BI105

SAP BusinessObjects:
Choose the Right Tools for the Right Job

Vijay Vijayasankar
Associate Partner, IBM Global Business Services
SAP Mentor

Disclaimer

The information in this presentation is confidential and proprietary to SAP and may not be
disclosed without the permission of SAP. This presentation is not subject to your license
agreement or any other service or subscription agreement with SAP. SAP has no obligation to
pursue any course of business outlined in this document or any related presentation, or to
develop or release any functionality mentioned therein. This document, or any related
presentation and SAP's strategy and possible future developments, products and or platforms
directions and functionality are all subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any time
for any reason without notice. The information on this document is not a commitment, promise
or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. This document is provided
without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, the
implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
This document is for informational purposes and may not be incorporated into a contract. SAP
assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in this document, except if such damages
were caused by SAP intentionally or grossly negligent.

All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause
actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned not to place
undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates, and
they should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

Page 2

1
 Background

• Business Intelligence is a top priority for C level executives in both good and bad
economies, and hence IT needs to keep on top of the evolutions in this space.

• Technology has improved on several fronts – Hardware continues to become

more powerful and less expensive, Vendor consolidations have resulted in new
and software choices etc

• New communication channels have opened up – like social media, which

increased the scope of BI

• Data modelling has a lot of new options to organize data

• With all of these, customers have plenty of choice in tool selection. Except – very
few have a good grip on what tools they should invest in

Page 3

Do you have a Decision Support Strategy?

• Do you have a good understanding of what your stakeholder’s information needs

are?

• Remember : There is no generic BI. It is always specific to your company

• How often is your BI strategy updated?

Page 4

2
 IBM’ s Integrated Value Case Approach

Interview stakeholders across the organization A KPI tree will be Goals will be Based on the
to define key strategic goals and the Analytic built to map prioritized based prioritization we
capabilities required to achieve those goals Strategies and on priority, revenue will focus on
Analytic potential and building out a
Scenarios/KPI’s cost/feasibility value case for the
Strategic to the Goals top 3 goals
Goals
Stakeholder Value Case
Value Tree Prioritization
Interviews Development
Analytic Needs
(KPI’s)

Solution Outline
Technical Source System Implementation
Cost Estimation
Assessment Profiling Roadmap
Future State
Architecture Based on the Solution Outline and
Assess current environment and profile all & Tool Selection
potential data sources required to Technical Assessment we will develop a
support the KPI’s Define a high-level cost estimate and implementation
Architecture, roadmap
Analytical Scenarios
and Data Model

Page 5

Case 1 : Real time data required at Financial close

• Case : Very common requirement to get last minute adjustment entries into
reports

• Challenge : Extraction of some BI data has inbuilt lags. And real time data
acquisition is only near-real time

• Solutions :
 Write an ABAP report. With more powerful and cheaper hardware, it is not necessary now
to send all information to BW for reporting
 Use Crystal reports on top of ECC tables
 Use virtual providers if BW needs to figure in the solution

Page 6

3
 Case 2: Fully Reconciled Financial Statements with minimal
manual intervention

• Case : To close a period and draw up a trial balance, a lot of reconciliation is

required between general ledgers and other ledgers.

• Challenge : Classical GL in ECC does not synchronize everything real time, and
hence manual effort at period close is a must. BW reports then need to catchup to
show all the data across the ledgers and tie out numbers. Even with all that, it is
hard to do segment reporting.

