Retiring SAP BusinessObjects

A reporting platform is easy to switch off and hard to leave. The reports themselves are the visible part. The real problem is the business logic buried inside them, written years ago, rarely documented, and often the only place a particular rule exists.

I worked with our data leadership team and the people who owned each report to go through more than 100 of them. For each one the question was the same: what is this actually calculating, who still depends on it, and where should that logic live now? The answer was almost never “rebuild the report as it was”. It was to lift the logic out and rebuild it as a governed model in Snowflake.

Retiring the platform took over NZ$150,000 a year out of running costs. The part I think matters more is what replaced it. Logic that used to be locked inside a reporting tool, where nobody could inspect or reuse it, now sits in models the business can query directly or point their own Power BI reports at.

What the work involved

• Inventorying 100+ reports with data leadership and report owners, and deciding what to rebuild, merge or retire.
• Reading and unpicking undocumented business logic, then re-expressing it as tested dbt models on Snowflake.
• Validating new outputs against the legacy reports so the numbers people trusted did not move.
• Moving users onto Power BI or direct SQL access, and supporting them through the change.

Why it mattered

Beyond the saving, the shift was from fixed reports to reusable models. A team that previously raised a request for a new report can now answer the question themselves.