SAP Business Warehouse Reviews

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.

It would be helpful if we could interface with BW itself, instead of piggybacking on Excel. If it could have its own interface where you can build dashboards and reports and where high-level power users can start building things, that would be helpful. Right now, only developers can build reports on BW. They need to begin to open it up to power users. The solution needs a broad-based interface.

More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful.

The company has been using Business Warehouse since 2010.

Business Warehouse is stable but my concerns surround the complexity of the solution. When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable. If everything is running smoothly and there are no problems then it's a very stable system.

Currently, the scalability isn't possible right now right now with its current architecture. That's why it's important that SAP has come up with its HANA solution and SAP Analytics on Cloud, where it's much easier to scale as necessary.

We're a company of 600 people and about 50% of the company uses the solution. The solution is used daily for reporting for the organization.

We contacted technical support in the past when we needed their help on a few issues.  It's a complicated system. Whenever our internal IT team was stuck on developing any reports we contacted SAP nearly every day.

Largely, we didn't have problems with technical support, but over the last two years, we were getting replies mentioning that we would be phased out of support and would need a new license. It's been a bit of a bumpy relationship in the last little while.

We didn't use a different third party solution previously. However, we did have some internal custom solutions that we used, not fully, but in some departments.

The set-up of the solution was very complicated. I believe SAP has a new offering on HANA that may be easier, but we have still not adopted that due to cost concerns.

Deployment took about one and a half years.

Consultants had to come in with their content and explain everything and helped by calculating the BW content. The BW developers had to understand all the build documents. That took a lot of time because SAP's architecture is very complicated for general users to understand.

It took about 35 to 40 people to handle the implementation across the organization. There were about five people from each department because Business Warehouse is something that's set-up for all departments and all the systems that all departments use.

We have three to four people from our internal IT department that handle maintenance. We also have a support structure with an external third-party vendor who assists with our maintenance support. Roughly, in total, we have six to ten people handling ongoing maintenance.

The company used consultants and integrators from the vendors to assist with the implementation of the solution. 

We had a team for coordinating with the implementation partner, they coordinated with the vendor and also the business departments to understand what was required.

The implementation was completely done by the implementation partner proposed by the vendor.

The pricing is fairly high for the solution.

We were looking for an enterprise-wide solution. In terms of an enterprise-wide ERP solution, SAP was the only available at that time in 2010. It was able to provide us with all the modules in one place, which was what we required.

We don't use any Data Quality or Identity Manager. Our company doesn't deal with customers directly as it is not open to the public. Our clients are mainly insurance companies. We will normally limit the amounts of data, so we don't have those components but we do have Business Warehouse where we pull in reports of incidents.

Recently, we were upgrading versions. We were on SAP BW version 4.7, and we have moved on to BW 6.0. Right now, we access Business Warehouse through an Excel add-on called BEx Analyzer which is also a product of SAP.

At this time, I wouldn't recommend the solution as the product support will be phased out by SAP. If others are interested in an SAP solution I would go for SAP Analytics Cloud.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

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.

SAP has released BW/4HANA, and the database has changed. Still, in the next release of SAP Business Warehouse, I'd like to see the capability to run big data solutions and integration with other databases, such as Hadoop, which is currently not there.

My organization has been using SAP Business Warehouse since 2006. As for me, I've been using it since 2012, so I have ten years of experience with it. I'm still using the product.

SAP Business Warehouse is quite stable, and its stability is one of its USPs.

SAP Business Warehouse is a very scalable product. Scalability is one of its USPs; it can hold vast amounts of data.

I've contacted the technical support for SAP Business Warehouse, which was wonderful. Once you buy the SAP Business Warehouse license, it comes with a bundle of services such as "Speak to an Expert," so if your technical team is stuck somewhere, the technical support team for SAP Business Warehouse is there to help.

When I assumed my role in the organization, I hadn't seen any other system apart from SAP Business Warehouse, but I heard that the organization used Oracle Database for reporting.

The initial setup for SAP Business Warehouse is not as straightforward because it's not an out-of-the-box product. You need to brainstorm with other business users and find out what you need to build department-specific or user-specific configurations before you can start using SAP Business Warehouse.

The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed.

On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost.

My company is an SAP Business Warehouse customer.

The initial deployment of SAP Business Warehouse requires between twenty to thirty people, but two to three people for maintenance would suffice.

Right now, everyone in the organization is using SAP Business Warehouse in one way or the other. The core or power users would be around three hundred people from finance, reinsurance, IT, etc., but mostly from finance.

I wouldn't recommend SAP Business Warehouse to startup organizations or people just starting out because the product demands many people to run and maintain it. SAP Business Warehouse would be a good product for medium-sized organizations where the data is becoming bigger and bigger. It'll be wonderful to use because if you have many systems, then SAP Business Warehouse can feed data into your systems, so it's perfect for a medium-sized organization, at least.

I'm rating SAP Business Warehouse as eight out of ten.

