Getting synergies from rapid access to data

Jon Oluf Brodersen – CIO Nokas Group

About Nokas

• North European cash management and guarding company – in all 10 different business areas

• Founded in 1987 by two brothers (Wang) out of Tønsberg, Norway

• Currently 100 shareholders and all of senior management among them

• Currently 7500 employees and annual turnover of 4.3 billion NOK of witch 40% generated outside Norway

• 13 cash depots in Norway (6), Sweden (4) and Denmark (3) • 300 cash/valuable transport routes• 225 fixed mobile response unit routes• 85 offices in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, 190,000 customers• We have conducted 73 acquisitions – the last 5 of them to be

considered large (in total more that 2 billon NOK in revenue)

• Significant growth through self financed M&As.

• Focus now is towards organic growth, but further acquisitions are also to be expected

About BI Builders

• BI Builders is a Norwegian software company founded in 2011, with a mission to

optimize the resources spent on Business Intelligence solutions as well as increasing data quality and reliability

• Have developed the Extract- Load- and Transform- (ETL) system Xpert BI

• The Xpert BI solution includes data warehouse architecture and methodologies as well as best practices right out-of-the-box

The Challenge

• Merger of two large Norwegian manned guarding companies (Nokas Norway and former G4S Norway)

• Numerous projects required, but synchronizing business processes and establishing a common ground for a single business culture was by far the largest one.

• G4S Norway was utilizing a well developed SAP system tightly integrated with numerous other critical business systems

• Nokas was running a highly customized AX3.0 in parallel with a number of other critical business systems.

• A new consolidated ERP platform (AX12 R3) was chosen as the path to follow.

• Extracting and migrating complex datasets from two old platforms into a single new posted a challenge in itself.

• In addition we had to maintain full integrity of old data according to existing law. We wanted to be able to do this outside of the old platforms.

Solution

• Quick deliveries were seen as pivotal due to the challenge of running two ERPs in parallel.

• Using the BI Builders’ product Xpert BI to extract information from the SAP environment, and reshaping this rather non accessible information into useful data for migration and look-up purposes.

• Using BI Builders tools to feed AX12 migration framework and hence obtaining a quality assurance on migrated data.

• Creating a approachable solution for the SAP dataset that would allow for access to historical transactions without any connections to or use of the old SAP platform. The final solution must satisfy external auditors demand for tracing financial transactions.

• Use of QlikView and Excel accessing the Xpert BI data warehouse which provides a structured and well formatted model. This makes this a strategic enterprise solution and not a tactical fix related to a merger.

5 people involved in the execution of the project

• 5 days of actual delivery work

• 1 day:• Communication between SAP expert and data warehouse

consultant in BI Builders to identify the source scope

• 4 days:• Definition of one integrated data model to store the data in MS SQL

Server• Extraction of data from SAP• Quality Assurance of data stored in MS SQL Server

• The source data in the SAP solution encompassed Finance Accounting, Asset Accounting, Human Resource & Payroll, Material Management, Plant Maintenance, Sales & Distribution

• 300 tables in the SAP source with more than 300 Gb of data, became ca 250 tables in a single integrated MS SQL model

The project in numbers

BI Builders• 1 Sr. ETL consultant• Project Execution

NOKAS• 1 Project manager, • 1 database administrator, • 1 external SAP consultant

Example of the sourceSAP timesheet and related tables

The process and the environment

5 days

Example of resultUsing the same timesheet date

Experienced gained

• Saving money and shifting culture towards common ground by turning of SAP

• Fast implementation means low utilization of key internal resources

• Building a data warehouse for the SAP data in such a short time is a first time for us.

• The result was an understandable and open structure that allows us to use historical SAP data as permanent source for future analysis and prognosis.

• The end result was easy to fit into our current MS SQL/QlikView environment

• The Xpert BI product and the methodology utilized where metadata from source is transformed into a understandable model, was of great importance for us in order to take real ownership to SAP data and proved to be very efficient.

• The BI expert software in combination with their expertise is a good value proposition

Our thinking moving forwardGuiding principle: Biggest bang for the buck

Multiple specialized and integrated SQL data warehouses that reflect functional areas

Xpert BI feed

Different reporting tools for specialized reporting against a single data warehouse

Reporting across multiple data warehouses using QlikView

LOB systems

New M&As

Questions