Concur Accelerates Analysis of Cognos Asset Inventory for 7000+ Customers
Senturus helped Concur to reduce the time and complexity of analyzing approximately 1.3 million Cognos reports for cleanup, consolidation and migration to a new reporting platform.
Challenge
SAP Concur is the leading provider of solutions for travel, expense and invoice management and serves some 7000 enterprise clients. Before being acquired by SAP, Concur Technologies used Cognos as their white-labeled reporting solution for 17 years. Following the merger, Concur was faced with the daunting task of analyzing approximately 1.3 million Cognos reports for migration to a new, proprietary reporting platform. An estimated 65% of these reports were client-developed custom reports.
The large volume of reports made it impossible for Concur to help customers evaluate their reports on a one-by-one basis. The timeline just to catalog the fields, tables and filters used in each report was staggering: Concur IT calculated that it would take 563 full-time employees five years to accomplish. They needed a solution to make this process more manageable.
Solution
Senturus delivered a version of the Migration Assistant for Cognos (MAC) that was customized to fit Concur’s unique needs as an OEM.
The insights provided by the MAC enable Concur to:
- Inventory report content from multiple content stores
- Inventory report execution history from multiple audit databases
- Gain visibility to reports stored in “My Folders”
- View the schedule details for all scheduled reports and jobs, including bursted reports
- Identify duplicate and highly similar reports for consolidation
- Identify unused and rarely run reports for archiving or deleting
- Assess the volume of reports that will need to be migrated for each customer
- Perform custom comparisons to group reports based on degree of similarity
- Prioritize content for migration based on frequency of use (e.g., selecting frequently used reports to be migrated first)
- Prioritize content for migration based on complexity (e.g., finding reports that can be easily converted to the new system and offer quick wins)
Benefits
The customized Migration Assistant enables Concur to significantly reduce the time and effort required to analyze and prepare Cognos content for migration.
- Saves thousands of hours of manual effort that would be required to gather, combine and analyze Cognos inventory data.
- Prevents the re-creation of unnecessary reports in the new system, helping to reduce overall migration cost, clutter and effort.
- Helps identify scheduled jobs that can be eliminated due to non-active use.
- Mitigates potential impact of wasted time and effort spent migrating content that isn’t needed.
- Streamlines analysis and planning by consolidating all relevant metadata for each report within a single tool.
- Reduces risk and confusion with large customer planning and change management activities.
It also provides some unexpected additional benefits…
- Supports Cognos maintenance and cleanup activities, even for environments that don’t need to be migrated.
- Helps reduce support costs by enabling the support team to triage and troubleshoot cases by providing information that isn’t readily available in the Cognos portal.
- Can be used to perform detailed content audits for customers to meet their internal compliance requirements.
Senturus has been a great Cognos migration partner. Their willingness to customize the Migration Assistant software gave us information-rich enhancements to meet our planning and analysis needs.
About our client
SAP Concur (formerly Concur Technologies) is an American SaaS company providing travel and expense management services to businesses. It is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. With more than 23,000 customers, 4,200 employees and 25 million users in over 150 countries, SAP Concur is the leader in the multi-billion market for travel and expense management software.
