support trusted infor mation at all levels from dataquality extract, transform, and load (eTl) func tionality to a securityenabled platform, to system auditing features, to present ing data lineage information to end users.

A key innovation in SAP Business objects xi solutions allows nontradi tional users of Bi tools to search and navigate to locate information hidden in hundreds of internal and external re sources, such as structured databases, Bi systems, unstructured company and text content, search engines, and the Web. Another key benefit of migrating to SAP Businessobjects xi solutions is the ability to transform how you view your business by interacting with sophisticated visual representations of processes and performance via dash boards and visualization. you can also perform whatif analysis within dash boards to gain new insights and make more informed decisions. All this helps you achieve a greater return on your Bi investment.

Trusted Information
compliance requirements such as those of Sarbanesoxley, Basel ii, and the U.S. food and drug Administration call for organizations to be accountable for their business operations and cor porate information. consequently, organizations are establishing internal controls and procedures to provide timely, accurate, and auditable data that can be verified by management. in light of the risks and challenges involved with some of these regulations, compa nies need trusted information they can track back to the source systems.

As your business evolves, so should your business intelligence. Achieve com petitive advantage with SAP Businessobjects xi solutions.
Greater Business Insight for More Users
Bi has traditionally been the focus of business analysts and iT. it is widely estimated that only about 15% of potential Bi users are taking advantage of Bi today. yet making decisions is a crucial part of everybodys job, and Bi is essential to good decision making.

Lower TCO Through Standardization

SAP Businessobjects xi solutions represent a unique opportunity for you to evolve your overall Bi strategy and lower your Tco by moving to a full

Webbased Bi environment and by standardizing on a single platform for all your Bi needs. for the majority of long time customers, this means examining how their organizations are currently using older SAP Businessobjects soft ware for enterprise and departmental query, reporting, and analysis. SAP Businessobjects xi solutions include full platformlevel support for SAP Businessobjects desktop intelli gence, allowing a smooth transition path for all existing customers. At the same time, SAP Businessobjects Web intelli gence software has been significantly enhanced with interactive viewing and queryauthoring functionality so you can move to a 100% Webbased envi ronment for query and analysis. you can considerably lower your Tco with the ability to deploy globally with the centralized architecture of SAP

Businessobjects Web intelligence. And thanks to the extranetready security and administration of the SAP Business objects enterprise software, you can extend the reach of the analysis and interactivity of SAP Businessobjects Web intelligence beyond the enterprise and maximize your data assets by pro viding query and analysis to external users. Reducing the number of Bi technolo gies in your organization can result in significant cost savings (through elimi nation of duplicated costs such as eval uation, deployment, training, and sup port), greater control over information, and better alignment with your busi ness users. This all leads to increased competitive advantage by fully exploit ing the power of Bi. These standardiza tion savings tie nicely into a strong Roi supported by faster, more consistent, and more complete Bi.

Costs

Without standards

With standards

Number of projects
Figure 1: Reduced Total Cost of Ownership via Business Intelligence Standardization

Migration rEquirES a MiX of tEChnology and MEthodology

The Bi SUcceSS Model

Technology is just a small part of the migration process, because it doesnt capture all the Bi best practices in place within your organization. SAP Businessobjects xi solutions offer a unique opportunity to review your Bi strategy. our consulting organi zation has evolved a methodology for building and evolving a Bi strategy. its called the Bi success model, and when applied to a migration situation, it maps to issues such as the following: Process how has the organizational strategy changed since the software was put in place? is there now more emphasis on per formance management? can you take advantage of the new functionality to create and use dash boards in SAP Businessobjects xi solutions? can you reuse existing SAP Business objects desktop intelligence reports in these dashboards?

People how have your user requirements changed across the full spectrum of Bi? is there a greater emphasis on self service? Are there more demands for the ability to explore or interact with data? Technology how has the technical environment changed? is there more demand for data quality that requires eTl work? has your infrastructure become more decentralized, requiring more Webbased query and analysis? implementation how is the plan going to be rolled out in terms of training, process change, and Roi assessment?

