Importance And Need Of SAP BW

For any enterprise, in order to achieve competitive edge, to optimize its processes and easily adapt to the ever changing market is a huge task. The enterprise must be equipped with a tool which can assist with the reporting, analysis and data interpretation in order to achieve this.

SAP Business Warehouse is a core component of SAP NetWeaver which provides data warehousing functionalities, a BI platform along with a suite of BI tools in order for the business to achieve the above said goals. SAP BW allows the enterprises to integrate, transform or consolidate all its business information obtained from SAP applications as well as external third party systems. It also offers flexible and user friendly reporting tool and analysis tools to assist evaluation, interpretation and distribution of business data. Organizations can aim at target-oriented activities with the help of well-founded analysis.

Integration of SAP BW with Other SAP NetWeaver Components

• The pre-calculated documents or BI content online links can be published using BEx Information Broadcasting to SAP Enterprise Portal.

• The content from SAP BW can be integrated with SAP EP using BEx Broadcaster, BEx Web Application Designer, BEx Query Designer, SAP Role Upload, KM Content, or the Portal Content Studio.

• The documents or the metadata created using SAP BW maybe integrated to SAP EP using the repository manager in Knowledge management module.

• Using SAP XI (Exchange Infrastructure), data can be sent from SAP or non-SAP applications to SAP BW. SAP XI uses SOAP-based data transfer.

Integration of SAP BW with SAP BI Content Add-On

Based on consistent metadata, SAP delivers information and reporting scenarios for SAP BW using the SAP BI content. These information models cover most of the business specialties and integrate content among SAP and external apps.

Components of SAP BW

Data Warehousing- This module in SAP BW represents the transformation, consolidation, integration, cleanup and storage of data. Data Warehousing includes extraction of data in order to analyze and interpret. It also includes data modelling, extraction of data and data administration. Administrator workbench is the central tool to carry out all these tasks.

BI Platform- BI or Business Intelligence platform works as the technological infrastructure for SAP BW. It offers numerous analytical functions and technologies.  Such functions or technologies include Metadata Repository, OLAP processor, Business Planning and Simulation , special analysis processes like Data Mining, and the Reporting Agent.

BI Suite- Business Explorer- SAP BW BI suite is the Business Explorer or BEx which provides easy reporting functionalities and flexible analysis tools to perform strategic analyses, decision-making support and operational reporting. The tools provide support for querying, reporting and analyzing the business data.

BEx allows a wide range of users to access the information from SAP BW using SAP EP, Web application design or mobile technologies.

Development technologies include:

Advantages of SAP BW

• SAP BW performs critical business functions like reporting, analyzing and interpreting the business data thereby providing a competitive edge to the business. 

• The system is so efficient and time saving. It has the capability to access the most important and relevant data pertaining to the key business factors within no time. Thereby it optimizes the business processes.

• SAP BW offers number of business tools to integrate data from different SAP modules. Data from different modules are consolidated into more easily understandable format using these tools which makes it easier to look into business intricacies.

• SAP BW provides a very good infrastructure which guarantees high performance. It allows the business users to pull out relevant data, evaluate them, analyze the data, interpret the complexities, simplify the data and offer it to the user in a more legible and easily understandable format. It helps the high level executives and managers to come up with improvised decisions using the precise data. It plays a major role in achieving the specified business targets or to implement new business strategies more effectively and efficiently.