RE: Business Objects with DB2 data

Good to have your eyes open.

I have observed two BO projects at two companies
and both were multiple year projects.

The rewards are there, but the project scope
is like installing a new ERP in that there
are many stakeholders and there must be data
cleaning and definition of the objects to be
measured and reported.

From what you say, your project has serious issues:

1) ERP is slow and has many bugs
2) New IT Director
3) dependent on 2 outside consultants

Sounds like you have a weak foundation for BO.

Pause now, and put first efforts into the foundation:
ERP, other business systems, and staff that are the
source, stakeholders and keepers for your BO.

My current company created a new department of
full time staff to define, create and support BO.

If you don't have the budget to hire staff for BO,
forget it, and put your money in your ERP.


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hoteltravelfundotcom
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 6:51 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Business Objects with DB2 data

OK this is definetly an eye opener for me and I thank you all for responding. It seems to me that the first thing they need to do is get a consultant who can go over these options as discussed.
The IT Director is new, and has no prior AS/400 background. The ownership only knows one thing, that the current ERP is very slow and has many bugs that need to be addressed on a constant basis by 2 outside consultants plus one in house Manager-programmer. So requests for many needed reports have been allocated to Crystal Reports hence they want to advance that to Business Objects. Some reports that I have done lately for instance are simple summaries of sales according to Product lines. They don't want anything added to current AS/400 because of space. The upgrade to 7.1 is planned but i need to find out which machine this will be, based on Rob's idea.


On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 8:12 AM, Mike Cunningham <mike.cunningham@xxxxxxx>wrote:

We have an instance of BO tied in to our iSeries DB2 using ODBC. We
also got BO when it came bundled with a Financial Package we purchased
so we decided to try and use it to also provide reporting services to
all of our i based data. What we did was write our own custom
Extract/transform/load
(ETL) application that runs nightly on the iSeries and pulls all the
data needed for reporting and puts it in a different set of tables in
a different library formatted for reporting. BO then points to this
library only. Most Data warehouse setups to the same including the
Financial Package we purchased. In their case they take the data out
of one MSSQL database server and replicate it all to a second MS SQL server used by BO.

After training everyone to use BO and the reports then can get from
the data and all the 'cool' things it can do, we have exactly 0 users using it.
Even after years of complaining that they had no reporting package
like other colleges had. We do have our research office using the i
data for many reports but they prefer to use Access. The database is
the same, we just allowed them ODBC access to the special library. They love it.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hoteltravelfundotcom
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2013 5:50 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Business Objects with DB2 data

I am interested in hearing of any Iseries shops which use Business Objects.
We are interested
in that product to use for reports and allowing users to create their
own reports.
I am concerned in that that AS/400 ERP we have is rather old product,
basically RPG from back in the 90's and data base is very bulky - any
experiences would be welcome.
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