APOS Solutions News - July / August 2009

Clifford Hallam Healthcare | Case Study

"Using APOS Solutions saves CH2 up to 240 man hours each month."

...Ian Thompson, Business Analyst, Clifford Hallam Healthcare

Solutions Used: Instance Manager, Bursting Manager

Background:
Clifford Hallam Healthcare (CH2) is Australia's largest national Pharmaceutical and Medical Wholesaler utilising local knowledge and local people to provide pharmaceuticals, medical consumables and equipment products to the Healthcare market. With branches in each state, CH2 is able to provide a complete supply solution with quality customer service and sales support.

Challenges:
CH2 publishes "rebate" reports to their suppliers each month. On average, 700 reports are generated and sent to over 100 different suppliers via email. These reports needed to be manually created one by one by the finance department, using a system generated report, listing all the suppliers that needed reports run for the month. It took two people up to three weeks of the month to generate the reports and email them out.

Solution:
CH2 needed to produce the monthly rebate reports faster, in order to give their finance team additional time to process regular invoices and payments to and from CH2. CH2 Business Analyst Ian Thompson explains, "Using APOS Solutions, CH2 reduced the process time for running the rebate reports to 12 minutes -- from what used to be a 3 week process! This saves CH2 up to 240 man hours each month."

Crisis Averted:

Having the APOS applications in our toolset really saved the day.

- Ian Thompson, Business Analyst, CH2

In May 2009, CH2 upgraded to SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 3. Ian Thompson recounted, "The migration environment install didn't go to plan and due to some challenges in the core platform software, we found our recurring jobs were deleting from our production server. To make the issue worse, our SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 2 backup had become corrupted so we couldn't do a system restore to the old version."

Since CH2 was already using APOS Instance Manager, they managed to get a list of all their recurring jobs from their SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 2 system and compare them to a list of jobs from the new SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 3 system. This allowed them to generate a list of missing jobs, including over 1,000 recurring instances that had been lost — one report alone had over 300 instances. Ian Thompson described, "We copied the data from Instance Manager into a SQL table and then used APOS Bursting Manager to recreate many of the recurring jobs, saving us from re-entering the jobs into SAP BusinessObjects XI manually. This saved us a lot of time and potential grief from suppliers and customers who may have missed out on getting reports on time."

Why APOS?
"Having the APOS applications in our toolset really saved the day," said Ian Thompson. "Overall, CH2 is very satisfied with our APOS experience."

View this case study in full and other APOS case studies here.

APOS Insight | New Features!

APOS Insight provides enhanced system monitoring for SAP BusinessObjects, including self-healing mechanisms, introspection, governance and auditing.

These new features have just been added to APOS Insight:

Process Logger for UNIX - logs data pertaining to processes running in UNIX to an external database. Process Logger can collect numerous metrics from UNIX processes. The data can later be analyzed to identify trends.

Web Intelligence Document Structure Scanning - APOS Insight can now scan Web Intelligence documents and store their structure in a database for impact analysis and structure comparison.

Try it out! Request an evaluation download to see how APOS Insight can bring enhanced management and monitoring to your SAP BusinessObjects deployment.

New Strategic Alliance Partnership | TAKE Solutions Inc.

Kitchener, Ontario, Canada – In a partnership agreement announced today, TAKE Solutions Inc. (TAKE) is now a Value Added Reseller for APOS Systems, a leading provider of extensions to the SAP BusinessObjects platform. TAKE has a strong, dedicated Business Intelligence practice within their broader organization, which will give them the ability to utilize the APOS solutions to benefit their pure BI customer, as well customers who utilize their own suite of application software solutions in the areas of life sciences, supply chain management, and business process management. This partnership gives APOS Solutions significant market exposure in TAKE's strong BI presence in both the United States as well as India.

"We are pleased to announce TAKE as the latest APOS Value Added Reseller, and we look forward to working with them to serve their business intelligence customers," said Allan Pym, Vice President, Business Development at APOS. "We are confident that the APOS Solutions will be well received by TAKE customers as they look to address efficient management of their SAP BusinessObjects deployments, and at the same time this new business relationship will drive very beneficial growth for both our organizations."

"Our partnership with APOS firmly establishes our commitment to provide the very best BI solutions, ultimately aimed at improving our customers' ability to make effective business decisions," said Sanjay Goradia, Senior Vice President, Business Intelligence practice at TAKE. "This partnership greatly enhances our ability to make our customers more profitable and successful."

Read the full press release here.

July/August, 2009

Clifford Hallam Healthcare | Case Study

APOS Insight | New Features!

New Strategic Alliance Partnership | TAKE Solutions Inc.

Powerful Solutions Webinar | Upcoming Session