The Challenge
Barnsley Council has not implemented BI/BW. There is limited availability of ABAP resources in-house and getting external consultants as and when required was not proving to be cost-effective. Users had to rely on “Quick-view” type reporting with some spending a lot of time generating and downloading these report in PC formats; and these reports were raw data which then needed reformatting and manual distribution. The SAP system already had a number of batch jobs creating spool files, which were not being used to their full potential. Apart from time delays related to report formatting and distribution there were also time delays reporting on interface errors, which resulted in an interface being unavailable for a few hours before someone would fix the problem.
The Solution
Berneslai Homes (Housing ALMO) wanted to run a pilot scheme to send SMS text message reminders to tenants regarding upcoming appointments. This would have required either an interface to be developed or manual update of the tenant’s details into SAP and there were no ABAP resources available. To achieve this project there were 3 spool files to work with – 1 containing the “opt-in” information of tenant’s, spool 2 contains mobile phone numbers of the “opt-in” tenants and spool 3 containing details of work orders on a given day. Using a combination of spool variables and database query variables in Compleo Suite the final Excel spreadsheet with all relevant information is emailed to the SMS gateway.
The use of Compleo Suite in the near future at Barnsley Council
Having only recently incorporated Compleo into their IT infrastructure Barnsley Council is currently using it for some of their business critical processes. In the near future it is planned to push resource hungry reporting to background jobs, policing user errors, manipulating large chunks of data for users – all using Compleo Suite. In a nutshell it is also a – “Cheap and simple alternative to SAP workflow”, says Paul Bell at Barnsley.
Initially it was Compleo Mapform (the forms designing module) that caught the attention of Mark Ratcliffe at Barnsley. A lot of time was spent creating bespoke job tickets, job reports, purchase orders, etc. which all needed ABAP and a lot of time to explain the requirements to the ABAP team, without having any actual involvement in it. Mark says “it would take them months and months to get that [the forms] right, whereas with the forms module of Compleo Suite, we could have done this ourselves, it would have been simpler to amend them and we wouldn’t have had the time or the trouble that we did”.
Key Benefits of using Compleo
Compleo Suite is currently being used for automated report formatting and distribution via a batch job, monitoring interfaces related errors, manipulating large chunks of data and combining data from multiple spool files into a single document. Paul Bell at Barnsley Council says: “We know there are other solutions to some of our problems; however we feel that Compleo allows the SAP support team to quickly react to user requests and gives us control without resorting to ABAP”.