Technology Provides Automation

SAP Businessobjects xi solutions come with an automated import wizard that enables easier update by automati cally moving repository resources deployed in previous releases to the intelligence platform. you can import the following resources with the wizard: documents dashboards and analytics Semantic layers (or universes) Business views User and security profiles groups and categories While this process is designed to help automate migration tasks, we highly recommend that you or your team go through training on SAP Business objects xi solutions and migration best practices or let consultants or partners be involved in any migration to a new platform. The import wizard in SAP Business objects xi 3.1 supports upgrades from: Businessobjects 5.1.x and above and Businessobjects 6.x and above (now known as SAP Business objects desktop intelligence) Application foundation 6.1.x and above crystal enterprise 9 and 10 SAP Businessobjects xi 1.0 (formerly known as Businessobjects xi Release 1) SAP Businessobjects xi 2.0 (formerly known as Businessobjects xi Release 2) SAP Businessobjects xi 3.0

Measurable Results
Behavioral change Mgmt Process change Mgmt Roi Analysis

how will your plan be acted upon and measured? What are the current enduser requirements? how has the technical environ ment changed? What changes in strategy must the Bi system support?

Data-Driven Decision Making

Performance Management Reporting Query and Analysis

Organizational Readiness
vision and Strategy organization and culture Skills development

Technical Readiness
infrastructure data

Business Intelligence Success Model

Figure 2: The Business Intelligence Success Model Methodology

MigRATion PhASeS

thE StEPS to Making Migration a rEality

do you want to become familiar with SAP Businessobjects xi solutions and quickly take advantage of them to achieve competitive advantage? you can achieve this objective by planning some early iT and project team training and by running a pilot deployment of the solutions in parallel with your cur rent deployment.

Map your Bi strategy to your evolving business needs.

A series of administration training courses for SAP Businessobjects xi solutions are available either through elearning or in the classroom. More information can be found at www.sap.com/sapbusinessobjects. We recommend you go through the following key phases to migrate an existing deployment to the latest SAP Businessobjects xi solutions. each of these phases is covered in detail as part of the complete documentation available with the solutions, in training courses available from our education services, and in offerings from our consulting services: Assessment and planning. The assessment phase consists of audit ing a particular deployment to deter mine the tools involved and project phases. Installation of destination environment. during this phase, a working instance of the latest SAP Business objects xi solutions will be installed

to provide access to the migration functionality and allow staff to become familiar with its operation. Importing content to destination system. This phase corresponds to the actual migration implementation using the appropriate tools to move content from the legacy system to the SAP Businessobjects xi solu tions environment. Test and validation. The test and vali dation phase involves any checking and postimplementation tuning required in order for the customer to put the Bi system into production.

changes and plans across each of these broad areas will have a profound impact not only on the approach to migrate existing deployments but also on the future development of a Bi strat egy. Many organizations are taking the opportunity presented by the migration to SAP Businessobjects xi solutions to reexamine their Bi strategy. Business Requirements While deployments of earlier releases of SAP Businessobjects software may have been effectively meeting the needs of your business, changes in your organizations situation or goals may require a reevaluation of your intel ligence platform design. Some typical questions organizations are asking include: What current business initiatives, pressures, or problems can more effectively be dealt with by adjusting the design of our business intelli gence solution? is a performance management initia tive driving how our organization is measured, leading to a requirement for dashboards and scorecards? has a compliance initiative (such as for Sarbanesoxley or Basel ii com pliance) introduced new reporting requirements that our current solu tion cannot meet at a reasonable cost? Understanding how your Bi deployment can change to solve these business problems will be key to continuing its value to the organization.

Focus Areas for Reviewing Your BI Deployment

The physical migration of the actual users, semantic layer, reports, and so forth from one release to another is only one aspect of the migration pro cess. Possibly the most important part of the process is to understand how a current deployment can evolve as part of a migration to the latest version of software. While the need to plan the complete migration in terms of timing, resources required, and deployment schedules is obvious, the opportunity to review the current and future Bi needs of the organization is often overlooked. There are three key areas to consider when reviewing an organizations Bi deployment: Business requirements User requirements iT requirements

