SAP Solution Brief

SAP NetWeaver

ENTERPRISE REPORTING,
QUERY, AND ANALYSIS
WITH SAP NetWeaver
Business Intelligence and Collaboration
for Information Workers

As your organization seeks to

exploit the benefits of business
intelligence, you must extend
these advantages to more
users. You must also consolidate your IT landscape and
align information workers with
a consistent source of data.
With the SAP NetWeaver platform, you can provide timely
and relevant information to all
users from executives to
operational users inside and
outside your organization.

As the role of business intelligence expands, your organization

must more closely align its business users actions with corporate
goals. Business intelligence can help you do just that. Business
intelligence helps you outpace the competition because you gain
insight into opportunities faster, streamline decision making,
improve relationships with business partners, and boost operational efficiencies.
Problems arise when business users demand more insights,
details, and current data, but lack the time and technical skills
to learn how to access the information they need. When that
happens, your users require support from an overworked IT
department. Advanced users tend to develop their own, nonstandard solutions. Other users simply ignore existing business
intelligence solutions because they are too complex, technical,
and seemingly irrelevant to their specific jobs. Such challenges
often result in unreliable, untimely data, causing high IT support
costs and hindering decision makers from taking fast action.
Because their jobs, business needs, skills, and roles differ, users
require diverse tools and data preferably without IT involvement. To ensure that every task supports organizational goals
and metrics, users need immediate access to uniform, reliable
data.
Sales executives, for example, demand simple, intuitive access to
graphical data that lets them compare sales forecasts with recent
actual sales. They also need access to individual sales documents,
which may reside in separate IT systems. Field-marketing experts
must analyze sales by region and channel, and they must revise
sales forecasts. Account executives must know about pending
shipment delays to key customers. Suppliers require high-quality
and formatted weekly forecast reports.

Despite these needs, significant challenges may hinder you from

deploying a business intelligence solution. Users may lack the
skills to use such traditionally difficult software, and you may
run a myriad of disparate business intelligence tools. The result
can be a high total cost of ownership (TCO) and applications
that are disconnected from your existing business environment.
The SAP NetWeaver platform helps you deliver comprehensive,
integrated business intelligence and analysis tools to all your
users. They can utilize dashboards, portals, and formatted reports,
and they can distribute data via e-mail to different users all
of which helps them initiate queries and perform enterprise
reporting and in-depth analysis.
Business Intelligence for All

SAP NetWeaver lets you deliver business intelligence to all users

at all organizational levels inside and outside your enterprise
so you keep your entire workforce informed and aligned with
corporate strategy. You have easy access to a range of analysis
from summary reports to operational details including
support for the following types of users:
Cost-center managers, who closely track the status of budgets
Sales executives, who develop action plans based on pipeline
opportunities
Financial controllers, who navigate from profit-and-loss statements directly into underlying operational sales transaction
documents

Enterprise dashboards have intuitive graphical layouts so users

can easily digest information. They also feature geographical
maps, graphics, and alerts with full drill-down capabilities.
Deployed via the SAP NetWeaver Portal component, dashboards
can be personalized to meet individual needs.
Formatted reporting makes it easy to provide business intelligence. Native, high-quality, and formatted reports support
menu-driven operational reporting. Users can drill down into
SAP and non-SAP transactional applications, and they can also
personalize the reports. Novices and experts alike can create
reports within a thin-client environment and display reports
via the Web or as Adobe PDF documents.
SAP NetWeaver makes it easy to distribute business intelligence
with information broadcasting. You can easily schedule or informally distribute and share offline reports and live information.
You can distribute data via e-mail and target distribution to
role-based portals. You can also securely deliver personalized
reports to wide audiences based on user profiles, job roles, and
such parameters as geographic location.
SAP NetWeaver is integrated with Microsoft Outlook so
users can subscribe to and view reports while working in
the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment. This greatly
enhances convenience and increases productivity.
Data Analysis

The highly scalable SAP NetWeaver platform supports a large

number of parallel users. Its comprehensive security framework
ensures that you reveal applicable, personalized information to
the appropriate users only. It supports multiple languages and
Unicode.
SAP NetWeaver provides powerful business intelligence tools,
including enterprise dashboards, formatted reporting, information broadcasting, and integration with Microsoft Outlook.

