Borchers, an Ohio-based global supplier of coatings additives and specialty catalysts, learned it needed to migrate its data and reports out of SAP BusinessObjects in just four weeks because of a company divestiture. CIO Jonathan Mortlock took this challenge one step further by using it as an opportunity to migrate to a completely cloud-based business intelligence and analytics system.
A Self-Service Move to the Cloud
His team’s goals for the new analytics system were three-fold: The solution needed to be quick to implement, easy to use, and easy to manage. “Within the context of our small global IT team, it obviously had to be fast to implement,” Mortlock said. “But it also had to bring a very low administrative burden to the team after it launched.”
For Mortlock, the answer was to move to SAP Cloud Analytics. Because Borchers is a global organization, it was essential to respond to requests for reports from clients around the world—something the company found challenging with its legacy on-premise business intelligence platform.
“SAP BusinessObjects was very heavily IT-centric, so any report was IT-driven, designed, and implemented,” Mortlock explained. “With SAP Analytics Cloud, any user with basic skills could design a simple report.”
The Quest for Quality Data
Moving away from an IT-driven analytics model, Borchers also needed a solution for data reporting. Thanks to SAP’s replication technologies, Borchers achieved this by using SAP Cloud Platform as its data center, where data is uploaded from its on-premise SAP ERP system and SAP Sales Cloud for its CRM. These connections helped Mortlock and his team wipe out the challenges it had faced with making sure all the data driving its reporting was accurate and direct from its ERP source.
In an interview with Ann Marie Gray, VP of content strategy and research for ASUG, Mortlock explains how his team was able not only to achieve its lofty four-week goals for launch, it also has been set up for success in lightweight rollouts of new features to build on its initial “no-frills” launch.
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