Elior Uses Business Objects to Build a Business Intelligence
System in an SAP Environment
SAN JOSE, Calif. - July 7, 2004 - Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ; Euronext Paris ISIN code FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that Elior has deployed BusinessObjects™ Data Integrator to consolidate its financial data and deploy a complete business intelligence system in an SAP environment. Elior is a leading contract catering company based in Europe with US$2.9 billion in revenue and 47,000 employees.
“BusinessObjects Data Integrator provides us with one solution for controlling all of our data transfers between SAP, our data warehouse and our other systems, including AS/400 and our EDI server,” said Franck Savarit, director of IT design and operation at Elior. “Data Integrator has become the control tower for all our data exchanges. With Data Integrator, it has taken less time than anticipated to implement our solution. We are now able to put together a complete business intelligence system in an SAP environment providing a very fine-grained analysis of the group's global performance.”
Elior has also purchased BusinessObjects Plant Maintenance Rapid Mart™, BusinessObjects Account Receivable Rapid Mart™, and BusinessObjects Cost Center Rapid Mart™. With pre-packaged extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) logic and native connectivity to SAP R/3, Data Integrator has reduced 30 to 40 percent of the time Elior spent on implementing SAP's input interfaces, and 50 percent of the time Elior spent on output interfaces. Elior has also saved time on maintenance because Data Integrator pulls everything together in a single tool on a single platform, eliminating the need for specialized programs and leveraging a tangible improvement in data quality.
Data Integrator manages all financial and accounting data transfer with SAP, the data warehouse, and other systems including AS/400 and the EDI server. Each month, for example, Data Integrator loads data from 140,000 EDI invoices from more than one hundred suppliers, processes it, and outputs the results to SAP. Data Integrator then takes care of extracting, processing, and loading all the data from all the Group's data sources into the data warehouse or data marts. The IT department has made Data Integrator into a full-scale Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution at the heart of the data exchanges between all the application platforms and all the Group's departments.
Business Objects solutions will be initially rolled out to the finance department, then to the purchasing, human resources, and marketing departments.
About Elior With US$2.9 billion in sales, Elior is number three in the European contracted food service market. In addition to Elior's strong presence in France, international sales represent an increasingly large portion of the Group's total sales (40.55% of sales in 2002/2003). With 47,000 employees and more than 11,500 restaurants and outlets, the Group serves 2.3 million guests per day in 13 countries. Elior provides its expertise in catering and related services to clients and guests in business, education, healthcare, nursing homes and residential accommodation for seniors, as well as in the travel (airports, railway stations, motorways) and leisure and culture (museums, exhibition centres, etc.) sectors.
About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company. With more than 35,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500, Business Objects helps organizations gain better insight into their business, improve decision making, and optimize enterprise performance. The company's business intelligence platform, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry's most complete and trusted platform for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and data integration. BusinessObjects XI includes Crystal Reports®, the industry standard for enterprise reporting. Business Objects has built the industry's strongest and most diverse partner community, and also offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.
Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company's stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.
###
Business Objects, the Business Objects logo, Crystal Reports, and Crystal Enterprise are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects SA or its affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