Query and analysis tools help the following types of users mine
and analyze data:
Financial analysts, who perform root-cause analyses to
determine the reasons for profitability declines
Marketing-campaign managers, who forecast returns on
advertisement spending
Assortment planners, who define product mixes for
upcoming retail seasons

Query and analysis tools integrate fully with reporting and

planning tools, so you can extend a consistent information
source to your data analysts and data miners. An accelerator
boosts performance so users can easily and quickly browse
through massive volumes of granular and historic information.
With Web-based interactive tools, you can perform multidimensional and drill-down analyses. Prebuilt for novices and
experts, the analyses help you gain insight across organizational
boundaries.
You can create ad hoc queries using a Web-based interface or
Microsoft Excel for special explorations or quick investigations.
Wizards, drag-and-drop functionality, and an intuitive interface
that requires no coding help you create queries dynamically.
The Web interface seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Excel
so you can move easily and quickly between applications. Or you
can perform these multidimensional and drill-down analyses
using the familiar Microsoft Excel environment. The Microsoft
Excelbased interface supports full navigation, including dragand-drop functionality and hierarchical searches. You can easily
modify or enhance queries with more sophisticated analyses
and calculations.
SAP NetWeaver provides data-mining and forecasting functions
for more advanced statistical analysis and pattern discovery. You
can use such statistical methods as decision trees, classification,
and clustering.
And because planning and business intelligence are tightly
integrated, you can use the Web interface or Microsoft Excel
to enhance queries with planning. You can perform both
simple simulations and complex collaborative budgeting and
forecasting.

Secure Collaboration

Because SAP NetWeaver provides a portal and collaboration

tools, you can personalize and secure users access to timely and
consistent data. Many different types of users can share information and collaborate to support a business process, including:
Customers, who use the Web to track and revise orders and
check shipments and billing histories
Regional sales managers, who review weekly sales data and
share their experience and insight with each other to optimize
product mixes
Marketing executives, who access daily news feeds, collateral,
and current key metrics to support campaigns
SAP NetWeaver Portal, which you can personalize to meet
specific user needs, offers collaboration tools and provides access
to unstructured information. Collaboration fosters secure information sharing, cooperation across departmental and enterprise
boundaries, the coordination of issue resolutions, and peer networks. Personalized, role-based information helps increase user
productivity, protects the security of corporate data, and allows
you to track and analyze user access to information.
With knowledge-management technology, you spend less time
seeking information because classification and search functionalities simplify access to reports and published analyses. You can
locate queries in personalized folders and perform searches by
key words. Support for unstructured information lets you access
daily news feeds, share documents, attach notes and documents
to reports, and search across repositories.
SAP NetWeaver also supports embedded analytical applications.
Analytical services are a key part of enterprise services architecture, a business-driven software architecture pioneered by SAP.
Support for business-process analytics lets you quickly analyze
and manage customers orders. Call-center agents can handle
customer relationships intelligently with insight derived from
customer-contact channels. Analytical services help you innovate your supply chain. You can, for example, make changes
among your suppliers after identifying currency fluctuations.

www.sap.com /contactsap

SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, a visual, model-driven tool,

provides an environment for modeling and deploying applications. With its embedded Adobe Flex technology, it combines the
richness and responsiveness of desktop applications with the
broad reach of Web applications. It helps business analysts and IT
developers compose visually rich applications that use analytical
and enterprise services. Developers can design custom composite applications with high analytical content to deliver timely
business insights within business processes and applications.
Infrastructure for Custom Development

If you require custom development, SAP NetWeaver lets you

build analytical applications that access, manipulate, and display
multidimensional, online analytical processing (OLAP), tabular,
and relational data. A Java-based development environment that
includes a comprehensive object library helps you streamline
the custom development of rich analytical applications.
Support for Heterogeneous Environments

An open adapter framework supports access to any type of

SAP or non-SAP software system. You can, for example, combine
data from various systems within one report, dashboard, or
analytical application. You can access such finance, purchasing,
sales, inventory, and other data from your data warehouse or
directly from an operational system or other data source.
As an open platform, SAP NetWeaver seamlessly integrates with
a wide range of third-party software tools, flexibility that ensures
you retain the value of existing IT investments. It also reduces
retraining needs for users who are familiar with such third-party
applications, which connect securely through standard interfaces to SAP NetWeaver functionality.

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These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its affiliated companies (SAP Group)
for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with
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Why Enterprise Reporting and Analysis with

SAP NetWeaver?

SAP NetWeaver delivers significant business intelligence benefits

to your business. You understand what is occurring in your
organization, why it is happening, and what will transpire in
the future. Your users can securely access consistent and timely
information, collaborate with each other, and increase their
productivity. You reduce the need for IT support, cut TCO,
discover new business opportunities, and mitigate existing business challenges. IT and business users rapidly prototype and
deploy composite business applications with rich analytical
content and that helps you use business intelligence to make
quick decisions and act fast.
Learn More

To learn more about how SAP NetWeaver can help you

drive business intelligence across and beyond your enterprise,
call your SAP representative today or visit us on the Web at
www.sap.com/netweaver.