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SAP Business Warehouse pros and cons

Vendor: SAP
3.9 out of 5

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

SAP Business Warehouse offers rapid response times for queries related to prices, buyers, customers, providers, and services.
The integration with SAP ERP and its ability to connect to Excel for data extraction and analysis are highly valued features.
The advanced structuring and transformation capabilities allow users to extract raw data and store it in a format conducive for easy reporting.
SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable and stable platform, further enhanced by its hybrid functionality with HANA.
Its features for alerting and monitoring, especially when integrated with SAP Solution Manager, provide seamless operations with real-time information.

CONS

SAP Business Warehouse faces challenges in providing seamless connectivity with other databases and offers limited integration with Microsoft Office beyond Excel.
Technical support for SAP Business Warehouse is unsatisfactory, with representatives lacking adequate knowledge.
SAP Business Warehouse is not flexible enough with data structures, making it difficult to improve performance when designing solutions.
Generating reports in SAP Business Warehouse is time-consuming, affecting overall performance and efficiency.
Integration with ETL tools in SAP Business Warehouse is complicated and not straightforward.
 

SAP Business Warehouse Pros review quotes

JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 1, 2023
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.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 22, 2025
The best features of SAP Business Warehouse that I am fond of are how this technology handles navigational attributes and the hierarchy; these are two interesting features.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 16, 2020
The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice.
Learn what your peers think about SAP Business Warehouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2025.
872,029 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SC
Jan 26, 2020
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.
reviewer1278519 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 20, 2020
In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable.
Vinay Lohakare - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 23, 2022
Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great.
reviewer2083704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 26, 2023
The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily.
CW
Apr 29, 2018
The key element in this solution is its rapid response. If you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two. That's the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us.
SC
Oct 21, 2022
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.
reviewer1372197 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 28, 2021
With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side.
 

SAP Business Warehouse Cons review quotes

JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 1, 2023
There is room for improvement from a technical perspective.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 22, 2025
Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 16, 2020
A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution.
Learn what your peers think about SAP Business Warehouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2025.
872,029 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SC
Jan 26, 2020
More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful.
reviewer1278519 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 20, 2020
We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least.
Vinay Lohakare - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 23, 2022
The solution should be more open to the cloud.
reviewer2083704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 26, 2023
It takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed when using SAP Business Warehouse.
CW
Apr 29, 2018
One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection.
SC
Oct 21, 2022
What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid.
reviewer1372197 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 28, 2021
In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed.