Solutions used: APOS INSIGHT
Product Components Used: AddressBook Gateway, APOS Professional Services, KPI, RealTime Monitor
Background:
Since establishment in December 1999, T-Mobile has positioned itself as one of the largest international mobile communications carriers. Get More® is more than a tagline at T-Mobile USA, Inc.—it is a business strategy and a commitment to providing customers with more minutes, more features, and more value so they can enjoy the benefits of mobile communications and Get More from Life® where they live, work and play. In efforts to Get More from their Business Intelligence System they contacted APOS Systems for some custom development work to simplify and automate user security and management across several applications.
Challenge:
T-Mobile wanted to synchronize security between their Help Desk Software applications (Remedy and Insite) and their BusinessObjects Enterprise system. This required the consolidation of 5 stand alone reporting environments into one. Another challenge was to import a subset of 26,000 users from Remedy and their groups or markets from Insite. T-Mobile also required a way to track who was viewing which reports utilizing local time zones across the country.
Solution:
The APOS Professional Services Team provided T-Mobile with a custom windows application that takes the user name and password information from the Help desk application security database and updates the BusinessObjects Enterprise security database automatically. This allows users to utilize one user ID across all applications. It also enabled T-Mobile to audit who is running which reports.
The APOS custom application imported all users and their corresponding groups into BusinessObjects Enterprise on the initial run. It also added information such as user email identification and local timezones. The reports show the datetimes in their respective timezone when they login to BusienssObjects Enterprise Infoview.
The APOS application is utilized by internal users who may be interacting with T-mobile customers. It has increased productivity tremendously as there is no need for a dedicated BusinessObjects Enterprise administrator to create users and provide privileges to specific groups. "Our project could not go live without APOS custom development. The APOS custom software enables us to maintain one user authentication process for all our applications while alleviating any additional strain on our enterprise administrator," acknowledged Sudar.
The APOS development process was simple; T-Mobile had few meetings with the APOS technical team to review the requirements and within two weeks the first version of the software was completed. T-Mobile tested it and then deployed it in production. "APOS Service was Excellent! The sales person was professional and listened to what we wanted. The development manager came up with excellent-working solutions. The best part is, they made outsourcing this application so easy. The turn around time was less then a week. The sales and development managers were approachable for questions, changes and post production support," declared Sudar.
Why APOS?
"APOS Systems has been around; they know Crystal Enterprise systems very well and have been developing custom applications which Crystal Enterprise and BusinessObjects Enterprise are missing. It was only natural to contact APOS to see if they could help us out with a solution," stated Sudar when asked why T-Mobile chose APOS for this project.
APOS Systems Inc. is an SAP BusinessObjects software solution provider in the SAP PartnerEdge program. Named SAP BusinessObjects Technology Partner of the Year for the past three years, APOS has been a Crystal partner since 1996. APOS has acknowledged a key SAP BusinessObjects XI and Crystal Enterprise strength - its open architecture - and has designed and developed a variety of add-on solutions that offer customers additional capabilities within the SAP BusinessObjects XI infrastructure.
For more information:
Allan Pym, VP Sales and Chief Operating Officer
519.666.2020 or apym@apos.com