IEMP In Practice features NASA Centers' 'real life' experiences and tangible examples of how Centers are benefiting from an IEM program component that is operational or activities at Centers in the midst of implementation. This section will include best practices and lessons learned that NASA Centers and other agencies can apply as they plan and manage similar programs and implementations.

At NASA, the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is continuing to gain momentum with user adoption. On any given month, there are approximately 1500 unique users running BW queries across the Agency. Since BW's introduction in December, 2002 significant progress has been made to increase functionality, customize standard reports, and to extend the reach into additional user communities. BW queries are used by Resource, Program, or Project Managers to assess and manage the financial health of NASA programs.

The BW tool is based on a multi-dimensional Online Analytical Process (OLAP) data model that provides an integrated view of data from several R/3 financial/procurement modules. NASA followed a similar implementation approach used by many private sector organizations, such as NIKE.

The initial phase typically has focused on broad-based queries that provide consistent, commonly defined reports. After two years in production, end users have become more knowledgeable and sophisticated about SAP's business warehouse and the reports are being refined and becoming more specific to the end user community.

The Agency BW Team, located at the IEMP Competency Center (CC) in Huntsville, AL oversees the application, system, and functional requirements of the BW tool. Working closely with Center Reporting Leads (CRLs) and the Agency Financial Offices, the BW Team holds weekly teleconference meetings with the CRLs to provide updates, solicit feedback, and share practices. In turn, the CRLs work directly with their Center users to increase proficiency and end-user adoption.

On-going process improvement is an important role of the CRLs. For example, the Centers requested additional attributes to the Purchase Order and Purchase Requisitioner modules, such as description information or requisitioner identification. The BW Team conducted the necessary design and testing, and ultimately was able to provide the additional attributes required by the Procurement community.

NASA has made significant strides with BW and continues to grow as the end users become more familiar with both the financial and reporting tools. There are still many areas left to address, such as management dashboards, graphical presentation of tabular data and presentation quality reporting. However, IEMP CC, working in concert with the Centers and the Agency OCFO, has a focused effort to steadily tackle the next generation of reporting requirements.