SAP BW

SAP BW’s Vital Role in Business Decision-making

Analytics of customer and business data is now as vital to business success as the products and services they sell. Data volumes alone do not equal analytics — the proper consolidation, quality, access, meaningful transformation, and reports make it valuable. For most companies, data does not lead to value. Best-in-class companies have invested in processes, people, and data warehousing technologies to turn data to value.

SAP offers two ways of data warehousing using SAP HANA: 1) the data warehouse application approach using SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA or 2) the SAP HANA Native Data Warehouse.

SAP Business Warehouse (called SAP BW) packages a powerful set of data warehousing solutions and tools to enable companies to curate data from many sources, including SAP HANA and other databases — integrating, extracting, and transforming them to derive meaningful insights for the business.

Some of the key components of SAP BW are:

1. SAP Data Warehouse or SAP Data Warehouse Cloud helps integrate, transform, consolidate, and store data and stage relevant data for specific analysis.
2. Analytic Engine provides OLAP functions for BW Integrated Planning and Analysis.
3. SAP Business Explorer provides tools to create and access reports, along with authorization for each report.
4. Interfaces offers an open architecture that allows for extraction of data from various systems into SAP BW. SAP BW also seamlessly integrates with other SAP solutions such as SAP BusinessObjects and SAP Business Intelligence.
5. Several functions like data mining are also built into SAP BW to recognize pattern sets in the data. A rich set of additional tools and functions for visualization and access are bundled.

Of course, SAP has invested heavily to integrate SAP BW with SAP HANA to enhance the power of SAP BW with in-memory technology and deliver analysis of high data volumes, high query frequency, and complicated calculations. This SAP BW/4HANA is SAP’s latest packaged data warehousing solution for both on-premise and private cloud.

How can companies decide on their data warehousing approach? This video by Bill Faison, a data warehousing expert, provides some answers. Please watch Key Considerations for an SAP BW/4HANA or SAP HANA Native Data Warehouse.

In addition, SAP BW/4HANA integrated with SAP Analytics solutions enables a massive adoption of trusted actionable analytics across a business, offering deployment options in the cloud or on premise. Read here about Bridging the Data-Driven to Insights-Driven Gap with SAP BW/4HANA.

With the data volumes from 5G applications expected to explode, deploying SAP BW/4HANA in the most optimal way can lead to significant value for companies.