Experience & demand for quality match perfectly

novum interview with Lars Buchner and Thorsten Schmidt regarding the partnership of BOARD Deutschland GmbH and noventum consulting GmbH

novum: noventum consulting and BOARD Deutschland are living a business partnership. What specifically is the basis of your cooperation?

Lars Buchner: BOARD has been on the market for 19 years and for more than 10 years in Germany. In our projects, we very much like to cooperate with implementation partners. noventum is an ideal company in our partner environment, especially due to the combination of BI/DWH expertise and its focus in the SAP context. This puts us in a very nice win-win situation which our customers sustainably benefit
from.

Thorsten Schmidt: As noventum consulting, we are a solution provider for BI and data warehouse projects. In this, BOARD is rather excellently covering a certain area. Through the cooperation, we have improved our solution competence in the area of Corporate Performance Management since – with BOARD – we are equipped with a very powerful tool for planning and reporting.

novum: Could you introduce the central advantages of the “BOARD Toolkit” in a few words?

Specialised departments create reports, analyses and planning scenarios without any need for programming

Lars Buchner: With the “BOARD Toolkit”, we are pursuing a holistic “all in one” approach. With a single product, we are covering all functionalities that are needed for creating Business Intelligence and Performance Management applications completely without programming. In a short period of time, you can create, adjust and maintain such an application environment. The guiding principle is “Self-Service”, the ability to create reports, analyses and planning scenarios from within the specialised department without any programming.

novum: What exactly is meant by “without programming”?

Lars Buchner: In BOARD, I have the opportunity to compile my individual reports or other information through the user interface via drag and drop, to create custom dashboards, or to also support planning processes and workflows. It provides a very good overview and control of workflows and planning processes.

Thorsten Schmidt: Of course, a proper data base must exist, be it a classic data warehouse or another relational data environment. If this is given, we – at noventum – very much like to place BOARD whenever we need a tool that specialised departments can create and operate completely independently for complex analyses and plannings.

novum: What are the benefits that your customers can realise from the noventum/BOARD partnership?

Lars Buchner: Our product is excellent and noventum is clearly very professional and competent in the Enterprise Data Warehouse area!

novum: How far-reaching is your cooperation?

Thorsten Schmidt: We have personal contacts that go way back. We have been cooperating very professionally and successfully with some of the executive staff of BOARD for close to 15 years. Likewise, we also work hand in hand on the conceptional level – independently from current projects. Most recently, our architects and developers have united for a workshop of several days, one of the goals being the optimisation of the conceptional layout of interaction between SAP and the BOARD Toolkit: what architecture makes sense at which point, what is a good time to put BW in place, when is a good time for a replacement and what’s the integration approach? This creates mutual trust, a similar understanding and short paths and, additionally, is to the benefit of our joint customers. I think we are complementing each other so well in projects that in this case 1 + 1 simply equals more than 2. In a lot of projects, we – and of course our customers – have found that our business cultures, experience and qualities simply fit together very well.

novum: Can you provide a specific example?

Thorsten Schmidt: Yes, sure. For instance, we are currently very successfully working in a joint project at an international manufacturer of measuring technology. The company is setting up a global Business Intelligence system that will contain all relevant business areas in perspective. In this, a special aspect is the integration of data from the SAP/ERP into a data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server. From this central data warehouse, which represents the Single Point of Truth, the data can quite easily and consistently be loaded into the BOARD environment. In the first phase, which was successfully completed just recently, a company-group wide sales & distribution planning system was set up in which the strengths of BOARD as a planning and analysis tool can be taken full advantage of. In the subsequent projects the global data warehouse will now be expanded further with this technology.

novum: Does your cooperation result in access to new industries?

Thorsten Schmidt: Generally, we can – of course – put our BI competence and the Toolkit to use anywhere. In our joint focus, we are focusing – with the areas of pharma, healthcare and energy providers – on industries in which noventum has a great deal of experience.

novum: Thank you very much for the interview!

Torsten Kanngiesser

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