SAP BW and BI – Food for Thought for Beginners

SAP BW or SAP Business Warehouse is also known in certain circles as the SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse.  It is the core factor in the strategic enterprise data solutions for SAP. The app runs on RDBMS which is the industry standard as well as on the SAP’s HANA in-memory DBMS.

SAP Business information Warehouse training involves various ingredients like business intelligence, analytics, reporting as well as data. It is one of the leading enterprise software solutions that are marketed by SAP AG. It is one of the main components for the business intelligence management in commercial world.

SAP BW – Core Components

Main components of SAP BW are as follows.                                   

• Data warehousing workbench for effective data management;


• Improved capabilities for data modeling;


• Embedded analytical engine that works to analyze data and its processing;


• Suite of analytical tools on a very rich front end that is known as the business explorer or BEx;


• Operational tools for importing all the recent transactional data into the system.

Three Layers of SAP BI Solutions

For appreciating the importance and working features of SAP Business Warehousing it is essential understanding the three layers of the SAP business intelligence of SAP BI. These three layers are as follows: -

• Extraction, Transformation and Load or the ETL layer. This is the layer where data is extracted from specific sources and the transformation rules are applied on them. Subsequently the same is loaded into the SAP BW system.


• Data Warehousing Layer. In this layer the information on different types of structures are stored. This layer also contains multidimensional structures that are known as the InfoCubes.


• Reporting layer is the one that accesses data and information stored in the data warehousing layer. After accessing the information is presented making them user-friendly and this helps the analyst or the user to make appropriate use of the data and information stored in warehousing layer.

Integrated BI/BW Solutions

The integrated BI/BW Solutions is one of the most persuasive data warehousing and analytical enterprise software solutions. Business enterprises running their enterprise on SAP operational systems use the integrated system effectively and to the best results. There are different types of integrated solutions on which such enterprises run their business. An example is the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning or SAP ERP that is also traditionally known as the SAP R/3.

Predefined Extractors

The integrated solution offered by SAP contains a host of predefined extractors. Large amount of predefined business contents are there in the form of InfoCubes. Others are available in form of –

• Master data that contains objects which represents the entities for customers or the materials;


• Authorization roles;


• Query views; and


• Consolidated reports.

All these are available in the SAP BI/BW integrated solutions.

Benefits of the Approach

There are some significant benefits of the approach. One of them is the ability for leveraging the substantial business knowledge of the organization that has been active in developing sophisticated software systems over the years. The software developed by them is in use in many multinational companies around the globe. Another big advantage of using the integrated SAP BI/BW solutions is that it can be suitably customized and modified in order to meet the specific requirements of the enterprise concerned. In addition; the enterprises can also take advantage of the general aspects of the data models as well as reports generated by them. In any case; these models have broad applications in cases of business enterprises.

Part of SAP Netweaver

SAP BW happens to be an integral part of the SAP Netweaver. However the BW is not the only component There are other components like SAP EP or the SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP Process Integration or the eXchange infrastructure, SAP Process Integration as well as Master Data Management etc.

Business Intelligence or BI is used for processing raw data of an enterprise and henceSAP BW certification can be a big asset. With the integrated SAP BI/BW solutions the data is cleansed, stored as well as applied along with business logic so that it becomes handy for business enterprises.