Enterprise DW Enables Robust Ad Hoc Reporting/Analysis on SAP G/L

With a pressing need for sophisticated reporting, and with its key financial information stored in a transaction-based SAP database, North Jersey Media Group found itself with a major challenge: how to do sophisticated re-porting and dimensional analysis on its general ledger.

The solution presented several technological hurdles for the Hackensack, N.J.-based newspaper, magazine and online classifieds company. Its existing database did not have a reporting infrastructure, so users could not go to the data to create reports. And the database’s transactional model did not offer the right structure for dimensional analysis. What’s more, the underlying architecture did support a Web/portal solution.

When internal resources were unsuccessful at overcoming these hurdles, and with an implementation deadline four months away, NJMG hired Dunn Solutions Group to quickly develop a workable, effective solution.

Dunn Solutions first built a data warehouse on top of the SAP database using BusinessObjects Rapid Mart and Data Integrator. Rapid Mart’s pre-defined framework jumpstarted the process by providing a base schema, core ETL and a sample universe, and Data Integrator’s powerful ETL tools delivered significant time savings.

With the data in a separate, secure database, the Dunn Solutions project team built a dimensional model that ex-posed general ledger data. Then, the team created a BOBJ Reporting universe, Web-based reporting environment and sample reports, giving NJMG new reporting and drill-down capabilities, plus the future capability to deploy dashboards and scorecards.

In addition, the project team involved NJMG IT personnel throughout the implementation, and trained them to maintain, enhance and expand the solution, making them self-sufficient. The team also trained end-users on the BOBJ reporting tools, giving them the ability to do their own complex reporting tasks. Today, NJMG financial managers can analyze cost/expense data, do ad hoc queries and create sophisticated history and trending reports.

The project took just 12 weeks from start to finish, easily beating the implementation deadline.