SAP Business Warehouse Reviews

SAP Business Warehouse (BW) integrates data from different sources, transforms and consolidates the data, does data cleansing, and storing of data as well. It also includes data modeling, administration, and staging area.

Actually, this is something analytical. Earlier, SAP was purely a GUI-based product. But now SAP is being moved out to the URL-based product. I would say the web pages and the front end.

They have converted their output in an analogical way. You might have seen this in the share market and for stocks. They are live all over the tracking system; their output gets changed in a fraction of a second. So for that type and kind of certain data, it has been used. From the back end, from a technical perspective, I have end-to-end knowledge. For example, for how to mitigate risk while assigning additional access to the user, there might be possibilities of the risk.

As an example, we have assigned a role to a user who is working in a bank and there may be a hierarchy in the bank. One user might be the cashier, one user might be the bank manager, and one the accountant, so if you compare all these three users, the bank manager will have more privileges than the other two users. The cashier may have access to withdraw and deposit the money. The accountant may have access to just pick the documents and compare the documents.

I am a backend guy, and I am handling the server. From the backend, we have to segregate the duties. So, we use it to segregate the manager, cashier, and accountant roles.

SAP Business Warehouse has now been integrated with HANA. So, earlier, the SAP Business Warehouse's working speed was slow. It would call for the data from the hard disk to the RAM and then RAM to the front end. 

But now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually. So, within a fraction of a second, you will get the output when you hit the required query. So, the integration of HANA is very powerful right now.

We used all the standard components. We did not customize it.

We used the standard content activation features. It generated reports. The reports accessed from the browser were also standard. We did not use any bespoke report creation. My organization used the product mostly for procurement, sales and delivery, finance, and CO-PA. All these components were implemented, and all the reports were based on them.

We use it mainly for financial reporting in any organization and also for cross-functional reporting.

Over the course of the year, it has been made really simple. The development time has significantly reduced due to the number of objects going down, and overall, the TCO to the company has reduced a lot. Therefore, the implementation time has come down a lot because of the new solution, and a lot of integration is available with the reporting tool as well, such as Analytics Cloud, and Power BI.

In my experience, there are typically two types of clients for SAP Business Warehouse: IT-driven and business-driven. Business-driven clients tend to have clearer objectives and achieve greater success because they understand their business needs well. 

The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW. This flexibility offers the best of both worlds, combining the power of SQL with the user-friendliness of BW for optimal performance based on specific requirements.

The most useful feature is definitely the speed.

I think it's natural that we have BW on HANA because the developer has SAP systems. At the end of the day, it provides the integration we need out of the box. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data.

I would like to see a more comprehensive package in the future. SAP did that, but when you go to BW on HANA, and then you want to go to BW4HANA, that's basically two migrations. BW4HANA does offer everything that we're lacking in BW on HANA, but two million migrations in five years isn't really salable to the business.

The solution is also very pricey. 

I think that there should definitely be more integration. Whatever they make available in BW4, they should make it available in BW on HANA. But SAP has clearly stated that they are not doing any development on this. They are concentrating on BW4 and the DWC.

SAP Business Warehouse is used for reporting purposes, so all the data is integrated from different modules, for example, finance, and users utilize SAP Business Warehouse to extract reports. It is a single platform where you get all the data from the modules, and all that data can be extracted in different formats as a report.

What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use.

All the data that we enter we can put into SAP in any module. We have an HR module, a finance module, an insurance module, and an investment module. All this data is being fed into the SAP CT production system, which is how we primarily use it. Also, we have some custom reports that are developed by our development team and these reports are used by all departments.

The fact that it can integrate with Microsoft Excel is the solution's most valuable feature.

The solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own.

My organization uses SAP Business Warehouse as its primary data storage platform, so all transactional systems feed data into the business warehouse system. That's the central part. Every department has some information or analytical service running into SAP Business Warehouse.

What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data.