Customer Success – Santa Clara County SSA

The County of Santa Clara's Social Services Agency (SSA) services 15 incorporated cities in the most populous county of the San Francisco Bay area, which is home to California's Silicon Valley. The SSA uses SAP BusinessObjects as its reporting engine, and relies on it to meet regulatory requirements for it documents of record.

Santa Clara County SSA’s Challenge

In preparation for an impending migration, the SSA needed an inventory and deep knowledge of their SAP BI system, how their reports were being used, and how those reports would be impacted. While taking steps to streamline their content migration, the SSA also had concerns about maintaining their documents of record and audit readiness.

Santa Clara County SSA implemented APOS Insight and APOS Storage Center

• Impact AnalysisThe SSA implemented APOS Insight to achieve awareness of reports, object usage and security profiles, and to understand the downstream impact of data modelling changes on reports.
• Migration ReadinessThe SSA used APOS Insight to inventory and analyze their SAP BI system content and usage. APOS Storage Center automation enabled system right-sizing and migration streamlining.
• Content RegulationThe SSA used APOS Storage Center to implement a content storage strategy that met their stringent regulatory requirements, safeguarded their content, and maintained audit readiness.

Feedback

Thinh Hong, Information System Manager at SSA Santa Clara County:

APOS Insight's impact analysis capabilities allow us to see what effect changes to our data model will have downstream. It has allowed us to analyze SAP BusinessObjects metadata effectively. APOS Storage Center provides us with an efficient, rules-based means of cleaning up our BI environment, and the ease with which it allows us to back up and selectively restore objects has been very useful.

Case Study: Social Services Agency, Santa Clara County

The Social Services Agency (SSA) of Santa Clara County, CA, spoke to us recently about their experience with our APOS Storage Center and APOS Insight solutions.

The SSA's 600-plus BI accounts currently use Desktop Intelligence and Web Intelligence as their primary report delivery media. At the time of writing, the SSA was in the process of planning its migration to BI 4, so investigation of and preparation for the inevitable full adoption of Web Intelligence was also under way. More recently, the BI team has been delivering BI to the agency's information consumers via SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius).

In 2011, after receiving recommendations from peers at an SAP BusinessObjects conference, SSA implemented APOS Storage Center. SSA needed a strategy and solution for backing up, archiving, and selectively restoring reports. Aside from needing to implement a reliable backup solution, they wanted to optimize system performance and have the means to comply quickly and easily with regulatory requirements through selective restore.

In 2013, as SSA was preparing for their migration to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4, they were looking for a means of doing an inventory and forming a complete understanding of their BI system and what is currently being used. Their positive experience with APOS led them to contact APOS again.

Thinh Hong, Information Systems Manager with SSA, summed up her experiences with these APOS solutions:

APOS Storage Center provides us with an efficient, rules-based means of cleaning up our BI environment, and the ease with which it allows us to back up and selectively restore objects has been very useful. We can archive and retrieve historical instances in a neutral format, which is important, because we maintain a five-year window on instances for regulatory compliance.

…

APOS Insight's impact analysis capabilities allow us to see what effect changes to our data model will have downstream. It has allowed us to analyze SAP BusinessObjects metadata effectively. The information we've gathered through Insight has been very useful in helping us to manage and troubleshoot our BI environment. We will be using APOS Insight to compare environments pre- and post-migration to benchmark performance and to ensure security has translated to the new system properly, and to build a list of reports for conversion from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence.

Read the complete case study.