A Project Report On SAP
Please answer in-depth the following questions about your SAP BOBJ Webi experience on a major customer project.
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Please tell us a bit about your role at this customer as it concerns SAP BOBJ webi.
Well, at this customer, they did not have any experience with SAP BOBJ Webi. They did not know what it was, had never seen it, did not know how to specify a Key Performance Indicator or Key Metric requirement for SAP BOBJ webi, did not know what a SAP BOBJ webi report looked like or how to interact with a SAP BOBJ webi report. They also did not have a test System setup to play around with.
So the client wanted me to set up a test system, create a training class for their casual and power users. One of the goals was to just introduce SAP BOBJ webi and xCelsius to show what a SAP BOBJ webi report or an xCelsius dashboard looked like. This was for both casual and power users.
For the Power Users, they wanted the ability to create their own reports, modify them. One of the primary reasons was the power users were used to helping themselves on their legacy system. Also the China based development team was trying to make the BU’s (Business Units) pay for each and every request after development was completed. So the power users were trying to self educate so that they could create their own reports without asking the Beijing team and to save their own budget.
So I downloaded and installed the SAP BOBJ webi System. This is also called the Rich Client and it runs on a PC.
After that I created some SAP BOBJ Universes and the schemas to feed into the tester universes. I then made some powerpoint training slides of about 130 slides in all that I could use in my classroom training sessions as well as use on the online SAP BOBJ webinar I gave. In the training powerpoint, I walked the power users step-by-step through how to do different things in a SAP BOBJ webi. Such as how to make a table, or convert the format of a table. How to drill down and up. Basically all the different steps they will have to go through to create SAP BOBJ webi reports.
We did not get into xCelsius since this was not a target product the China team wanted to deliver. But later on, I did do an xCelsius requirement and the layouts for it because China told me they could do xCelsius. But in the end they had to admit they did not know how to implement or work with xCelsius so then I had to convert my xCelsius requirement document to a SAP BOBJ webi requirement document.
Now the China development team was also developing SAP BOBJ webi reports. So as part of the customer support role I was in, I read through all the older report requirement documents and then wrote test plans and scripts for each of the SAP BOBJ webi reports when they were delivered. In actual testing of their deliveries, I found, documented and reported, around 300 defects per universe delivered or per report delivered. They were totally unusable.
After the reports were delivered, I then tested each and every one. Around 89 reports and universes and the associated reports for 1 BU (Business Unit) and 11 reports and associated universes from the other BU I was supporting. Another BU had around 60+ reports and universes. Multiply these numbers by the defect rate of 300 each and you can see the astronomical size of the total defect rate. In my opinion, 1 defect is 1 defect too many. The reason for these defects was obvious, the developers in China were not testing their work before they delivered their software to the customer. This is just a basic failure of fundamental software engineering practices.
Now the customer also had other people doing parallel testing on the same reports. The defect rate from the China development (the Offshore Team) was around 300 defects per SAP BOBJ webi report they delivered to us. They were completely unusable actually. So then I logged all the defects I found into their defect tracking system, Mercury Test Director.
Some of the defects were due to poor requirements to begin with. I was not part of developing most of those requirements. They were created by a previous top US consulting house which this customer had worked with earlier.
What SAP BOBJ webi requirements gathering techniques did you use/tools did you develop?
Seeing that their BI Functional Specifications requirements gathering template was about useless, I developed my own templates and methods that turned out to be far superior to any I had seen before and which I think is a best practice of how to develop a SAP BOBJ webi requirement or an xCelsius requirement and also a method for converting 1 requirement form into the other form such as from SAP BOBJ webi to xCelsius or xCelsius to SAP BOBJ webi. The various BI Functional Specification Templates and Accelerators out there might work for a BEx Query, but they don't really work or even fit to the design requirements of a Universe, Webi Report or an xCelsius Dashboard. I had to develop my own templates.
What problems were they trying to solve and why did they decide to use SAP BOBJ webi to solve them?
The main problem they were trying to solve was several. The IBM Legacy system was expensive to maintain. They were paying around $1,400,000 per month to IBM to maintain that system (they said on their website) and they wanted to move that system to a SAP system and to do it in-house to save that leasing expense.
Also they wanted to move control of all IT systems to Beijing, China.