User Requirements When reviewing current user require ments, many organizations discover the requirements are different from those the system was originally designed to address. Thus, questions such as those listed below will assist in migra tion planning and in any required rede sign of the system: Which documents are actually regu larly used? how are they used? Which users in my system are actual ly active? Which user groups require increased interactivity? has my user base expanded? how will all of this change in the next 18 months? has training been available to take advantage of current data and functionality? Answers to these questions provide an opportunity to ensure users can access the insight they need to make more effective decisions. Making crystal Reports documents available via the Web in the same environment used to access SAP Businessobjects Web intelligence, developing key perfor mance indicator (KPi) dashboards to provide a suitable environment for executives to leverage existing Bi development investments, or switching from a desktopbased to fully Web based query and analysis deployment to reduce the cost of making analysis capabilities available to a wide user base all allow for increased effectiveness.

iT Requirements The migration of a Bi system to a new release also offers an opportunity to help ensure the technical infrastructure is aligned to the anticipated usage, so that data is available and represented in a consistent manner to meet the above requirements for the business and the end user. This should, of course, be understood in the context of the busi ness and enduser requirements reviewed above. The data infrastructures in many organi zations have radically changed over the past several years with the introduction of new data storage models (such as

What is the most appropriate and costeffective method of providing the necessary reporting, query, and analysis? does a larger user base require a Webbased delivery? is there a greater focus on data quali ty requiring changes to data integra tion jobs? have the data sources used in the Bi system changed? is there any new functionality that can improve the efficiency and perfor mance of our system (for example, the ability to take advantage of aggre gate tables within a database system)? What design or deployment Bi standards have been implemented? As an example, weve often seen cus tomers use the full client (now known as SAP Businessobjects desktop intelligence) to access multiple data bases, with some reports containing up to 15 or 20 synchronized data provid ers. At that time, the software was used more as a data extraction tool rather than for its ad hoc query and analysis power. Perhaps now is the time to consider integrating some of your scattered data sources into a single data mart or data warehouse in order to enable one ver sion of the truth across the company and help gain greater visibility over your enterprise performance. Because some customers have used software development kits (SdKs) to customize SAP Businessobjects

leverage and protect your existing Bi invest ments.

data warehousing), new applications (such as updated customer relationship management, enterprise resource plan ning, or custom applications), and data movement capabilities (new data quali ty or data integration processes). Addi tionally, organizations have continued the drive to reduce costs through Web delivered applications and information while continuing to establish Bi stan dards and competency centers. We recommend iT departments have a full understanding of the following issues during data and architecture migration planning:

products to fit their specific needs, many customization options have been included as standard features in SAP Businessobjects xi solutions, so you wont necessarily need to migrate all your custom coding to these solutions. This will help you considerably reduce your total cost of ownership by cutting back on the support cost for custom code. Plus, our consulting services and part ners are in a good position to help you migrate your customization to the new model, because they may have handled the customization in the first place. And they have direct access to our technical support and research and development organization, which will help speed the migration of your customized SAP Businessobjects applications. in addition, it is important to under stand the training requirements related to taking advantage of new functional ity, improved deployment options, and new administration or security models. This review should include both end users and technical staff.

ing you gain the most value from your Bi solution. By identifying and under standing your goals and requirements, we can deliver a Bi solution to meet your business needs. you can leverage our consulting services and partners experience and knowledge to provide the value and direction necessary to

Bi consolidation can help increase your or ganizations return on investment and results in significant operating efficiencies.
position your Bi initiative for success. Below are the different stages of the planning process: Determine business requirements. When planning for migrations, SAP consulting first works with the cus tomer to define the needs of the business, which drives the migration assessment plan. This assessment provides all parties with a clear and complete understanding of the goals driving the move to a new release. Assess migration readiness. After working with the customer to develop a solid understanding of business requirements, we perform a detailed readiness assessment and work closely with your technical project team to fully plan the migration. dur ing the assessment, we evaluate your

