SAP, Affinity Sutton, and the strange case of the hidden mobile BI platform

Sometimes the answer you seek is sitting right under your nose - the trick is whether or not your software vendor decides to tell you...

Affinity Sutton is one of the largest providers of affordable housing in the UK. With 57,000 properties across the country, and building another 1,000 every year, it has a turnover of between £300m and £400m a year in shared ownership and, to a lesser extent, private home sales.

It employs 1,600 staff, and just over 130 of them - mostly field operatives - use iPads as standard.

To maximise the time these mobile workers could spend out in the field tackling issues, head of business intelligence Julian Pimm-Smith decided to equip them with a BI reporting solution.

Little did he know how punishing a process it would be.

"I didn't want reporting to be one of the reasons people still needed to go back to the office - to print stuff out - and I didn't want reporting to be a legacy desktop application either," Pimm-Smith said in an interview with Computing at the SAP UK and Ireland User Group's 2014 conference in Birmingham.

"I wanted it to be running parallel with the whole mobile working initiative."

Unfortunately, this was around mid-2012, when the iPad was barely two years old. There was literally "no solution that was fully functional and feature rich at all", he said.

Beyond Pimm-Smith's idea of wanting to do it, Affinity Sutton had no vision - and seemingly no way of attaining one - of what mobile reporting should be like in order to be "fully embedded and adopted" by the business.

Pimm-Smith decided to tackle the problem head-on, skirting what he calls "marketing speak" and embarking on a detailed and intense search for the next six months to find something that would suit the company's needs.

"We did at least six trials in sandbox environments around different platforms," he explained.

First up was Roambi, arguably the original analytics platform that grew up around the iPhone and iPad, and was developed to resemble the iPhone's original stocks and shares app.

Pimm-Smith liked Roambi's "gorgeous" UI, but felt that integrated it with the rest of Affinity Sutton's existing platform would be too hard and costly.

The company then looked at SAP's Xcelsius, which later became known as Dashboards - specifically the BusinessObjects version.

"That was great, because of the whole drill-down functionality," he said.

"We didn't want to release reporting that was static, because then we might as well be sending Excel documents or PDFs back - we wanted to let regional managers see not only their KPIs, but get into each estate, and down into properties," he added.

However, Xcelsius was "incredibly slow", with a report taking "days or weeks to build" and "hours or days" to maintain. Unworkable, by any standard.

In desperation, Affinity Sutton began looking into building its own app entirely, using Xcode.

"The advantage of that, we thought, was that at the same time we could mobilise our reporting through the app, we could also mobilise our legacy applications in the business. We thought, ‘That's just data, let's just have little apps for this - at least in an interim phase'."

This was easier said than done, however.

"It required more than our BI skillset," Pimm-Smith said. "We got little further than ‘Hello world', and faces of team members popping up on iPads. That's about it."

Next, Pimm-Smith considered returning to Dashboards and Antivia's report-crafting client XWIS, assisted by a Google Maps API.

"That would have been great," said Pimm-Smith, "especially as it lets you put more data in a dashboard - there's something quite irritating in the way reporting companies limit the amount of data that can go in - even into a desktop dashboard - so it might be a maximum of 500 rows. So what that ends up doing is pushing a lot of work onto the data warehouse part of the team, making them build specific aggregate tables just for one report.

SAP, Affinity Sutton, and the strange case of the hidden mobile BI platform

Sometimes the answer you seek is sitting right under your nose - the trick is whether or not your software vendor decides to tell you...

"Antivia got round that with lots of data aggregating in one dashboard, and we realised the transformative power of interactive mapping with the Google Maps API," said Pimm-Smith.

But he finally rejected this option because he felt it was not future-proof, and now feels justified in his misgivings given that Dashboard "looks like it's going out the door" at SAP.

SAP's BusinessObjects Explorer was next up, but this too was eventually rejected on the grounds that it did not offer enough analytics functionality.

By mid 2013, the testing process had dragged on for nine months, not the six originally envisioned.

"By this time, we'd decided there wasn't anything else on the market, and that we'd just wait," said Pimm-Smith.

Then one day, Affinity Sutton was performing a routine three-monthly SAP Business Objects update...

"It was just by fluke that I was looking through a little folder called Web Intelligence Samples," explained Pimm-Smith.

"I'd never seen it advertised or mentioned, but a little report in there was called Geoanalysis Samples. I double-clicked on it and it was just an ugly set of tables, but you could turn it into a mobile report simply by right-clicking on it and selecting the category of ‘mobile'."

Opened on the iPad, this became an Apple Map with "all sorts of indicators - heat map etc" which, Pimm-Smith realised, "changed everything".

He had found everything he needed right under his nose, and it seemed SAP itself would never have told him it was even there.

"It's incredibly quick to create reports, there's mapping, of course, and in our entire infrastructure, which has 400 reports and 100 self-serve reports through Web Intelligence, literally all we need to do is - at the basic level - right-click, select ‘mobile', and it's on the iPad."

The only extra work needed was opening a secure port and "sculpting reporting for mobile" in a cursory way, said Pimm-Smith.

Web Intelligence can call up BI-based single customer views, which functions way beyond the expected CRM-only access for an interrogation. Customer rental histories, building works, complaints, the works - everything is there, and in an "incredibly low cost way" of mobilising a desktop application.

Computing watched as Pimm-Smith called up a fuel poverty heat-maps, graphs and charts covering bills and arrears, and any number of combinations of facts and statistics all plotted in real-time.

"If we had a mobile CRM application and wanted to amend a single customer view, it could take half an hour, and come at immense [time] cost," said Pimm-Smith.

"I think Web Intelligence is the unsung hero of Business Objects," Pimm-Smith said.

"I think a lot of people feel that - it's why they buy Business Objects. A lot of the other products feel like halo products, in that they burn and die out. But Web Intelligence is the reason BI teams love Business Objects."

Computing asked whether Pimm-Smith felt SAP could be doing more to promote Web Intelligence.

"Oh, massively," replied Pimm-Smith. "Absolutely".

But he remained diplomatic.

"The nice thing that I've seen change is that - when you use an iPad - you're used to little updates coming straight to your device every three or four weeks, and now Business Objects is doing the same.

"So SAP's little Business Objects mobile app is updating. It's still quite hard to find out what's updating, but sure enough little things improve. Suddenly an extra graph is able to be rendered on Business Objects Mobile, or it can take a little more data, or the map has got another function on it. So they're definitely improving, and I'd say it's a huge opportunity for them."

Pimm-Smith used part of his address at the UK and Ireland User Group conference to do SAP's job for it and raise awareness of Web Intelligence.

"It seems so simple to us, and logical, to use it now, as our desktop version and our mobile version. So I'm hoping that people in the audience today who aren't using it are only doing so because they don't know about it," he said.

Have you found any hidden gems in SAP's software offerings that you think SAP has overlooked? How does it feel to perhaps be paying for software and services you don't know exist? Computing would like to know.