What tool is your company using as far as Business inteligence is concerned.
Also, if anyone of you is involved in ERP, B.I, budgeting and forecasting, OLAP, data warehousing, e-commerce, MRP, CRM projects please share your experiences..dos and don’ts would be interesting to read. Thanks.
SAP. I start training tomorrow …
hate training for new things…why can’t they just let me be
IT budgeting sucks bigtime. :eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek:
In my previous life, for three years I worked as a functional consultant for implementing major Oracle and SAP R/3 systems.
During that, we designed, tested, trained users, migrated data and provided post-production support on these two ERP systems. These included core accounting modules, Executive Information System (functionalities designed by us and then developed by techies using OLAP and integrated with Oracle Financials), a Budget Information System (developed by techies using Oracle's PL/SQL), designed a bunch of custom reports (which were then developed by techies using Oracle's Report Writer in the Oracle project and by using ABAP in the SAP project) and a host of other assorted activities.
Is there anything particular you wish to know?
working somewhat on e-procurement setup. Dont know if that falls into your e-commerce peice cause it is really related to purchases essential for the organizations functioning and more strategic then profit based.
Working as an e-HR Consultant at GE right now...
driving a project to consolidate backdoor operations for the HR, Payroll and Benefits workstreams.
Its been an interesting four months of work dealing with different people and business across North America and creating a buy-in for the new workflows amongst the dependent businesses. Learned a lot about change-management - the tech implementation has been somewhat boring though.
The businesses I work with mainly rely on data-warehousing in Oracle and Infinium... and there isn't much "intelligence" to these systems. The new portal that I'm designing adds one more layer to the warehouse (a staging database of sort) but the programmed logic on that interface brings a little more acuity to the workflow.
On the Business Intelligence front, my graduate-level research deals with Knowledge Use and Information Workspaces and the tools I'm trying to bring in for analysis include ebXML which I've had some exposure to working on a contract with IBM... its a great technology although still in its twitching stages …
The idea I’m toying with is a way to create partner collaboration profiles in ebXML with business network directories such as LDAP. This will have applications in SCM. Let's see how far I can take that idea.
Boss, please have a look at this (if not already): http://www.dwinfocenter.org/
This will tell you everything you need to know about data warehousing and decision support.
With regards to dos and don’ts about data warehousing, I am sure you will find the ‘Data Warehousing Gotcha’s’ section most informative.
I have been working on e-commerce and B2B integration projects for long now.
I think business-to-business (B2B) integration projects at times can really be challenging. If you are workiing with routine ERP systems (like Ariba, CommerceOne, Siebel etc) then its not much difficult to couple different businesses. However, it becomes exciting when you are integrating different custom-tailored legacy systems.
For eCommerce (B2C) stuff, its almost diminishing with a rapid collapse in DOT com sector. But still there are sectors who are still trying to enhance their eCommerce applications; MRO industry is one to name here.
Lahoreia,
its interesting to read your comment about different businesses with their own legacy systems...
this is exactly where my research interests lie - in devising strategies to help businesses collaborate across multiple applications and vendors... something that present day EDI systems lack - hence the need for platform-neutral methods for data exchange.
would like to hear more about your experiences with Systems Integration.
Ana, What module are you gonna get training on?
Faisal, how are your implementation projects handled as far time, resources and costs are concerned. SAP and Oracle are expensive products and same goes for the their implementation…I would like to see the project plan for your budgeting information project if that is not too much to ask….I can understand if there are any confidentiality issues.
Hmcq tell me more about the e-procurement ..how are you handling it and stuff
Umer, What product is GE using for their HR..
2bornot2b thanks for the link..it looks informative.
Lahoreia..I agree mostly the legacy systems are hard to ‘map’. In most cases these systems have grown with time and initial database designs have evolved based on company’s needs. Most of the companies prefer to go with a middleware to integrate rather than messing around with unnormalized-production databases…
BoSS - FICO. fun fun fun
Boss my background has been in strategy and application of IT tools to align client;s IT strategy to support their overall business. This has ranged from CRM, BI, ERP, APS/SCM, and Portals.
I dont get into teh actual implementation and integration however stay involved to make sure thetechies dont go off in a tangent :) which they almost always do.
It startegy, IT portfolio analysis and Management and It governance have been my areas of expereince. so a diff twist to what you guys have done.
One of the things I have noticed is how the companies went in all directions arond Y2K time and have all these systems spread around with duplication, lack of connectivity and thus they are unable to leverage the systems to get the use out of them that they really need to. Thus a wholesale alignment and analysis and figuring out what you can dump and what you can connect better to gain usage out of it. Portals and EAI area has been of a lot of interest.
From a business perspective ppl runnifn diff type of apps look at their apps as a fiefdom and dont want to budge. It boils down to how strategic and strong the CIO is, and is he viewed as just an enabler or a key component of the coprorate strategy. I have seen both cases and everything in between.
Umar what exactly is your thesis work? would you like to share a bit?
as for the integration with legacy systems is concerned, there are many out of box solutions available in the market but it all comes down how much one has customized his legacy system. If its something standard (eg CICS etc) then you can use any main frame emulation or screen scrapper tool to integrate to the main frame. This approach is especially handy when you do not want to re-write the whole business logic. You are essentially using the same main frame screens but invoking these screens remotely through your modern web-based client, for instance.
The other scenario where you are more interested in the data rather than the business logic is comparatively easier. Since all you have to do is somehow get the data. If this data is in some database, its even more easier...but if its in flat files then you really need to write some interface which can translate this data for your application.