Wednesday, May 12, 2021

APOS Customer Success – Harvey Norman

Harvey Norman is one of Australia's leading retail brands. Harvey Norman operates a chain of approximately 250 retail stores across Australia that focus on Harvey Norman’s four primary lines of business: computers, electrical appliances, furniture and bedding.

The success of this project was a product of APOS working with SAP to integrate APOS Publisher’s Distribution Server module with SAP BI 4.2. This integration was so successful that it is now available to all APOS customers with a valid Distribution Server license with SAP BusinessObjects, versions 4.2 and higher.

Challenge

As part of a broad SAP business transformation program, a single, centralized business intelligence platform was deployed to replace a large number of site-specific reporting solutions. The success of the transformation program could not be achieved without meeting needs for extremely high-volume and intensity report scheduling processes and stringent distribution controls, all within effective and manageable workflows.

Harvey Norman – APOS Publisher

• High-Volume Report Scheduling
  Publishing 15,000 reports per night with limited administrative personnel required the flexible automation of APOS Publisher to let Harvey-Norman deliver consistently across the enterprise.
• Complex Distribution Capabilities
  Assigning each of their 3,500 users to a valid printer required complex bursting definitions. APOS Publisher allowed Harvey-Norman to reduce the number of printers in use substantially.
• Integration with SAP BI Interface
  APOS consultants worked with SAP to integrate APOS Publisher's distribution capabilities with BI Launchpad, achieving Harvey-Norman's required level of flexibility and automation.

Feedback

With APOS Publisher in place, we were able to deliver the sought after single version of the truth… With the new centralized BI solution in place, the information available to analysts is quite transformational, and the benefits continue to accrue. This was a complex project, and the APOS integration addressed a very complex piece of the puzzle.

Richard Arkell, Harvey Norman

APOS Distribution Server / SAP BI Launchpad 4.2 Integration

The integration of APOS Distribution Server with SAP BI Launchpad in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 has been praised as an excellent example of the SAP Partner Ecosphere in action, and this integration is described in more detail in the Harvey Norman case study.

In that case study, Reload Program Manager Richard Arkell describes the situation Harvey Norman was facing:

We had a ‘burning platform’ situation with the Crystal Reports deployments at the store and there had always been an issue in comparing the store-based Crystal Reports with the head office BI system, because they were never really synchronized at the same point in time. The organization lacked a single version of the truth.

To meet this challenge, Harvey Norman needed the collaboration of APOS and SAP to integrate APOS Distribution Server with SAP BI Launchpad. Without this integration, Harvey Norman did not have a solution to their distribution challenges:

If we hadn’t been able to deploy the APOS solution, we wouldn’t have been able to deliver a final product that met our requirements so completely and elegantly. With the APOS solution in place, we were able to deliver the sought after single version of the truth, and we were able to retire the store-level burning platform and avoid a complete re-architecting at the local level, which would have incurred major costs. With the new centralized BI solution in place, the information available to analysts is quite transformational, and the benefits continue to accrue. This was a complex project, and the APOS integration addressed a very complex piece of the puzzle.

What BI Launchpad looks like without the APOS Distribution Server integration:

What BI Launchpad looks like with the APOS Distribution Server integration: