Customers

Unisys

"The scheduling capability is phenomenal—it’s really helped out the operations. And our experience with Business Objects Global Services was tremendous."

Yvonne Jones
Manager of Worldwide Data Warehousing and Reporting
Unisys

Challenge

As a worldwide technology services and solutions company with more than 31,000 employees, Unisys is pretty savvy when it comes to technology. Unisys provides consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, infrastructure, and server technology to customers in financial services, communications, transportation, commercial, and the public sector, including the U.S. government.

A Business Objects customer since 1999, Unisys decided to migrate its business intelligence (BI) infrastructure from BusinessObjects™ 6.5 to a centralized BI platform. Key drivers for the migration were scalability, single sign-on capabilities, and a centralized BI platform on which to standardize reporting. With 8,000 users, Unisys was dealing with a large and complex installation. Moving to a centralized BI platform would simplify reporting processes and reduce IT maintenance. BusinessObjects XI Release 2 met the requirements. "From an IT perspective, the biggest benefit of migrating is scalability and a central enterprise solution," says Yvonne Jones, manager of worldwide data warehousing and reporting at Unisys. "And, of course, single sign-on is a big piece in this." Single sign-on reduces administration of multiple passwords, and streamlines IT maintenance.

Approach

Unisys established a steering committe, and recruited Business Objects Global Services to help assess requirements. Business Objects recommended an incremental approach to deployment, which Unisys adopted when creating a project plan. Breaking the migration into four phases, according to departmental function, Unisys devoted initial efforts to migrating users in the finance and human resources (HR) departments to BusinessObjects XI Release 2, establishing a centralized web-based reporting environment. Unisys used phase 1 as an opportunity to get the kinks out of the migration process. "We wanted to target some of the more difficult applications up front, so if we encountered a problem we would catch it early on," says Jones. "As with any large migration, there were areas where we had to spend extra time to map out the right migration strategy. In particular, we focused on security and single sign-on as well as migration of reports." After phase 1, the migration went smoothly. Says Jones, "We identified the problem areas within the first increment, and then it was just repeating the same process again. The migration went through easily after that point." Having Global Services onsite helped Unisys get over the speed bumps. "Escalating immediate issues was a big thing," says Jones. "We found if we came across a problem, Global Services would validate that it was truly a problem and then escalate it to get it resolved, or assist us in getting it fixed, here onsite. The resolution cycle was far better with Global Services on board."

Jones explains, "From our point of view, the value was the immediate knowledge they already had. We were easily able to absorb their knowledge, and transfer it to the other administrators here within the company. Our environment had complexities the migration process didn’t cover. So having Business Objects Global Services onsite was advantageous to us."

Along with the single sign-on functionality available with Release 2, Unisys leverages several Business Objects technologies, including BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® and BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence™ for reporting, Crystal Xcelsius™ for visualization and presentation, BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager for creating sales and executive dashboards, and BusinessObjects Performance Manager for building and deploying enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions, such as balanced scorecards. Web Intelligence is the central reporting tool, used for about 90% of corporate reports.

Results

Unisys completed the migration of 8,000 users from BusinessObjects 6.5 to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 in about 9 months, using Business Objects Global Services to help roll it out to its worldwide user community. Jones notes users are happy with Release 2 functionality, particularly the report distribution and scheduling capabilities. Power users schedule reports to run at off-peak times, minimizing the system impact of 50 different users refreshing reports all at once—and freeing users to work on other activities while the time-consuming reports refresh. Jones says, "The scheduling capability is phenomenal—it’s really helped out the operations." Regarding Business Objects Global Services, Jones says, "Our experience with Business Objects Global Services was tremendous."

The Unisys BI team developed a wide range of BusinessObjects Web Intelligence reports for managers, power users, and business end users across key functional areas, such as finance, HR, supply chain, and sales. Unisys streamlined the number of standard reports being produced each month across the organization, from 10,000 to about 4,000. Now, within each department, power users are called upon to develop reports tied to their domain expertise. For example, in the sales group, power users create reports related to orders, trending, and the pipeline, and end users come to them if they require modifications. Additionally, power users have ad hoc reporting capabilities. "We have a fairly large community of power users, who are empowered to create and manage reports," says Jones. IT is no longer required to write reports for end users, except in the case of difficult subject areas where IT’s expertise may be needed. IT personnel are free to focus on value-added IT activities.

Unisys uses BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager for the sales organization, and is building a separate dashboard with balanced scorecards for the executive committee. Dashboards give managers and executives easy access to critical business data, including key performance indicators (KPIs). The rich combination of Business Objects products gives Unisys actionable intelligence for informed decision-making.

In terms of scalability, Jones says, "The flexibility of the architecture is very good, and we’re really just appreciating that right now. Last week we added Web Intelligence and desktop servers to our cluster to handle a larger load. No doubt as we roll out more dashboards, we’ll add more there, too." Unisys likes the flexibility of adding servers when needed. "For failover, we can spread out logical servers across different physical servers. That’s been very beneficial," says Jones. "Luckily, we’re using ES7000 enterprise servers—so we have a highly reliable and available infrastructure."

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