Implementing central and single point of Analytics solution across company

Customer is one of Africa’s public sector company want to implement central and single point of Analytics solution across company

About Client
Umgeni Water is a State-Owned Entity which provides water services – water supply and sanitation services – to other water services institutions in its service area. Established in 1974, 472 million cubic metres of potable water per annum (1294 Ml/d) are currently supplied to a population of over 6.7 million spread over an area of 94,359 km2.

Business Scenario

In Umgeni Water, the Business Processes are integrated with SAP ECC 6.0 IS-Utilities system and other non-SAP systems such as Labware (SQL), DHIDSS (SQL) and WRMDSS (PostgreSQL). The analytical needs of the organization has to be  managed with the SAP Business Warehouse BW/4HANA 2.0 and Business Intelligence Business Objects 4.2.

After the decommissioning of legacy and implementation of SAP ERP, business had to rely on SAP standard reports and excel to perform analytical operations and develop reports which was time consuming, cumbersome and highly inefficient.

Therefore, customer decided to develop BW/4HANA system to utilize more from HANA and develop business centric reports across different modules in SAP and non-SAP. Customer also wanted to migrate 30 years of legacy data and combine with SAP data for their reporting and legal requirements.

Business Challenge

Customer was looking for a Business Intelligence solution which would form part of a standardized core reporting framework for the top and middle management Reporting.
Challenges customer was facing with having no existing analytical environment -

• Management team was not able to analysis business across different divisions because of difference in business process – establish single version of truth.
• Water balancing – Raw Balances, Plant Balances and Distribution – analysis.
• BBBEE tracking.
• Reporting to get compliance % as per SANS and customer internal limits.
• Dynamic comparison of influent and effluent analyses.
• Automated reporting of Financial ratio, Operational cashflow, CO Income Statement – summarized and detailed.
• OOR Investigation.
• Bid tracker.
• Analysis of non-moving materials.
• Balance sheet reporting of actuals against the budget.
• A tool to check if the billings runs were performed correctly – comparison of before and after billing volume, sales and tariffs.
• No printable reports or interactive dashboards for top management

Solution

• The solution is developed using BW/4HANA 2.0 and Business Objects 4.2 to allow excel and graphical based information presentation to ensure consistent data interpretation.
• LSA++ architecture to utilize HANA optimized objects.
• Delivered 165 reports and 23 dashboards in the timeline of 11 months.
• Used HANA optimized advance BW objects to utilize the power of HANA
• Integrated non-moving materials logic, priority compliance logic in the solution to provide dynamic reporting.
• Combined data from various sources including ECC, Labware, DHIDSS and WRMDSS System for actuals and historical reporting.

Solution Components

The solution has three components:

• Analytical Reports: These reports are excel based reports developed for business users to analyze, slice and dice the data to the way they want to analyze. These reports empowers business to perform self-service analysis and hence fulfil various business requirements without need of creating redundant reports.
• Fixed Format Reports: These are Web Intelligence reports built to facilitate the need to print and publish the reports across organization.
• Dashboards: Dashboards are summarized graphical representation of information which facilitates higher management to construct future strategy, which includes across sector analysis for top management to provide right information to take business orientated decision.

Solution Key Benefits

• Improving the decision making process (quality & relevance)
• Producing a single, unified view of enterprise information across business area and different divisions.
• Distribution of data provider based on divisions to manage high amount of data.
• Responding to user needs for availability of data on timely basis.
• Solution facilitates business users to execute and analyse reports in seconds which took more than 20 working days to built.
• Solution empowers end users to build self-service reports.
• Solution enables business users to perform cross module reporting.