Scroll Top

3 Problems but 1 Solution
Overcoming BI Challenges
with 360Suite at Credit Suisse

img-customer-story-credit-suisse

Credit Suisse At A Glance

Credit Suisse is the second largest bank in Switzerland with over 50 thousand employees and leverages a global SAP BusinessObjects platform with huge scope and thousands of users, reports, universes, developers, viewers, and instances around the world. Adding strict industry regulations to the equation (e.g. BCBS-239, SOX, CCPA, GDPR, etc), Credit Suisse regularly faces BI challenges in ensuring its SAP BusinessObjects environment is successfully managed. 

 

Facing up to their BI Challenges 

BI Consolidation Project

When we were first in contact with Credit Suisse back in 2018, its SAP BusinessObjects landscape was somewhat disorganized. Some were on version BI 3.1, some on BI 4.1, and then others started to roll out to BI 4.2. A little chaotic nonetheless. The company also had approximately 200 servers located across the world with most as classic servers (VMs on the blue clusters or physical machines) which was costing them a lot of money. It was in need of an extensive consolidation project to have one SAP BusinessObjects version for the whole company. Achieving this required a multimillion database migration. 

After any migration, proper testing is required to ensure everything moves over as should. Marcin Zajaczkowski, Business Objects Support Specialist at Credit Suisse, was challenged by stakeholders on how he was going to carry out regression testing to ensure all the reports displayed the same information when moving SAP BusinessObjects to the latest version and performing a database migration. Let’s be honest nobody wants to carry out testing after a migration but Marcin discovered the 360Suite Analytics Governance solutions for SAP BusinessObjects to be able to implement this in an automated way. Proper testing is making sure everything is checked and so, over 6 months Marcin and his team did the sync between the old and new versions with internal workshops showing employees how to prepare and run regression tests. Even with changes in the infrastructure throughout, the 360Suite solutions allowed them to orchestrate this. 

Row-Level Security

With over 100 different applications using SAP BusinessObjects, every application had a different owner and business owner making the security levels very complex. In this case, Credit Suisse implemented 360Eyes to allow for row-level security so each application only can access its own metadata. For example, the service replies to a customer and can see what will be impacted by a change in the data mart or a column, and the repercussion on those managing applications on the sub-SAP BusinessObjects level. With 360Eyes universes and reports, users are able to answer questions by themselves. 

360Plus also allowed them to automatically promote universes after any change was made and then run a regression test on what was changed, autonomously, without the manual intervention of the BI Team. 

Disaster Recovery

There is never a 100% guarantee that a system will run continuously without any problems and so Credit Suisse decided to invest in our disaster recovery solution to avoid any major incident calls, such as a system restart. With our solution, you can restart your SAP BusinessObjects environment from a fresh installation and then take everything from the backup. You also have the option of doing a selective backup. In a critical situation, there’s always a standby version and our solutions will tell you which reports are the most critical in just a few seconds. It gives you a 100% guarantee that you won’t lose anything important and allows for rollback. 

 

“In just the first year and a half of implementing 360Suite, we were able to save the company €1.3 million per year.”

Before 360Suite, Credit Suisse was outsourcing its testing and administrative tasks but since implementing our solutions, they have taken this back in-house. “We have a better set-up now on how we support all those applications, we are now more efficient answering questions from customers plus giving them a lot of self-service possibilities.” Marcin Zajaczkowski, Business Objects Support Specialist at Credit Suisse.

360Suite not only allowed them to consolidate their SAP BusinessObjects deployments to have just one global version, successfully migrate over 30,000 reports, and migrate 100 applications, but it also provided them with considerate financial gains. In just the first year and a half of implementing our solutions, they saved €1.3 million per year, which even takes into account the cost of the infrastructure and dropping the outsourcing company. Our customer also experienced a 90% reduction in manual and administrative tasks thanks to combining automation and self-service.

Since 360Suite, Credit Suisse has also leveraged self-service. For example, for its content promotion, they can have up to 100 changes per month which previously was done manually by the central team, but now a developer just needs to set up a template then everything is done automatically. The content is migrated to the UAT and 360Suite provides proof for the auditors based on report changes. Now every time they want to promote content from one environment to another, they don’t need any input from the central team. Everything is logged (with full traceability) in an external system. 

 

It’s the Credit Suisse Way

Thanks to 360Suite solutions, their BI challenges seem in the all too distant future. Credit Suisse was able to successfully migrate all its SAP BusinessObjects environments to the same version, implement proper automated regression testing, deploy self-service to reduce dependence on IT, and ensure systems are in place in case of disaster recovery. 360Suite is the set of solutions to automate daily operations, reduce TCO and mitigate risks in your SAP BusinessObjects deployment. If you need help optimizing your platform, get in touch today.

Leave a comment