Projects, Development and Systems Engineering

Business Intelligence (IDEV-BI)

The IDEV-BI unit’s mission is to give the various stakeholders at EPFL access to its business intelligence reports and dashboards.
According to Wikipedia, Business Intelligence “comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information”, helping stakeholders to have an overview of their business and take decisions based on this business intelligence.

  • Collection, consolidation and modelling of data through ETL (extract, transform, load) processes, allowing the extraction of the source data to transfer them in an optimized way to the data warehouses. This is the data engineer’s work.
  • Data rendering through reporting, dashboarding, self-service and data visualisation tools, aimed at stakeholders (business analysts). This is the data analyst’s work.

Collection, consolidation and modelling of data:

  • SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW)
  • SAP Business Object (SAP BO)
  • SAP HANA views via Pentaho ETL

Data rendering:

  • Tableau
  • SAP Design Studio
  • SAP Business Object webi
  • Development of business applications based on the SAP platform.
  • Development of applications to manage the Master Data.
  • Development of interfaces for the integration and distribution of Master Data.
  • Development and maintenance of the “Comptoir d’Accès Aux Données Institutionnelles”.
  • Development of Access and Identity management applications.
  • Development of applications for the CAMIPRO solution.
  • Technology watch, strategy evolution in the SAP environment.•Help and support to IT solutions conception.

Development teams use various industry standards, differing depending on the technologies and languages used.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of used tools:

  • SAP web IDE
  • SAP HANA Studio
  • SAP ABAP Workbench
  • Eclipse
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 5
  • PyCharm
  • Vim

Full-Stack Development (IDEV-FSD)

This team is made of “Full-Stack” developpers, meaning able to code from databases level to Front-End level, through Back-end usage (sometimes using existing frameworks or not). They are mostly active in projects. The main responsibility of the team, glue to VPSI mission, is software development, maintenance and evolutions of EPFL Web applications mostly. DevOps is another responsibility in our strategy to enhance development cycle, testing, release and maintenance of required infrastructure.

  • Development of projects (out of scope of SAP)
  • Develop and maintain EPFL Web applications
  • Hand-over and evolutions of applications developed out of VPSI
  • DevOps : research and deployement in collaboration with Operations teams

Finances (IDEV-FI)

The IDEV-FI team serves with it’s vast experience in finance and accounting related jobs. EPFL and it’s associated companies (SQNE, SQIE) can count on their help for the creation of new projects and the evolution of existing solutions.
It’s mission is to second the VPFI in the evolution of the tools required for EPFL’s financial management.

  • Accountings (financial, analytical, budgets).
  • Controlling.
  • Management of the Finance Information System project.
  • Logistics integration.

SAP ECC, Modules: FI (AP, AR, AA, GL), CO, FM, PS, SD, MM, TR, PM

Human Ressources (IDEV-RH)

The IDEV-RH team’s mission is to second the HR service in the maintenance of the personnel management system, and to participate in the development projects for new services and tools in the HR IS.

  • Evolution and maintenance of the SAP business application for personnel management (personnel information, digital personnel files, salaries, organisation and training).
  • Evolution and maintenance of the SaaS tool for recruiting operations.
  • HR services in Sésame and Sésame 2 (Infocentre HR, Workflows, HR Online).
  • Analysis, statistics and reporting.
  • SAP ECC module CHM (PA, PY, OM, LSO).
  • OpenText, Employee File Management.
  • Umantis e-recruiting.

Management of Information Systems for Education (IDEV-GIF)

The Management of Information Systems for Education team (IDEV-GIF) has the following missions:

  • analyze the business needs of the field of training and implement the corresponding IT solutions
  • actively participate in the process of continuous improvement as part of the organization of the field of training
  • provide support to users of applications related to the field of training, particularly with regard to the academic management tool IS-Academia
  • Is-academia