Insights

Mark Wheaton

BI Consultant, Bluefin Solutions

How an SAP BI project is like starting and maintaining an allotment

Grow your own Management Information

Starting a vegetable garden is not just about growing a few vegetables; it’s about changing the way you and your family think about food.

In a similar vein, a wise man once said – “the purpose of a SAP BI rollout should not be to provide reports, but to change the information culture of the organisation.”

This blog takes a light-hearted approach to the similarities between starting your own vegetable patch and rolling out a BI solution. Maybe some of the principles of one can be applied to the other.

Grow the right produce

What do you want to get? There’s no point growing beetroot if your sister already does so and gives you her surplus.

Similarly, if your business already has great reporting for financials, but poor reporting for logistics, you’ll get more value out of your SAP BI project if you start off looking at parts of the business which are currently poorly-served for reporting.

Home-grown is best

When planning your allotment, it’s best to grow something that is expensive to buy or poor in quality in shops. Tomato’s for example, are always better when grown at home, even in a gro-bag on the patio.

Similarly, if managers can access and analyse relevant data for themselves, it’s more satisfying and inspiring than getting the information second-hand from other people’s reports. Second-hand information is often stale like shop tomato’s, and you can never be sure where it came and how accurate it is.

Short-term V’s long-term benefits

When do you want your first returns? Radishes grow in 4 weeks but apple-trees take longer.

You’ll need to provide fast results to keep morale up and show that the BI project is delivering results as it rolls out. At the same time, you’ll need to deliver information which is harder to get at and understand - this may require a long-term investment of time...and energy!

Getting the right balance of quick wins and the longer term deliverables is key to making your BI project successful. You’ll need a mixture of exciting quick results and longer-term projection and analysis of the more complex parts of the business in order to keep the stakeholders happy.

Prepare the ground first

Like digging the ground over and enriching it before you start planting, you’ll need to get buy-in from the stakeholders first or your BI project will fail to flourish in sour ground. Sweeten the ground first by demonstrating the added value and ROI the organisation can achieve through an SAP BI system – you need the business stakeholders to be eager to support the project.

Sow

When sowing seeds, you need to sow them at the right depth, in the right place, with the right spacing and at the right time. When you implement your BI system, you’ll need to ensure the project is well managed by an accredited SAP partner with a proven track record.

Feed, weed and water

You can’t just plants the seeds and leave them to grow alone. You need to look after them to get the best yields.

Similarly, once your BI project has rolled out, you need to keep on top of it. As people use it, they’ll start to see how the system can be further improved and they’ll also start to identify issues and niggles that they will want fixing.

So you can’t just deliver the BI project and walk away. You will need to make sure that you’ve engaged a good support partner who can help to keep your BI garden productive well into the future. Any fool with a strimmer can call themselves a gardener, but a real plants man will more than repay your investment in them with the skills and knowledge that they will bring to your garden.

Harvest

Once the SAP BI system is delivered, your organisation will begin reaping the benefits of top-quality enterprise reporting. Management decision-making will be better, the organisation will have a better idea how of how to achieve its strategic goals, and day-to-day operational problems will immediately be brought into the light of day where they can be analysed and fixed.

Reflect, and plan for next year

Like gardening, which has periods of intense activity in the summer, followed by fallow periods in the winter, BI projects are also iterative. After the harvest, it’s a time to reflect on the past seasons triumphs and failures. Perhaps this year you’ve had good beans, but poor quality potatoes.

Similarly, once the dust of the project implementation has settled, some of your stakeholders will be happier with the BI system than others.  You’ll need to improve your satisfaction rating with those stakeholders in the future or they will stop backing you, so it’s a good time to learn lessons and plan to start making things right for the next iteration.

Future projects

Now you’re getting the hang of it, maybe next year you could try something a bit exotic. Butternut Squash? Watermelon? Business Objects Dashboards? Not for everyone...and they can be a bit tricky to get right, but if they suit your business then they can be very rewarding.