A globally reputed BI and Analytics specialist, GrayMatter has an in-house center of excellence for SAP BI solutions with expertise in SAP BOBJ, SAP BW, SAP HANA, and SAP BODS. The company has implemented SAP BI projects across data integration, dashboarding, reporting, consulting, migration, support, and training as well as in advanced analytics, for marquee customers across the globe. This series of blogs shall focus on GrayMatter’s SAP BI engagements delivered for global clients.
This blog, the first in this series, is focused on GrayMatter’s project for GMR. GMR Group is one of the largest and fastest growing global infrastructure enterprises from India with interests in Airports, Energy, Highways and Urban Infrastructure sectors.
Following are the challenges, solution and business benefits that the engagement involved:
Challenges
- High reaction times due to lag in consolidation of information across enterprise
- Need for simple and clear insights to accelerate decision making
- Need for insights on the go, for key executives and personnel on the field
- Migration of existing Xcelsius dashboards
Solution
- Developed dashboards around OTP (On time Performance), Aero Revenue, Aero Financial, ASQ (Airport Service Quality)
- Implemented GrayMatter’s unique UI strategy for visualizations to enable sharp and insightful dashboards
- Enabled mobile responsive dashboards offering actionable insights in a couple of clicks
- GrayMatter experts enabled smooth transition to Design Studio dashboards
Benefits
- Management gets quick snapshot of entire airport business at the corporate level on live data
- Faster and more accurate decision making
- Enhanced information sharing and collaboration leading to business benefits e.g., identification and elimination of revenue leakages
Customer Delight is the ultimate measure of results delivered. True to the results delivered through the engagement, the client provided glowing testimonials to GrayMatter. Mr. PS Nair, CEO – Corporate, Airports sector at GMR Group stated, “The GMR group strongly believes in harnessing the ‘Power of Information’ across all its businesses. By deploying GrayMatter’s Airport Analytics solution on SAP BO, GMR Airports has taken a quantum leap forward. The analytic solution enables GMR’s Airport Management team to take quick, timely and informed decisions on various aspects of the airport business across all GMR Airports”
About GrayMatter’s SAP BI TCoE:
GrayMatter has a dedicated SAP BI center of excellence (SAPBICoE) that ensures that the industry trends and best practices are constantly incorporated in its offerings. The entire range of offerings from ETL to reports, dashboards to predictive analytics on SAP are governed and directed by the center of excellence, for every single engagement, including project management, program management as well as executive guidance.
GrayMatter is powered by the technology assets created by SAPBICoE including 20 different data models, 30+ source system connectors, 20+ custom components, migration effort calculators, 10 dashboarding techniques, “RADIUS” dashboarding framework etc. As an illustration of the span of coverage of these assets, the source system connectors include ECC connectors, BW connectors, connectors to unstructured data using BODS, connectors to data on cloud and so on.
Some of the path-breaking innovations that it has done in the recent past include:
- GrayMatter addressed certain requirements that are not available out-of-the-box in tools like SAP Design Studio, SAP WebI, for example processing of data, capturing and saving user inputs, connecting to web interface etc. To address such requirements, GrayMatter has created many services and interfaces which are used across Design Studio and WebI. All these services are created using Java based web technology that can be easily deployed and managed in the web servers.
- Data quality and data governance process have been implemented by integrating BODS and ProcessMaker where the data quality is automated using BODS with a design to scale easily to add more Data Quality rules. Process Maker is integrated using standard web interface with BODS to bring automation to the workflow of data governance requirements
- Predictive analytics systems have been devised using a mix of R and BODS e.g. car park revenue management system to predict car park slot prices.
- Enabled data loads and file management from cloud (AWS) using latest BODS adapter
- Designed BO universes to overcome the limitations of Sybase IQ SQL functions like top, rank etc.
