Scheduling BAM Packages – failure in ‘Set global connection string variables’

I recently hit an issue while configuring a sql job to process my BAM cubes by running the BAM_AN_* packages with the following error:
Code: 0x00000000
Source: Set global connection string variables
Description: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I later found that this was due to the user under which the SQL Server Agent Service runs not having enough permissions on SQL Server. I changed the user to a sql server service account and I no longer got this error while running the sql job. Alternatively, you can also run this service under the network service account if your BAM databases are on a different server.