4 Ways to Cut arcplan Implementation Costs

As an arcplan Channel Partner, we’re always looking for colleagues who aim to optimize and innovate with the technology we already use. Amorsys is a company that’s done just that. Based in Kinitra Morocco, Amorsys originally posted their How to Cut you arcplan Implementation Cost by More Than Half series on their blog last year. This series was written by Hamza Amor and we’ve selected the best excerpts from the series to include in the article below. To see the articles in their entirety check out their blog.

Identify your Biggest Cost Drivers
I have identified 3, which are: 1) Architecture  2) People 3) Process Architecture. What makes arcplan the most powerful BI tool out there is that it is also a development platform with a lot of functionality. Developers should take advantage of this.

First, your arcplan applications should use central documents in which you store reusable objects and functions so that you don’t waste time recreating them in all reports. This will come in very handy, especially when you have to make changes.

Second, you should have a solution that is metadata-driven. In other words, you should store information about your reports, and dynamically call this information when needed. This includes color themes, enable/disable functionality, number formatting…etc

Third, documenting and organizing your objects is critical, not only for support, but for collaboration and to ensure continuity in case the original developer is unavailable. arcplan gives you the ability to add inline comments, which means comments that are embedded with your code. Color coding objects is also extremely handy, that is you provide a legend for your color coding.

And last, a well-thought-out QA (Quality Assurance) process for your solution will provide a standard way to test and identify report issues. If you have 2 or 3 developers creating reports, you can be certain they will not test the same way.

Rejecting the Waterfall Methodology
The method I recommend for arcplan Enterprise based projects is Agile, using the Scrum management framework. This model has proven very successful delivering software projects, and is just now gaining attention among BI professionals. Using Agile, the product owner works very closely with a team to define the key system functionality and tracks it in a “product backlog”, which is a log of locked functionality that cannot change except by the team. Cross-functional teams estimate and sign up to deliver “potentially shippable increments” during a sprint, which typically lasts 1 month.

Using this method, we have seen our first usable deliverable handed to clients within 1 month, instead of 3-to 9 months, and projects were delivered in half the time with greater user adoption.

Learn more about Agile Data Warehousing