Plan for a Successful Migration

our consulting services and partners can assist you in defining a detailed migration plan, including a user training plan, to help ensure quick adoption of the new system. We can help you assess your current Bi deployment within a collaborative, strategic, requirementsgathering work shop. This session is focused on help

current infrastructure, semantic layer, reports, and customizations to define a migration path tailored to your spe cific deployment. This assessment provides all parties with a clear and complete understanding of the tasks and resources required for a suc cessful migration. Develop a migration plan. As a deliv erable from the assessment, we will document the findings in a standard migration assessment plan. This plan will include a summary of the busi ness requirements identified, an overview of the current deployment, recommendations on how to proceed with a migration, a description of the activities and resources required to conduct the migration, and training recommendations. Provide training development recommendations. As part of the migra tion assessment plan, we will deliver training development recommenda tions. This plan assesses the educa tion needs of the customer and cre ates the appropriate training plan for the business and technical users. Such education could be instructor led, Web or cdbased, via the SAP Businessobjects Knowledge Accel erator software, or trainthetrainer instruction. Provide full knowledge transfer and documentation. it is our intention to allow our customers to learn and grow from the deployment of the new platform to the point of total self sufficiency. it is our intention to work with your business and technical resources to provide highquality migration documentation as standard within this service offering.

Help Ensure Quick User Adoption of the New System

User adoption is a key element in mea suring the success of your migration. By driving user acceptance of the new system, you will get a faster return on investment from the updated Bi system.

SAP Businessobjects xi solutions are delivered with migration and conversion utilities to help you auto mate your migration tasks.
you can engage experts from our pro fessional services team or partners to help you with a migration. They will come up with training recommenda tions and in many cases, a full train ing plan as part of the migration plan ning process. Training is an essential part of any migration and will help you maximize enduser adoption of the new software. internal advocates (sponsors, a Bi competency center) can also help drive enduser adoption across the var ious departments of your organization.

When planning for a migration to SAP Businessobjects xi solutions, consider the following to help ensure successful enduser adoption: Develop plans and knowledge. A series of system administration courses for SAP Businessobjects xi solutions is available to help you get familiar with the intelligence platform. With the latest release of these solu tions, you will be able to take migra tion training or topics training on specific features and product chang es to update your knowledge. Develop technical skills. Project teams can be trained through instructorled courses, elearning, Web seminars, or workshops. Develop business-user skills. To ful ly achieve benefits from your Bi soft ware, educate your business users with SAP Businessobjects Knowl edge Accelerator, and boost the impact of businessuser training through customization and user adoption services.

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idenTifying TAngiBle And inTAngiBle BenefiTS

CalCulating thE roi of Migration

customers who have migrated to SAP Businessobjects xi solutions have wit nessed considerable benefits for both the iT department and those areas of

To enable a single version of the truth and make sound decisions, an organization must establish a solid data foundation.
the business where the solutions were deployed. Whether by increasing pro ductivity, streamlining business pro cesses, or reducing iT spending, SAP Businessobjects xi solutions have made a quantifiable impact on those organizations willing to implement the leading Bi software.

The following is a list of key drivers to consider when measuring the impact of standardization on SAP Business objects xi solutions versus maintaining your current Bi implementations: Maintenance retirement cost savings on other Bi deployments Reduction in iT headcount due to Bi tool retirement and ease of management Reduction in training costs (for both iT and end user) Reduction in server or other hard ware costs Reduced iT administration costs due to: Single metadata layer Single Web portal Single security domain Single Web environment Single infrastructure for management Simplified SdK/object model improved profitability through more efficient business processes

Conclusion The Right Intelligence Platform for Your Businesss Success

SAP recognizes the need to minimize the cost and risk for customers adopt ing SAP Businessobjects xi solutions. We provide a range of tools, documen tation, bestpractice training, and tai lored services via our consultants or partners to make this transition as smooth as possible. SAP Businessobjects xi solutions sup port the future success of your organi zation so take the steps now to bene fit from the industrys most advanced and complete intelligence platform. for more information about SAP Business objects products and services, please visit our Web site at www.sap.com/sapbusinessobjects.

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50 092 950 (08/12) 2008 by SAP Ag. All rights reserved. SAP, R/3, xApps, xApp, SAP netWeaver, duet, Partneredge, Bydesign, SAP Business Bydesign, and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP Ag in germany and in several other countries all over the world. Business objects and the Business objects logo, Businessobjects, crystal Reports, crystal decisions, Web intelligence, xcelsius, and other Business objects products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business objects S.A. in the United States and in several other countries all over the world. Business objects is an SAP company. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. national product specifications may vary. These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP Ag and its affiliated companies (SAP group) for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.

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