The largest SAP BusinessObjects™ and SAP Business Warehouse™ integration project in the world

Shell’s integration project results in SAP Service Pack release

Enterprise-wide data warehouse and reporting solution

Headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands, Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, operating in 90 countries, employing over 101,000 staff and producing 2% of the world’s oil and 3% of the world’s gas.

18 months ago, Shell began a strategic project to design, develop and implement an enterprise-wide data warehouse for its service and technology divisions. “The underlying objective of this project was to enhance and streamline our management and operations reporting processes against our centralised data warehouse,” explained Steve Mutch, Shell’s Solution Delivery Manager.

Reaching a crossroads

Shell had previously adopted SAP BW (Business Warehouse) as its data warehouse solution, fronted by SAP BEx (Business Explorer) for the generation of reports.  “We had reached a crossroads and essentially had two options: we could retain our existing legacy BEx application or replace it with SAP BusinessObjects,” continued Steve Mutch. “In any event, we did not see BEx as being suitable for our longer term objectives and accepted that, soon or later, this legacy application would have to be replaced.”

SAP had acquired BusinessObjects some six months previously and whilst this appeared to provide the advanced and complex functionalities that Shell required, Steve Mutch was sceptical as to the technological advances that SAP had made in integrating SAP BusinessObjects with SAP BW in such as short time.

“We had recognised that BusinessObjects was the way forward for Shell,” added Steve. “In major development programmes, our policy is to work closely with partners and augment this by bringing in highly specialised contractors.” Like many major organisations, Shell appreciated the benefits of outsourcing specialised expertise rather than go through the expensive and time consuming processes of interviewing, recruiting, training and retaining IT professionals whose specific knowledge would only be required for a relatively limited period.

Close cooperation between teams

Shell’s partner in this project was Accenture but it quickly became apparent that due to the rapid integration of the solutions by SAP Accenture could not provide integration experts with the appropriate levels of expertise. “Almost from day one we hit integration issues,” said Steve. “We started working very closely with SAP which sent a number of its own integration experts to work side-by-side with our teams.”

One of the SAP experts was Nicolas Henry who, a few weeks into the project joined Xoomworks - a consulting and technology company that specialises in business process optimisation, transformation and change management.

“Shell had run into serious problems in attempting to integrate SAP BusinessObjects with SAP BW,” explained Nicolas Henry. “My initial focus was to analyse performance issues and liaise with SAP to identify and implement fixes to move the project forward. This was not a straightforward task as there were numerous issues and resolving one created further problems down the line.”

“There were clear flaws in the integration solution that SAP had developed internally,” continued Steve Mutch. “This was not particularly surprising since SAP had only acquired BusinessObjects a few months ago and our integration project was pushing the boundaries to the very limits.”

The resident expert

Working extremely closely with the 38 strong project team, (which included development specialists from Accenture and SAP as well as other external contractors), and calling upon the internal resources of Xoomworks, Nicolas Henry continued identifying and resolving integration issues between SAP BW and SAP BusinessObjects. “Nicolas is technically extremely competent and is clearly Xoomworks’ resident SAP BusinessObjects expert,” added Steve Mutch. “Xoomworks recognised the critical nature of this project and ensured that we are able to call on Nic’s expertise and experience whenever we need it.”

Nicolas’ work alongside Shell’s incumbent development team has successfully moved the highly complex integration project forward. Equally importantly, SAP itself recognised the immense value of the development work being undertaken by Shell and has incorporated many of the initiatives into its latest SAP BusinessObjects Service Pack so that other organisations can benefit from this pioneering development work. “Much of the work that we have undertaken has been hailed by SAP as a major feature in its Service Pack, which has eased the way forward for other organisations,” added Steve Mutch. “The solution will also act as an enabler for our planned migration to shared services centres.”

The world’s largest SAP BusinessObjects/BW integration project

Steve Mutch was recently asked by SAP to present the technology innovations behind Shell’s integration project at the Frankfurt session of SAPPHIRENOW – a global business resource of over 400 broadcasts that highlight best practice insights. “The presentation was extremely well received and has resulted in Shell hosting a number of reference visits,” added Steve Mutch.

When fully implemented, Shell’s programme will deliver unified financial and supply chain reporting standards across some 21 countries and will support around 5,500 users – the largest integration of SAP BusinessObjects and SAP BW in the world. “Shell has a large range of WebIntelligence and Crystal Report as well as Xcelsius dashboards that are run against the centralised data warehouse at regular intervals,” added Nicolas Henry. “This ensures that everyone receives the same, up-to-date information in the same way at the same time. In addition to these standard reports, users are able to build and run their own reports so that they can get the information they need, when they need it, and in a format that they can understand.”