Many enterprises will face such confusion in the process of informatization construction: with the increase of systems and the deepening of construction, more and more data are accumulated. The data deposited in the system needs to be used, and visualization becomes a problem. When it is extended to the application, it forms the demand for report display and data analysis display. Regarding these issues, here is a case study of Yanghe's informatization construction.
About Yanghe
The Suzhou Wine Group has one wine capital, two famous wines, three first-class wines, and four first-class wines. One wine refers to Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, where the Su Wine Group is located. The two famous wines refer to Yanghe and Shuanggou, the two famous Chinese wines. The three firsts refer to production capacity, market share, and smooth quality. Ranked first in the industry. The four first-class refers to the industry-leading average in four aspects: brewing technology, brand influence, innovation ability, and marketing network.
Yanghe Information Construction Background
The informatization construction of Yanghe started early in the liquor industry. In 2003, Yonyou's U8 system was launched. After that, the OA system was built to realize the interconnection of network special lines in Nanjing, Suqian, Yanghe, Shuanggou and Siyang. The construction of SAP's ERP system began in 2012. The two-phase project covers the entire business chain from front-end sales, finance to back-end production, and warehousing. In addition, a series of peripheral business systems such as mobile sales, business membership system, Portal, and BPM have been built. These several components have greatly improved the informatization level of Yanghe.
In Yanghe's information system architecture, SAP ERP, TMS, WMS, BPM and other systems are used as the background, business membership system, mobile sales, enterprise portal as the middle platform, Yanghe No. 1, official mall, etc. as the front desk. The middle and back offices generate a large amount of business data during business operations. Each system implemented has its own reports, and these reports are implemented in different ways and in various forms. This brings a lot of problems to the report application of the comprehensive data platform. In conclusion, there are three major pain points:
1. Reports are scattered and lack planning and management
The data sources of each system are independent of each other, and their respective reports are also independent of each other. The reports of different systems need to be developed and maintained by developers of different systems. The reports of cross-system and cross-data sources can only be realized by calling each other through remote interfaces, which is inefficient and operation. It is difficult to maintain and requires high technical ability of developers.
2. Real-time correlation affects business efficiency
The original report directly fetches data from the database of the business system. Because the fetching logic of the report is relatively complex compared with other businesses, and the query result is large, the pressure caused by the report to the database is much greater than that of other business calculation logic. For example, there was a database downtime accident in the mobile marketing system. It was later found out that the calculation logic of the report consumed 80% of the system performance resources, while the calculation logic of the business only consumed 20% of the performance resources of the system. The numbers sound so outrageous, but they are real things that are worth thinking about.
3. The form is monotonous and the user experience is poor
The original reports of each platform only belong to the subsidiary functions of the platform, and lack professional display capabilities. Most reports can only be presented in the form of tables, which are not beautiful and easy to use. For example, the ALV report of the SAP system cannot even be realized with background paging, and the experience is very poor.
Based on the above reasons, Yanghe has to make the first change in informatization - introducing a professional reporting platform.
After repeated investigations, we chose the best product in the industry - FineReport. Taking this opportunity, the company made a sorting out and planning for the company's internal reporting system.
We introduced a data warehouse and set up a dedicated report development and operation team. The use of FineReport brings us 3 obvious benefits:
1. Reduce the complexity of report development, operation and maintenance, and improve the level of report application.
2. The report is separated from the business system, which greatly improves the performance of the business system.
3. FanRuan's professional display ability and strong scalability have greatly improved development efficiency and demand response speed.
At the same time, the reports of the existing systems were classified according to their functions, the report system of Yanghe was sorted out, and the reports with poor experience were migrated to the FanRuan report platform step by step.
The application of FanRuan reports greatly reduces the consideration of trivial issues such as interface connection between systems, compatibility of chart libraries, logic implementation of page controls, and how to design query permission control. Then you can focus on the optimization of the report fetching logic.
In terms of improving the efficiency of reports, we have formulated the programming specifications of the SQL language and require all developers to strictly abide by them to ensure code maintainability and query efficiency.
Deep integration of reports and other platforms
1. Integration of reports and Portal
As more and more systems have been built over the years, each system has a set of login accounts and passwords. In order to reduce the pressure on operation and maintenance personnel and users, we plan to use the Portal portal as the unified entry for all front-end systems.
This involves the integration of FineReport and Portal. We adopt the CAS single sign-on integration solution, intercept the request of the FanRuan reporting platform through the SSO service, and issue a token to obtain access rights after verification. In this way, there is no need to synchronize Portal usernames and passwords, and multiple systems can be integrated with each other.
2. Automatic authorization mechanism for reports
Report permissions, we divided into two parts: report viewing permissions and query scope permissions. For the query scope permissions, an automatic authorization mechanism is designed. By identifying user login information, obtaining user identity classification information, calculating the user's maximum authority, displaying the query authority tree in a tree menu, and automatically identifying the level to which the query scope selected by the user belongs.
3. SAP function of the report
In some cases, reports require direct calls to BAPI functions from SAP. For this purpose, the secondary development was carried out, and the public method SAP_RFC_TOOL for the communication between FanRuan reports and SAP was designed by themselves. They use JCO3 technology to realize the communication between JAVA and SAP and encapsulate it, so that users can skip various details and simply call the public method by calling the public method. Any SAP remote function, the returned data type can be used directly by the java program. After that, we also designed the function CALL_SAP_RFC_RT_STRING(). From the figure, you can see the use of calling SAP remote functions, which is very convenient.
Thanks to the unparalleled openness of FanRuan, this is the reason why FanRuan is favored.
future construction plans
With the continuous deepening of Yanghe's informatization construction, more and more data are accumulated, and the demand for data analysis is also increasing day by day. Therefore, the construction of a data analysis system has become imminent, so the next phase of the plan is to build a data analysis system. With SAP BW as the data center, the data sources of all business systems enter the data center through regular extraction. After BW's data cleaning, sorting, modeling and other processing procedures, it provides a unified data source for reports. The FanRuan report platform is used as the front-end fixed-format report to provide to grassroots sales, back office and other departments. BO is used by senior managers as a multi-dimensional analysis report platform and a decision-aided cockpit platform. The key to this plan is that FanRuan reports will bear a lot of concurrent pressure and display most of the business data reports.