On the one hand, it was a good project worth doing because it was a self-funding project.
The money saved from maintaining the legacy system will definitely pay back the development cost for the new SAP system. I did a cost pay back analysis(CPB) for my own curiosity and I found that they will break even on the project on or about 2022. This is due mainly to the fact they were using junior consultants in the Offshore team. Not the best but still a break even. So I estimated it would take them about 10 years to complete the project. If they had used senior onsite consultants, I estimated they could have finished in just 4 years with an 8 year start-to-finish break even point.
What project management lessons did you take away from your SAP BOBJ webi project?
Things as basic as having a project folder was an alien concept to them. I say this because it took me at least 6 months to convince them that they need a folder someplace and I gave them the list of folders to be placed in the folder system. They broke it after that and it was not visible to anyone and due to their security paranoia never will be visible or useful to people on the project. But still I gave them one.
What was special about BW in this project as it relates to SAP BOBJ Webi
The one thing I noticed that was so stark was how they could take something as simple as a variable, and then design a complex formula around something that should be simple to complicate the system to the point that it was an unusable, overly complex, slow system that then required them to install HANA just to have a system with a normal response rate. I remember tracing 1 variable (of many) that led to a formula with 15 sub variables and each one of those variables drilled down to 7 levels of additional recursive formulas. And all this recursion was ran on each and every one of those 150 million records in their DW. All they needed was simple-a single variable in BW fed into Webi. Their design and development was just crazy.
Can you identify any benefits they achieved from the project?
Not yet. The benefit of the system was they were to shut down an IBM legacy system (iBase) that they were paying $1.4 million a month or $16.8 million a year in licensing/maintenance fees. So they wanted to replace that with SAP. And also to bring control of all their computer systems in-house and transfer all systems to Chinese control in Beijing.
One of my customers was focusing on a Supply Chain Management dashboard as it relates to monitoring Inventory log jams in their supply chain network. They wanted to take supplier and partner data from their SAP CRM system or pull in flat files and monitor what was going on in semi-real time using an xCelsius dashboard. I was responsible for the design work for that management dashboard requirement and the interface with SAP CRM. This was a new capability I was able to give them because, well, I understood the tools and what each can do.
Another customer was focused on analyzing units sold by product attributes on the unit sold level in order to tune their product offerings. This was a new capability they never had before that I was able to give them.
What would you recommend be done differently on your next SAP BOBJ webi project?
Run a tighter time card and expense management system. When you deal with the Chinese, always have a lawyer on retainer. Took them 19 weeks to pay the first check now they still owe me for my last month's pay, oh they keep promising to pay, and I know 2 other consultants who the Chinese tried to bilk out of their last month's pay as well.
I understand they were also doing a SAP HANA implementation. Was there any interplay with SAP BOBJ Webi?
Looked transparent to me. Not sure if they actually had HANA or not. They said they did in their PR releases. But from what I saw, the system ran slow and crashed constantly. IF they had HANA, it did not compensate for a poor design.
What were the techniques you used to work in the distributed environment, i.e., USA and China
Document all requirements to the point there are no questions left for China to ask. You had to have the requirement 100% ready to implement so that China could not spend the next 2 months asking clarification questions to stall.
We had weekly and daily conference calls with the development team in China. We had conference calls early in the morning and late at night. I eventually just limited myself to 1 call a week and spent the rest of my time getting the requirements 100% ready to go. This worked fine. My requirements got implemented. No one else's requirements did though.
What communications issues arose and how did you resolve them?
The only real communications issue I had was with the last consultant they hired from a major consultancy. He was just hard headed. His big issue was he gave non-answers to questions. They sounded like answers, and people were happy to hear that he had answered their question. But when you look at what he really said, he did not actually say anything. He gave non-answers. For example, are we working January 2nd? His answer was not clear. It sounded clear but in reality it was not clear at all. Just a vague, general statement.
Can you give us a summary of any lessons learned?
- Learn all you can.
- Make sure your clients learn from you while you are there.
- Be aware of and manage the politics on the project
To help you in your next Webi project and possibly avoid some of these types of issues, we've developed a handy SAP BOBJ Webi multi-part tutorial for you to use.
This is a highly edited interview from what was a very difficult, politically charged project in a distributed multi-national project environment.
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Thanks
