Sample scenario - Managing asset cost
The scenario discussed in this topic explains how you can use the BMC Analytics for Business Service Management (BMC Analytics for BSM) reporting application to identify, analyze, and effectively solve a business problem.
Problem: Increase in lease payments over a period of time
Mary Smith, an IT asset manager at Calbro Financial Services, is responsible for managing assets for her company, including its financial details. As part of her job, she also generates routine reports for management.
Because her group leases computer hardware for use by various groups within the company, one of the reports she generates for asset management is Lease Payments. While looking over a Lease Payment report, the CIO notices that the payments for one month were substantially higher than the payments for the previous four months. The CIO asks Mary to analyze the lease payments for the given period to determine the reason for the inconsistency.
Mary logs in to BMC Analytics for BSM and displays one of the predefined reports that show lease payments by month. She drills down into the report using the drill-down functionality. The report displays another report showing lease payments broken down by various categories on a month-to-month basis, as shown in the following figure:
Lease payment by month
(Click the image to expand it.)
In this report, she notices that the lease penalty was considerably higher in the last month as compared with the previous four months. That is the reason why the overall lease payment drastically increased. But why did the lease penalties increase?
Solution: Create an ad hoc report
Mary suspects that the leased equipment was not being returned on time. To confirm this, she opens the available reports on leases. However, none of the available reports show a comparison between the actual return date of lease equipment compared with the expected return date.
Observing the options available in BMC Analytics for BSM, she decides to create an ad-hoc report to test her hypothesis. She launches the report designer panel in SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise and decides to create a custom variable in the linked universe to determine whether the asset was returned on time. She calls this custom variable Days of Delay.
She specifies the formula for this custom variable to be the difference between the actual return date and the expected return date of the leased asset (the actual and expected dates were already available as fields in her report design panel).
From the list of available fields, she also selects Asset ID, Asset Owner, and Actual Return Date to include in this new report along with the custom variable she created.
Because she is interested in data only over the last five months, she creates a filter for the report to restrict the data. She then runs the query to generate the data for the report.
Conclusion: Successfully identified the problem
As a result of creating the ad hoc report and analyzing the data displayed in it, Mary is able to identify the problem, as shown in the following figure:
Lease payment—drill-down view
(Click the image to expand it.)
Looking at this data, her hypothesis is confirmed. The delay in returning the leased equipment had definitely increased during the last month. This is what accounted for the increase in lease penalties.
She sends the results of her analysis to the CIO using the email facility in SAP BusinessObjects. In the body of the email, she explains the reason for the increase in lease payments.