Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager as a driver of increased transparency at Geberit

Case study

SAP ALM Insights as enabler for IT Management at Geberit

Customer

Industry	Sanitary Engineering
Location	Switzerland
Employees	ca. 12’000
Service	Focused Insights
Customer since	2020

Digital transformation poses new challenges to organizations. To successfully navigate them, the role of IT needs to transform with the company. More then ever, quick adaption is needed.

To survive in the market, the process of change needs to be optimized. An important aspect of succeeding in the VUCA world is the establishment of internal transparency. Recognizing trends from existing data and measuring overall progress support overall success:

If you manage to enable your employees to actively participate in this process through transparency, the corner stone has been set.

“In our collaboration with blue.works, we particularly enjoyed their open mindedness to all our request, even if they weren’t covered by the SAP standards.[…] Not least, the professional and service oriented project execution convinced us.”

Michael Eisele

One of the greatest challenges at Geberit is to maintain overall overview across the entire SAP landscape. Particularly the the rapid changes in IT make this even harder to achieve. Because of this, it becomes increasingly difficult for IT Management to recognize trends in their systems. During our evaluation of tools to support our needs, we came across the free add-on Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager. One if it’s strongest benefits is the central access to the database of Solution Manager and the SAP System landscape.

SAP ALM as enabler

SAP Application Lifecycle Management (SAP ALM) is a key to creating transparency around the SAP system landscape and projects surrounding it: As a bridge between Business and IT, the necessary transparency as basis for decision making is established. Geberit has opted for Focused Insights’ dashboards, to create transparency in their IT-Change Process and in the area of SAP Security.

Focused Insights

Focused Insights is a dashboarding product, that allow access to more than 800 predefined KPIs. Additionally, it is possible to evaluate custom indicators. Focused Insights is fast and simple to implement and needs to no custom development. As part of the Focused Solutions Suite it comes as a license cost free add-on to SAP Solution Manager.

The accessed information can be simplified, aggregated or set into relation and allow for high detailed views and broad overview dashboards across the entire landscape and even the processes. With Focused Insights you can provide diagrams, reports, diagnostics and alerts to the relevant key users of your organization, allowing them to quickly interpret the information and take action if needed. You can evaluate live and historical data.

„Show and Tell“ after a few days, with live data

In his search to find a fitting tool to evaluate important KPIs, Manfred Bantle, Head of SAP Service center at Geberit found blue.works.
Due to the Corona-situation, a quick remote kick-off meeting was held and the job was clear: next to displaying critical security settings using he SAP=Security Situation Dashboard, KPIs needed to be displayed to enable a clearly structured Change Process.

Geberit quickly provided blue.works with access to their systems so that we could complete the basic configuration of Focused Insights and return to the customer after a few days and demonstrate the first dashboards with Geberit’s live data during a “show and tell” session.

In the past we had a number of self developed reporting tools in use at Geberit. This allowed us to swiftly identify the necessary KPIs we wanted to have in the reporting.

Shortly after the initial kick-off meeting, blue.works present their first results. We were blown away how quickly the dashboards can be realized. In particular blue.works’ deep knowledge of the SAP Focused Solutions impressed us from day one.

With additional feedback calls, we were able to discuss all details and have changes implemented without delays.

One by one, the needed dashboards were configured to meet all of Geberit’ requirements.

Customer Engagement and direct line to the product management

Focused Insights, a comparatively young project within the SAP ALM sphere, can already cover a number of requirements. However, during implementation, a number of gaps were identified.

In our collaboration with blue.works, we particularly enjoyed their open mindedness to all our request, even if they weren’t covered by the SAP standards. blue.works was able to address technical limitations directly with SAP’ product management and development teams. We were then quickly able to implement the changes made by SAP in waves.
Not least, the professional and service oriented project execution convinced us.

This shows how serious SAP is about the Customer Engagement stream: At the end of the day, SAP develops ALM for their customers.

What’s next…

Michael Eisle, project responsible at Geberit draws a intermediate conclusion “Our joint success story is about to continue.“

Initially we planned to use Focused Insights as a reporting tool for IT management, that delivers KPIs across all SAP systems. Soon, it will be used by the different IT units and business key users to maintain a real-time overview of the landscape status, such as performance indicators, number of dumps, canceled batch jobs and so on.

Since the tool is intuitive to use and delivers very good results in the UI5 Design, we can imagine planning and adding additional dashboards in the future.

Next, the onboarding of additional systems such as the Identity Management System and the SAP Analytics Cloud are scheduled.

Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager

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