BW application maintenance
L'Oréal USA · US Point of Contact · SAP BW Support
US point of contact for the VISEO BW maintenance contract at L'Oréal USA: extraction tickets from SAP ECC to BW, a shared team between the US and France, and an improvement plan for how requests were raised and tracked.
- Client / organization
- L'Oréal USA
- Consulting firm
- VISEO USA
- Role
- US Point of Contact · SAP BW Support
- Period
- Jul 2014 - 2016
- Duration
- Part-time
- Location
- Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, USA
- Work mode
- On site at the client
- Team
- VISEO BW consultants in the US and France
Business context
L'Oréal USA's BI reporting relied on SAP BW, fed from SAP ECC by logistics and profitability DataSources, with Informatica and MSBI on the BI side. VISEO ran its corrective and evolutive maintenance with consultants in the US and in France. Requests often arrived by e-mail, chat or phone without priorities or functional documents, which made the workload hard to plan.
Key contributions
- Acted as the US point of contact for the BW maintenance team, which was split between the US and France.
- Followed extraction tickets from SAP ECC to BW, including profitability (CO-PA) extraction performance, delivery extraction and new CO-PA fields.
- Proposed an improvement plan: regular status meetings, a ticket tool, priorities on every request and functional documents for new needs.
- Maintained the logistics DataSources and cleared BI delta queues when loads backed up.
Responsibilities in detail
Coordination
- Received L'Oréal USA's BW requests and assigned them across the US and France team.
- Ran the status meetings with L'Oréal USA's BI team and reviewed on-going tickets.
- Balanced the workload between critical and non-critical requests.
BW support
- Followed corrective and evolutive maintenance on the ECC extractors and BW loads.
- Applied SAP notes and workarounds for extraction performance and timestamp issues.
- Monitored the extraction queues and cleared the delta queues feeding BW.
The contract
VISEO maintained L'Oréal USA's BW layer with consultants in the US and in France. I was the US point of contact: requests from the L'Oréal BI team came to me, and I followed them with the consultants on both sides of the Atlantic. The tickets were mostly about the extraction from SAP ECC to BW: the speed of the profitability (CO-PA) and delivery extractions, new CO-PA fields, and standard transactions that behaved differently with US time zones.
Improving the way requests were handled
In mid-2014 I presented an improvement plan to L'Oréal USA. Needs were often asked by e-mail, chat or phone, without priority or functional document, and non-critical requests waited too long. The plan set regular status meetings, a single tool to specify and track tickets, priorities on every request, and a fixed share of each week for low-priority work so the workload stayed stable.