Squirrel – The replacement for SAP Business Objects Dashboards. If you need like-for-like functionality in a modern build, this is it.
Squirrel365 – the Replacement for SAP Business Objects Dashboards
Over the past 15 years, SAP Business Objects Dashboards (formerly known as Xcelsius), has provided many mining operations with the perfect tool to build their fleet management system and asset health management mining data dashboards.
However, as we’ve blogged about previously, SAP dashboards will cease to function at the end of 2020 with the demise of Flash.
Finding a direct replacement has proved particularly difficult when taking into account the small architectural footprint and cost-effectiveness of SAP Dashboards. Many other tools require dedicated servers and significant licenses. Plus, with any new software, a period of training and adjustment is required.
There are many excellent data visualisation tools available. Tableau, Power BI, QlikView to name a few (as blogged about here) are all excellent analytical solutions for the mining industry. However, we work with many mines that use unattended dashboards simply show to operational statistics and key metrics that are not particularly complex, or dynamic. For these clients, some of the options mentioned above are overkill.
Our search is now over!
InfoSol, one of the world’s leading providers of specialist BI solutions, has launched Squirrel365, and MTS will become one of their early adopter customers.
What is Squirrel365?
Squirrel365 is a like-for-like replacement for SAP Dashboards and it has some particularly attractive selling points:
- Can use existing data connections such as BIWS web services from your existing dashboards.
- The same spreadsheet mapping functionality that has endeared so many to SAP Dashboards over the years.
- Squirrel365 dashboards can be hosted on your existing SAP Business Objects server and accessed via a web browser – there no need for additional infrastructure or software.
MTS has been working closely with InfoSol throughout the initial testing phase:
“Squirrel365’s slick, intuitive interface and range of component configuration options means that we can continue to build a range of high-quality asset health dashboards and mine operations dashboards with the speed and flexibility that our clients have become accustomed to.”
Alicia McCabe, Mining Technology Consultant, MTS
What’s on the roadmap with Squirrel?
We are not simply picking Squirrel365 because it is a like-for-like replacement for SAP Dashboards. What is of equal importance to us is InfoSol’s commitment to a roadmap and their outstanding level of support.
“InfoSol first starting using Xcelsius in 2005 and, like many others, totally fell in love with it and believe it is still one of the best BI dashboard tools on the market. So many customers like MTS told us the same thing and both encouraged and supported us to create Squirrel which we believe will provide a natural evolution of Xcelsius for the next decade and beyond”.
Paul Grill, President, Infosol.
InfoSol has been an SAP Business Objects Partner for many years, building fantastic extensions for SAP Dashboards, amongst others. With Squirrel365 they are integrating many of these extensions into native functionality within the product itself.
Squirrel was designed from the outset to be familiar to SAP Dashboards users but it was equally important that we innovate both in terms of the technology and the UX. We focused on creating a product that is enjoyable to use as well as future proof. The roadmap is chocked full of exciting new features designed to make building and maintaining dashboards quicker and easier. These include multi-device support, version control and a host of new charts and components.”
Mel Sheppard, Head of Service & Operations, Infosol.
So What’s Next for Asset Health and Mine Operations Dashboards?
MTS will now be building all new, unattended KPI dashboards at “SAP Business Objects” mine sites in Squirrel365.
Having worked closely with the InfoSol development team, we have already executed conversions of a number of our existing dashboard solutions. The results are slick, effective dashboards that avoid the upcoming 2020 “cliff-edge”.
We’re also working with others who have chosen to make the investment in other solutions (such as Tableau and PowerBI) to migrate their current mining dashboards built using SAP Dashboards/SAP Explorer.
Asset Health Dashboards and Mine Operations Dashboards
To find out more about how Squirrel365 can be used to build visualisations for your fleet management system and asset health data, take a look at our services. You can also contact us here.
To see more, why not head over to Squirrel365’s main site?
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