SAP Business Warehouse Reviews

I am the Group IT Manager in our company and responsible for SAP implementation. We are currently evaluating what is the best solution for us given the landscape. We are running SAP 3 release plus BW, version 7.5 and we are evaluating the adaption of BW/4HANA considering attached applications like BPC. Our focus is to migrate to the SAP solution and we're evaluating the product in terms of data warehousing.

Our primary use case is for collecting data coming from SAP implementation and fully running the solution for other companies. We have about 20 users in our company who are generally IT admins. Our difficulties relate to the way users configure these kinds of solutions. The traditional approach is to extract the data from the ERP and make extra files.

The business warehouse solutions are not SAP solutions, which means that data is already connected to the IP network connectors making the configuration of the BW system quite simple. It's more simple than other solutions available on the market. I think it's the best quality of BW.

On the existing release, I'm unsure about improvements. For sure the functionality is available in the new release. I don't know what competitors' systems of data warehousing provide. I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users. I'd like to see the flexibility to create reports. Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution.

I'm considering migrating to the BW/4HANA solution because the language in terms of settings is very similar to the one I am currently using. We are starting to configure the BW old version solution so I don't need to invest in data analysis in order to understand the difference or to connect to a different data warehouse with this system.

Additional features that could be included would be for SAP to provide different layers of solutions. One for data warehousing, another for different end solutions on the data warehouse. 

We've been using the solution since 2014 when we began with a data set, and have expanded it over the last five years. 

Stability is okay but there are some bugs which is normal for an enterprise solution. Again, our issue now is that we didn't go ahead with the upgrade. We are now running a newer version.

We have had some issues with scalability but it's related to the fact that we didn't upgrade the solution. If you update the solution every time SAP suggests it, you have the possibility to introduce all the new features. We didn't do that and we have some issues with the connection. 

Technical support is strong and helpful.

We are a manufacturing company, also running a factory and we implemented it in the ERP. I think BW is one of the best products at the moment. There are a lot of competitors that are adding features. Specialty Suites or the FETA Gartner and Logic requirement. It's important to check all options. A company needs to take into account what business or industry they have. Most are probably considering different solutions and for banks or insurance companies, it's possible that Microsoft solutions are better. 

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

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.

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. 

Our primary use case includes logging the reports on OpenTech manager. We wanted to slice and dice across the PO - whose POs, number of POs which are created, number of POs whose payment is pending, whose payment was done or the turnaround time from PO to payment cycle, etc... For all this we had to extract the data from SAP and build the cubes with the measurement and dimensions, and to slice and dice. For this, we used these cubes that provided VW. We connected it to our dashboard which is Tableau and used the dashboards for the management.

The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice. But the reporting is not that interactive because of its reliance to Tableau. We have something called Excel Analysis, which we connect to the cube and do the slice and dice - so that is the best part.

The other best part, and why we moved from Microsoft to SAP BW, are the ready-made connectors where we can extract the data from, which was something that was a challenge for us to pull in SQL Microsoft Warehouse. So the delta features and Excel features are some of its advantages, which we've found. And with SAP it was easier for us to directly get the data immediately, rather than purchasing licenses and all. So although we have an additional connector for SQL extraction for the data from SAP to SQL, that connector doesn't provide us the feature of extracting delta data.

All the reports were already depending on SAP data. But anything in which we needed to combine data to their applications we were trying to pull with Microsoft Data Warehouse to those different users.

In terms of what can be improved, they already improved the features of SAP HANA, and since we are not migrated now, we are using SAP VPC and consolidation where they provide those VW's for HANA. Once we go there, we will be able to understand that differentiation point and what could be improved or could have been provided more. But as of right now we're in a very early stage so I don't see anything else that is required.

In the next release, I would like to see BW integrate the visualization with the reports which are in SAP HANA. If that gets into BW in the next release we would be happy rather than having to purchase different business objects, like for the front end, or Tableau, or other SAP products. Instead, of buying that, BW could provide us better visualization. Then we don't have to put data into other tools and build things out there.

My organization has been using SAP Business Warehouse for a year.

I have no issues with the stability as of right now. Everything boils down to the servers and the configuration. So apart from fees, no issues related to BW.

My team members who are handling SAP have been in touch with support. I would evaluate support at four out of five. We are happy with it.

The setup was straightforward.

The only thing which we needed help with, and are still struggling with, is getting to know the AW server. That really helps because we always have to be dependent on a vendor or a consultant company to help with our strategy.

If SAP could help with that, it would really help us with the hardware requirements. Because we are not on the cloud, we still struggle with the SAP and always have to be dependent on a partner to give us all the information. There are existing details about the basic configuration and requirements based on the data sizing - that calculation is available and it really helps.

For BW we use a proper software integrator to help with their part and implementing it for us. But I think their experience is very limited. But since we wanted a partner who knows Microsoft Warehouse and BI, we have connected as partners. As far as the sizing and installation, everything was done by our team within our organization. The vendor is only responsible for creating the cubes and the reports but we implement the infrastructure installation.

SAP Business Warehouse is really good. I had already used it in four prior organizations and this will be my fifth organization using it. It is pretty good as far as SAP Data is concerned. So right now, our licenses are only limited to SAP Data because it is for external data, then we need to purchase additional licenses, which we have now gone ahead with.

So that's where one of the challenges is. They have ready-made connectors for the SAP, data transfers, extractions, cube production, and all the applications. We build the data and the reports. They are trying to deliver the data as compared to extracting the data from SAP to SQL Tables and then building the same logic and producing the report. We prefer that when it comes to SAP Data.

My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP Business Warehouse an eight. 

As I said, 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 to Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution.

Because if I already have an SQL Server, my licensing fees and the server licensing cost for installation all go drastically down.

They also give us a free reporting tool. For the data view, we need to have user-licensing and every cost gets increased, as I said. For example, we have a license for SAP Data, and for external data, we also have to purchase one more license, and again for a visualization tool. So that way, licensing costs keep increasing with BW.

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.

We have used SAP Business Warehouse to monitor and manage supporter donations and campaigns.

SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations.

I have been using SAP Business Warehouse for more than 10 years.

The stability of SAP Business Warehouse has been good. When we are doing charity work we do not do many transactions. The performance has been within the limits of the solution. We are not doing millions of transitions to see an impact on the stability.

SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 10 to 12 people using the solution in the community and once the campaign report is generated the entire business start to use the solution. We have approximately 200 people in the whole business.

The technical support is good, we have never had a problem with them.

There are two groups of people that do the implementation and support of SAP Business Warehouse. One group is for the build phase, the other group is for the support phase. There will be a handshake between these two groups, on how to go live. In the build phase, there are approximately seven to eight people are available for support, we agreed to not exceed more than four. However, this seven will be continuing for longer for deployment and new developments. 

Anything on the support side, if they find any challenge, they can easily reach for a phone and receive input from the builder team to resolve them quickly.

The two clients that have been using SAP Business Warehouse have found that it does not quite fit their use case. However, there is not any CRM or ERP that fits their needs specifically. In the charity use case, they have found challenges.

I rate SAP Business Warehouse a ten 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.