Materna & RZF: From EOL BMC Smart Reporting to native Yellowfin BI
Background
Materna is an international IT service provider that specializes in helping companies and authorities digitize. Established in 1980, Materna employs more than 4,000 staff globally, divided into several subsidiaries under Materna Group, with its focus areas including digital administration, enterprise service management, cybersecurity, and digital resilience.
Materna is one of the largest BMC partners in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), and the leading partner of BMC Software globally, helping many of its customers adopt BMC’s previous in-built reporting tool, Smart Reporting, which was a white-labeled version of an older build of Yellowfin BI.
Materna has been a long term partner of Yellowfin since 2016, and with several of its clients needing to update their reporting tools, following BMC’s announcement of Smart Reporting’s end-of-life (EOL) in 2022, Materna sought Yellowfin’s assistance in helping its clients seamlessly upgrade from Smart Reporting toward adopt the full, native analytics experience of Yellowfin BI.
“We (Materna and RZF) were probably the first ones to get native Yellowfin 9 to work with BMC reporting assets via the adapter to the BMC database.”
Uwe Reimers, Master Consultant, Materna
Challenge
EOL BMC Smart Reporting and a need for more features
One of Materna’s clients is RZF, the German acronym for “Computing Center for the Tax Authorities of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia”, which is the largest federate state in Germany. RZF is a state-run IT firm for the local region government, and acts as a service provider for the Ministry of Finance, while working with other local and regional tax offices.
In 2018, Materna helped RZF to evaluate Smart Reporting as its reporting solution, after its previous tool, shipped with BMC ITSM, did not provide them all the features they needed.
Over the years, however, RZF’s unique data needs began to exceed the capability of Smart Reporting, which lacked the newer features of the native Yellowfin reporting suite. This included:
- A web-based platform to create reports
- Give certain users the opportunity to create their own reports according to their wishes independently of releases and without the use of additional tools
- Use existing reports with the new BMC Helix setup
Even before Smart Reporting’s EOL date looming, RZF recognized they would require an updated analytics solution, and turned to their regional partner, Materna, once more: “We need a better reporting solution, with more opportunities to expand the features,” said a team member at RZF.
Solution
Fully native, white-label analytics with Yellowfin
In 2020, RZF requested help from Materna to help their users unlock more detailed data reporting capability with a new tooling upgrade. Materna opted to show RZF what the full Yellowfin native platform could bring as its new, updated analytics solution, based on the following factors:
- RZF had a considerable number of reports created in Smart Reporting, which could be more easily rebuilt or transitioned into a native Yellowfin deployment
- Yellowfin’s feature-set would help meet RZF’s modern data requirements and use cases
- Yellowfin provides RZF’s Smart Reporting users with a familiar analytics user experience, as Smart Reporting was an older, white-label version of Yellowfin
“RZF used a highly customized solution from BMC, and over time needed much more detail from reporting based on demands from their different management teams,” explained Gereon Panknin, Focus Account Manager at Materna Group. “Unfortunately, BMC’s reporting option could no longer fulfill that, and therefore, they wanted to prepare for the future.”
“RZF had a lot of reports in Smart Reporting, which was rather old and years behind the current version of Yellowfin, and we saw the possibility to help them improve their use of Yellowfin, where they can use different databases, integrate information from our ITSM ticket system, and aggregate data in Yellowfin Present,” said Uwe Reimers, Master Consultant at Materna, who managed the migration and implementation project. “For Materna, Yellowfin was also the easiest choice as it suited the existing ITSM suite we had with RZF very well, being able to aggregate the KPIs of every process, active tickets, resolve times, and so on.”
“For RZF, Yellowfin’s pricing was a huge driving factor, as other BI solutions like Business Objects were much more expensive,” Uwe continued. “RZF’s top management also identified the Present feature as something they wanted to leverage for their weekly change reports. These were the main factors to choose Yellowfin in 2021, before Smart Reporting’s EOL.”
Implementation
Better security, user sync, and updated reporting
RZF purchased Yellowfin in February 2021 following its consultation with Materna, as they determined a native Yellowfin deployment was the best solution for their growing analytics needs.
“When BMC announced EOL for Smart Reporting, it was the final kick for RZF to say, ‘okay, we’re going to start with Yellowfin native,’” said Uwe Reimers, Master Consultant at Materna, who managed the migration and implementation project. “Materna had two roles in the project, that being consulting for RZF’s processes, and consulting in the development of an ITSM tool.”
The first task for Materna was to help RZF transfer its considerable number of reports created in Smart Reporting into Yellowfin, and then configure the rights management system. “Many of the reports were rebuilt in Yellowfin, or exported and then imported into the new system,” said Uwe.
“We then implemented our own user sync, and enhanced its Single Sign-On (SSO) from the Smart Reporting version so all the users and groups they belong to are configured in the ITSM and synced to Yellowfin. This means RZF do not have to manage people in different systems.”
“This feature also allows RZF users to access Yellowfin and the groups they belong to easily,” Uwe continued. “For example, anyone who belongs to the Incident Management Group has auto-access to Yellowfin and the reports that you need. This made it easy for RZF to configure user permissions.”
To ensure the overall upgrade and deployment went smoothly, Materna worked closely with Peter Damen, Chief Product Architect at Yellowfin, who previously helped BMC with their Smart Reporting integrations. As Uwe recalls, “We (Materna and RZF) were probably the first ones to get native Yellowfin 9 to work with BMC reporting assets via the adapter to the BMC database.”
Results
Up-to-date embedded analytics suite
RZF went live with its Yellowfin deployment in September 2022, with its users now able to enjoy the full feature-set of the Yellowfin BI native suite, achieving the following outcomes:
- Thanks to the API, the administration of user access has become simple or even exceeded expectations, as users can also easily use the reporting platform via SSO
- Creating and saving specific Views give our module Managers the chance to easily create their own reports based on these views
- Running Yellowfin stand alone and connect it to the new BMC Helix setup. Existing reports can be reused
“RZF now has 80 or 90 users on Yellowfin, with 20 processes and reports on all of these processes on KPIs, which are sent to and aggregated for top management,” explained Uwe.
For Materna, the transition from Smart Reporting to Yellowfin native was also achieved smoothly. “On our side of things, for every ITSM process, we have got almost the same data structures, which was one advantage to get all the reports quickly done,” said Uwe.
Future
In September 2023, RZF requested an upgrade on Yellowfin’s special offer to a 4 core, and moved into a 3 year capacity based license with unlimited users. RZF plans to use Yellowfin for reports on data in other departments of the company like CTI, people disposition and workload planning.
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