"The main challenge has been the data. We have had to do a lot of work at the data warehouse level, that's been a lot more labour intensive than I would have expected," he said.

"There have been lots of data cleansing, lots of ETL development, reconciliation - the nuts and bolts of data management. These activities have taken more time and resource than I would have expected."

Will Smart will be talking in more detail about the BusinessObjects implementation at the UK SAP User Group conference in Manchester this month. .

In other news, meant to define itself as a major player in the enterprise social software market with a product it claims is superior to rivals such as Salesforce.com.