BI Specialist @ VPK Group

1. Purpose of the position

The BI Specialist at VPK Group plays a critical role in managing and developing the BI/BW/BO/SAC environment, ensuring the robustness of the existing SAP BW solution and driving the transition to self-service reporting tools such as SAC. This position has a significant impact within the organization as it directly influences the standard reporting provided to all Business Units in accordance with the strategic plans established by the corporate controllers and division heads.

2. Context and BI landscape

2.1 The BI landscape

The BI Landscape is in the cloud and built around SAP BW, Business Objects and SAP BPC. Currently there are proof of concepts being built to evolve to the SAC Cloud solution of SAP.  The main backbone for all the reporting queues is SAP and multiple other legacy systems. The governance is built in and around these source applications. In the organization this is the responsibility of the Applications team. There are 340 active BI users. Several hundreds receive daily broadcasts.

2.2 The team and collaboration

The BI team has a dotted line to the Business sponsors of ICT. This is both the corporate controller and the divisional heads. They will set the priorities and agree on the next steps. There is a two months BI Steerco where both the CIO and CFO are available and where with BI lead the strategies six quarters ahead are evaluated.

The most frequent collaboration will be with the applications team and the business process owner (only BPO’s make tickets). The relationship is not complex, a key challenge is to be able to make the translation between the business need and the BI Architecture and set up.

2.3 The challenges

The first challenge is to ensure the uptime of the solutions and the readiness of the data and reporting on time. The team has worked hard to get this in place and it can be considered as being at the right standards.
The opportunity is to become an even stronger partner with the application team and business stakeholders. Picking up early requirements and finding synergies across the VPK Group.

The current VPK BI Team has strong SAP BW/BI Skills and is a very mature and functional team. Graphical front end skills are for sure an opportunity for growth.

2.4 Some Ongoing projects

• Set up of BPC for consolidation
• Prototyping for SAC
• VPK has  a combination of BW on Hana and BW4Hana and will evolve to full 4Hana in the next years. 

3. Tasks and responsibilities

• Reporting to the BI Team Lead: The Specialist is responsible for designing, developing and implementing new flows in SAP BW on Hana, modeling SAP extractors, creating BO reports, monitoring daily loads, defining new reports in SAC and handling business support tickets.
   
• Design and Development: Responsible for designing, developing and implementing new flows in SAP BW on Hana using LSA++ methodology (40% of time).
   
• Data Modeling: Handles different types of SAP extractors in modeling, including LIS, FI, COPA, Generic data sources, Hana views, etc. (30% of the time).
   
• Reporting: Creates BO reports based on Hana views and BEx queries.
   
• Monitoring and Support: Oversees daily load, handles business support tickets and provides training to business users of BO reporting tools.
   
• Self-Service Reporting: Defines new reports in SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud) and sets authorizations.

The BI Specialist works closely with the Applications team and business stakeholders and translates business requirements into feasible development strategies. Challenges include understanding the current setup and translating complex business needs into effective technical solutions. 

4. Objectives for the first 12 months

3 months Learn about the solutions and set up guided by the current team and team leader
6 months work on some first design and set up
12 months be a trusted advisor for the business process owners after some first successful deliveries

Obviously, expectations about the speed at which the BI Specialist settles in are related to the experience he/she has already accumulated. Depending on experience, this process can obviously be faster, knowing that the VPK environment is complex and international.

5. Reporting

The BI Specialist will report directly to the VPK BI Team Lead.

6. Reason for the vacancy

 VPK keeps on growing and investing, consequently also the BI project portfolio has grown, hence there is a need for recruiting an extra BI Specialist.