The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) is the world?s premier supplier of navigational charts and publications, with an enviable global reputation for information you can trust. A Government Agency with Trading Fund status within the Ministry of Defence, the UKHO?s primary objective is to supply navigational products and services to The Royal Navy.  More than three quarters of world shipping relies on Admiralty products, the quality of which has safeguarded millions of lives at sea since 1795.

The UKHO uses SAP R/3 extensively for areas such as finance, procurement and sales. To date, management reporting has been done using an elaborate, in house system. UKHO had been aware of SAP Business Warehouse (BW) for some time and wanted to have a look in more detail.

BW Pilot Project

UKHO selected Bluefin to assist with an innovative BW pilot. The primary objective of this was to facilitate knowledge transfer to UKHO whilst building a pilot BW system at the same time.

Bluefin agreed with Matt Ogden, the UKHO?s Business Reporting Manager, that the best way to achieve this was via a series of focused training courses. The clever part was to design each course to build upon the previous one, in such a way as to have the participants deliver a BW pilot system, covering a number of functional areas.
A proposed training schedule was produced by Bluefin and agreed with UKHO. Attendees for the courses would be drawn from both technical and functional areas in order to give as many people as possible exposure to BW and the opportunity to acquire BW skills.

A total of six courses were run over a six week period, covering an end to end BW life cycle. Each course lasted from two to four days and contained a significant ?hands on? element. Typically the topic was introduced together with any theory, followed by a demonstration by the trainer and then an exercise on the system. Daily quizzes kept participants on their toes and proved to be a popular way to recap on the previous day?s content. Feedback was gathered from each training course, and this was used to further refine subsequent courses.

At the end of end of just six weeks, the UKHO had a pilot BW system, together with a basic in house ability to develop BW solutions and build sophisticated reports.

Asked about what Bluefin were like to work with, Matt had this to say:

Bluefin were the experts in the team. They supported us and were as (if not more) enthusiastic about our project as we were. Their knowledge was impressive, their willingness and ability to share it was exemplary.

Technical Aspects

The project started in November 2004 and Bluefin therefore recommended using BW 3.5, which had just been released. This would give UKHO access to the latest functionality, including much improved web reporting.

As UKHO were new to BW but wanted to build knowledge internally, Bluefin advised on the installation process, but all hands on aspects were done by UKHO. This was completed in just under a week.

In order to make the pilot as realistic as possible, a copy of the live R/3 environment was made, to which BW was connected. This enabled prospective users to see data that they could easily relate to in BW reports. It also meant that potential data issues were identified and resolved much earlier than they would have been, had just an R/3 development or test environment been used.

UKHO were particularly interested in getting data in and out of BW from and to non-SAP systems. A number of techniques were investigated and prototyped including XML and web services.

Regarding BW as a product, Matt had two things to say: ?The pilot showed that BW was a much more complex beast than we expected. We also found that the power user community were perfectly able to take advantage of the power of BEX as soon as we could deliver the content to them.?

Next Steps

UKHO are now putting BW through its paces and consolidating what has been learned. Asked about next steps, Matt said ?we intend to rebuild the prototype ourselves, using BOSS(Bluefin's Support Offering) where appropriate, in order to release a sales analysis system.?

This will enable any skills gap to be identified and to establish what the impact of BW would be on the organisation. During this phase, UKHO are being supported remotely by Bluefin?s unique TSP (Total Solution Portal) which gives the UKHO development team access to Bluefin?s entire knowledge pool for any technical questions or system problems.