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One of my favorite Business Intelligence stories is from a fleet vehicle management company who use BI extensively to help identify anomalies in fleet vehicle costs and behavior.
In one of their analyses, they identified a driver who had 12 oil changes on his vehicle in 12 months – literally one oil change a month. They could see from the vehicle’s mileage and other activity that it needed no more than 2 oil changes a year. They reported it to the fleet manager who called in the driver to explain.
The driver, who was in sales , told the fleet manager that every month he has to visit a client in downtown New York City. The cost of parking near the client’s office is $75 but there is a service garage next door that charges $60 for an oil change so he simply drops the car there every month while he visits the client and saves the company $15 in parking every month as well as getting an oil change!
Brilliant! He deserves an award!
While I would not recommend monthly oil changes, regular maintenance is a good idea to both keep a vehicle running smoothly and identifying any potential issues.
BusinessObjects is just the same and, unfortunately, too many BusinessObjects customers wait too long between health checks and preventative maintenance activity and end up in a bad situation that usually is very costly to their organization.
An annual (semi-annual for a large deployment) BusinessObjects health check is a very good idea and can help identify potential issues as well as provide a prioritized list of recommendations to help you keep your mission critical system running smoothly.
An even better idea is to have someone both monitoring and tuning your deployment on an on-going basis.
Many BusinessObjects customers cannot justify having a full-time or even a part-time System Administrator on staff. At the same time, many deployments do not really need more than 5 to 10 hours a month of BO System Administration tasks.
The typical day to day tasks of a BO System Administrator are things like managing system security, managing schedules and publications, troubleshooting system issues, monitoring and tuning performance. On a less frequent basis there is also applying fix packs and software upgrades.
As most BusinessObjects installations have been running for a while, organizations often forget how critical it is to their operation until it fails or encounters a major performance issue. Ironically, it is usually after such a failure or issue that they look for a solution.
One of the most popular solutions has been to contract for an annual Managed Services plan that provides 5, 10 or 15 hours of on-going support services per month in addition to providing hotline support for anything unexpected that might happen.
The beauty of a Managed Service plan is that it is both an insurance policy (and lifeline) for unexpected events in addition to an on-going and preventative maintenance service.
This solution has in fact become so popular, that we recently created a value calculator to show your potential savings on an annual basis. You can check it out here.
There are other solutions especially if you have BusinessObects System Administrators on staff and these can range from utilizing knowledge exchange subscription sites like SpeakBO PLUS to having a priority support service in place with a BusinessObjects specialist.
Whichever solution you decide, just be sure to have something in place where you are regularly monitoring and tuning your deployment. In the case of BusinessObjects, it is good to have frequent oil changes!
