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Peoplesoft HRMS & Business Objects Security Metadata Integration for a Global Technology Distributor |
The Business: The Company is a global leader in technology distribution, sales, marketing and logistics. Operating in more than 100 countries, the Company offers a broad array of solutions and services to nearly 165,000 resellers by distributing and marketing thousands of IT products worldwide sourced through nearly 1,400 suppliers.
The Challenge: The Company used Peoplesoft (PS) HR application to support its human resources functions. End user reporting with Peoplesoft’s reporting tool was slow and not user-friendly, requiring a specialized group of HR users to extract information on an ad-hoc basis and develop reports. Analysis of large volume of data was difficult, due to lack of simple data manipulation features, such as slice and dice. The Company was maintaining legacy complex 3GL codes and multi-language extraction, transformation, and loading scripts. Any errors during daily loads were difficult to trace. Extensive IT resources were devoted for this maintenance effort.
The Company uses Business Objects (BO) extensively for reporting and analysis for many applications and wanted BO’s user-friendly features for reporting out of Peoplesoft, but security was a major concern. In order to control access to BO reports, Peoplesoft’s security has to be seamlessly integrated with BO. No direct security metadata integration tool was currently available in the market, between these two technology platforms. Highly sensitive human resources data requires bullet-proof security measures. Maintenance burden of 3GL codes and ETL scripts need to be reduced.
The Vision: The Company needed a seamless integration of security metadata between Peoplesoft HR and Business Objects, so that any changes in Peoplesoft security are effortlessly propagated into Business Objects’ “Universe”. This would enable users to use BO reporting and analysis without additional work for specialized HR personnel.
The Solution: We integrated security metadata by analyzing and retrofitting the Peoplesoft security structure into BO universe. In-depth analysis resulted in mapping the metadata tables and fields into appropriate tables in Business Objects repository. Metadata was exported from Peoplesoft and loaded into BO using Informatica’s ETL toolset. Loading of new and modified profiles in Peoplesoft, due to organizational changes (job changes, terminations, new hires, etc.), were seamlessly integrated and automated, thus reducing the IT personnel involvement in day-to-day maintenance and reconciliation.
The 3GL codes and mix of complex Perl/Unix scripts were converted to simple user-friendly table-driven Unix scripts. Informatica’s metadata and GUI functionality is used for daily data extraction and loading, resulting in user-friendly and easy maintenance of the data warehouse.
The project was finished under budget and ahead of schedule.
The Results: Business users could extract reports and analyze HR related information without the intervention of HR personnel. HR administrator can now make necessary security access changes without IT’s help. IT can trace any data errors that may occur during data loads and modify them as needed.
The Tools: Erwin, Oracle RDBMS, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, Informatica PowerCenter, Windows 2000, and Sun Solaris. |
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