We have end-to-end SAP. Therefore, we have the operations system, which is ECC6, which is the ERP. This is used for day-to-day data consolidating of purchase orders, finances, etc. We have 16 business lines. 

When the data comes, we need the reports for the management and we need consolidated and aggregated data. For that, we use Business Warehouse. NetWeaver is a platform, however, on top of it, you use different products. Therefore, on top of NetWeaver, we have BW overlayed for aggregated data for its management. It can be displayed as necessary in data visualization tools, like Business Objects, Excel, Tableau, Power BI, etc. 

The main purpose of our BW is to consolidate data and show the trends for the last, I would estimate, ten years.

BW is our bread and butter. We use it every day for reporting, for analysis, data consolidation and aggregation, drag and drop queries, etc.

There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer. 

The solution has very limited options, so we have to mix and match some functionality formulas we create in Business Warehouse. The rest of the formulas and functionality we try to deliver on the front end via direct objects. Therefore, there's a lot of improvement needed. 

My understanding is that they are going to discontinue Business Warehouse so that they can push HANA, including Native HANA, S4 HANA, and BW/4HANA.

This platform has reached its limitation. In order for SAP to improve it, they have to provide a new product, which they have: BW/4HANA. 

BW/HANA is much better than the native standard Business Warehouse. It has new options, new functionality, is faster, has pre-built processes, etc. It has all the data processes from a different company's best practices, and they give it to you by default, just out of the box. This is what Business Warehouse should have been, and it's good they are pushing HANA instead of BW.

I've been using the solution for six years.

In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable.

The solution isn't that scalable. It depends on a lot of factors like what the budget of the company is. If it's scalable in terms of hardware, then we'll have to acquire new hardware and new costs start to pile up. We are not scaling it. If we go overboard with the size, then we just try to reduce the size. We haven't ever tried to scale it. We don't want to spend more to do so.

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.

I cannot recall if we previously used another solution or what it was. Before SAP, the company was using a third-party tool on Oracle or some other SQL database. We have been running SAP for the last 10 years, and I joined the company in the past six years. I wasn't here when SAP was originally implemented.

Initial set up is pretty easy. You just install it and connect it to ECC. The tables are already there as well as the business content. If your company has a lot of customized processes, then you have to adjust a few things. 

Otherwise, if it's a fairly new company, then you just have to connect ECC and the data will start coming in. You can do batch jobs and create aggregation. The initial implementation is fairly easy in that scenario. 

Our solution is strictly on-premises due to our company policy to not place anything on the cloud. 

Consultants with technical experience are helpful. They need to understand the processes, as well, however, because designing is the key. Designing right from the start is the very important if you want the product to work for you. 

There are multiple teams within our company. In my team, we are only concerned with BW and BO. With other teams, there are probably many other instances where someone that is using the solution is connected to other data sources and may be providing the data to the suppliers outside SAP using the portal. I don't know much about it because I'm not involved in this process.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

It's fast for building solutions, but once you have built them it's not that easy to get the answers you want. Many of our users are downloading files to Excel and tools like it and creating their reports there. I don't like it, so we're thinking about a reporting solution that works better than SAP BW.

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.

We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution.

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. When I think about the next generation of analytics solutions, I think of a powerful data mining solution with the data that we have now.

It works well enough. We don't have a lot of stability problems. That is not the problem for us. Reporting is the problem for us.

Scalability is good for us. We don't have scalability problems because, with the line of servers that we are using now, we can scale in a factor of 100 and still have no problems with it.

We haven't used technical support in about two years so I don't think I can give a fair answer to this question.

We were using another world-class ERP solution. When we switched to the SAP solution, we were thinking we had to have rapid solution-building tools for SAP. It was very easy to think the SAP solutions, such as business content solutions, could be used to build analytic solutions for us. We were using Cognos at that time, but we stop using it because it was hard to build solutions with SAP as the data source.

We take into account the prestige and longterm relations with the vendor during our selection process.

The initial setup was good enough. I wouldn't say straightforward, because we took about a month to set up the server, processes, tools, and the software. For me, one month does not signify a straightforward process. Maybe it's because we are using iSeries from IBM and it's not a very popular architecture. So in part, it was our fault too because we are using that line of servers.

We had Oracle and SAP on our short list, because we had a lot to build in a short time. We figured that with those vendors we would find enough human capital and knowledge to solve the problems that we might have. Of the two providers that we had on our shortlist, we got the best answers from SAP. Oracle wasn't good enough for us.

I rate this solution a seven out of 10. You can start quickly but, when you have to get a little more detailed, when you have to change something, when you have to solve problems, it's not that easy. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy.

To make it a 10 out of 10, SAP would have to have better tools for reporting. There is a lot of focus on boards and graphics and those kinds of features, but they are tools for newcomers. You don't have machine-learning tools that you can easily connect to your data. You have to download the data to a CSV or a text file, and then you have to analyze it with something like R or SPSS.

My advice is that SAP will give you a fast start, but in two to four years you will have to go fishing for another solution for sophisticated users who will not get enough from the SAP tool.

Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions. Thus, decision-making mostly occurs through SAP BI or SAP Business Warehouse.

Feature-wise, there are some hiccups with SAP Business Warehouse, especially its integration with various systems, including SAP and others. Populating data onto one screen does not happen in real time, which is one of the areas that our business is concerned about.

Improving SAP Business Warehouse's user-friendliness and real-time capabilities would be beneficial. The improvement would enable users to make decisions and understand their current standing quickly. Also, if there are any issues or fallbacks, we can quickly correct them.

I have been using SAP Business Warehouse for eight years. Our company is transitioning from the SAP Business Warehouse's older version to the latest version. It may take another couple of months for the process to be completed. Also, I am a customer of the solution.

It has been a stable solution all these years, and so we are going for the newer version of the product since we wanted to have a more user-friendly option in our company.

More than 200 people are using the solution in my company.

Our company has been in touch with the solution's technical support team seeking guidance whenever and wherever required.

It is difficult for me to honestly rate the technical support since it is still in progress. While we have had multiple discussions with them, we are optimistic about building the technical aspects.

So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand. As of now, I might be wrong or right since we have not completed and are still undergoing the transition phase in our company. Once it is completed, I can only give feedback on how easy or complex the setup process was for our company. As of now, still, we have some connectivity issues.

The solution is deployed on the private cloud.

My suggestion for those considering the solution is to prioritize setting up the core engine, the ERP. Once that is established, they can evaluate various BI tools available in the market before deciding.

Considering factors such as data extraction, data pushing, and the solution's accuracy, I rate the overall solution a six or seven out of ten.

The product is very stable. It has a straightforward maintenance process with essential support services.

They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading.

We have been working with SAP Business Warehouse for 20 years as a partner.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten. There is room for improvement.

We have three customers and 1000 end users for SAP Business Warehouse. I rate its scalability an eight or nine.

The technical support services are good.

The product is straightforward to install and deploy. It takes two to three weeks to complete the process. I install it for the customers and forward it to application executives for data warehousing. The number of executives required for deployment depends on the organization’s size. It requires approximately one to ten people, depending on the project requirements.

I recommend SAP Business Warehouse to others and rate it an eight out of ten. It has a well-documented and straightforward installation process.

AP BW is our main data storing platform that houses all transactional systems data. Every department has some or the other analytical service running on to our business warehouse.

The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats. SAP BW can open its data to any kind of system over the gateway services including to portals or applications that need to consume and complete data analysis. 

The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance. 

In a future release, we would like to have the capability of running big data solutions and integration with the other databases, like Hadoop.

We have been using this solution since 2006. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help.

Positive

This is not a straight out of the box product. It is a product that needs a lot of brainstorming along with the business users to find out what they need so that the build is department specific.

SAP's licensing structure is a little bit complicated and is linked to your revenue. This does not apply to smaller business. Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive. As your revenue grows, so does your operational licensing cost. This needs to be factored in when calculating cost. 

I would not recommend it to organizations that are starting out because it demands a huge number of people to run and maintain it. I would recommend it for medium organizations with a lot of data. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

It's a customized solution for the company's reporting needs.

The real-time information is great. Many reports take a long time, and we can save the data if we have a backlog of information to assess. The Real-time InfoCube is quite useful in terms of getting information fast when we need it. 

The preparation is basically useful. We are using it via integrated BI, BWIP, Business Warehouse, and Integrated Planning. Based on that, we are able to get good information on plans. 

We can integrate analysis into our planning. 

It has good integration with the Analysis Office.

We're able to create different queries and get reports based on what we specifically need. 

I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report. Maybe it's the queries that have been developed in-house. I'm not sure. 

People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report. Maybe they are getting real-time data. However, it is time-consuming in the generation of the report.

They should allow for power users. If SAP really wants to have some insights related to their software's applicability, adaptability, and some areas of let's say, future expansion or future new development, then they should think of taking the opinion of the actual end users.

They should offer up smaller components for smaller companies to make it more affordable and accessible for more companies.

I've been using the solution since 2017.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. 

We have lots of users using the BW-based reports. That's around 500 people. However, we don't have many actual users on the solution itself. 

Technical support from SAP is being provided by our technical teams. There have been issues that our own team has dealt with directly.

We are using the SAP Business Warehouse as well as the Commercial Project Management model of SAP. 

We are also using Analysis Office Integration with SAP.

I have worked with two systems related to BW. One that is an elegant JBA, which is all right. They have products that are BW related. It was also a nice product, actually.

The upside to working with this solution is that it is basically integrated with directly SAP.

I'm not involved in the initial setup.

It is very costly. I can't speak to the exact costs, however. Only larger companies can afford SAP.

The maintenance costs are very high as well. 

I am not the one who is using the different transaction codes of BW since rights are provided to a minimal amount of technical personnel. Those who are going to prepare the cubes or make some queries or something like that would use it. Based on that queries, we are getting reports.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.