• Solutions :
 Switch over to New GL in ECC
 Use BPC for getting detailed financial statements
 Avoid complex BW logic to generate financial statements
 Use BI tools for sophisticated reporting with a universe

Page 7

Case 3: Users do not know where to find data

•Case : Business users, especially casual users of

reports, do not know where they can find data

•Challenge : Data and Data models evolve, and training

can only keep up to a limit

•Solutions :
 Use BOBJ Explorer – Now you can type natural language
queries and get google like functionality. Explorer can index
different types of data, so you are not limited to BW or ECC.
 Explorer is an appliance, with optimized hardware and
software – all you need to do is to point it to data it needs to
index.
 Explorer needs a significant initial investment
 Explorer does not improve data quality – if the source data
is bad, your users will get bad answers to their queries
 Data returned by Explorer can be further analyzed by Web
Intelligence

Page 8

4
 Case 4: Profitability is needed by product, and not just by
product group etc

• Case : Due to the difficulty in allocating indirect spend, most companies can only
find out profitability by product groups, and not by product

• Challenge : ECC has very limited allocation abilities. And it is hard to do “what if”
analysis without significant custom effort in ECC or BW. Also, hard coded
transformation rules for allocations in BW makes it less flexible and harder to
reconcile

• Solutions :
 Unallocated data can imported into BOBJ PCM – Profitability and Cost Management.
 PCM is a stand alone system that can take data in from many sources including ECC and
BW.
 It has sophisticated allocation options to allocate every line into the lowest level
 PCM has inbuilt ETL tools and reporting tools to draw charts and tables etc
 PCM data can also be sent to BPC to form final P&L statements
 PCM models can be exported to a BOBJ Universe, and hence can be reported on by any
of the BOBJ tools like Web Intelligence

Page 9

Case 5: Reporting on disparate data sources, especially after

Mergers & Acquisitions

• Case : Due to the difficulty in moving newly acquired companies into ECC and
BW, data across the enterprise is manually compared in spreadsheets

• Challenge : ECC has strict data validations, and configuration requirements.

Consequently, it takes time to move new companies to ECC. Moving legacy data
to BW is usually considered a temporary solution since rework is needed after
switching to ECC. More over, physical data movement is costly.

• Solutions :
 Use BOBJ Data Federator to combine data from disparate data sources virtually.
 Build a universe that represents the data across the enterprise, and use tools like
Web intelligence to report off it
 When legacy systems switch over to ECC, just remap the source data and refresh
the universe – so that user experience does not get disrupted

Page 10

5
 Case 6: IT support is needed for ad-hoc queries

•Case : Business users, not familiar with BEx

functionality, need some way of doing ad-hoc
reporting without waiting for IT support. This is
especially true for non-Finance users

•Challenge : BEx is not the most user friendly

tool, and most users do not need full OLAP
functionality for one-time queries. Also the BW
names for objects do not appear friendly to
most users. So most users dump data from
BEx to Excel and manipulate it there.

•Solutions :
 IT or a super user can define a
Universe for a set of users.
 If BW is the source, then security,
variables etc can be reused
 Users can be given access to Web
Intelligence to build reports as they
desire.
 Users can report on BW and non-BW
sources with relatively consistent
experience

Page 11

Case 7: Analysts need to create Interactive

Dashboards

•Case : Analysts in an organization typically

build excel based dashboards, and then
embed them in powerpoint to send to
management

•Challenge : No tie to source data, and

knowledge of logic lies with Individual analyst.
Also, as information requirement changes,
there is considerable rework.

•Solutions :
 Since there is hardly a common definition
across the world on what is a dashboard,
check if Web Intelligence can already solve
the problem.
 If it does not, or if dashboard needs
professional level details – then Xcelsius is
a great tool for this. ( Note that XCelsius has
been rebranded now)
 Dashboard can be built on top of different
data sources including web services
 Live Office enables MS Office integration
 Not the best solution if extensive use of
hierarchies are needed

Page 12

6
 Case 8 : Standardization Across Enterprise and How to get rid of
BEx

• Case : Most Organizations want to standardize on reporting tools across the

enterprise

• Challenge : Multiple tools need more licensing fees, need user and developer
training, and can confuse users

• Solutions :
 Tools in BOBJ suite are built for specific business purposes - and it is very rare that same
business user needs to access multiple tools.
 IT users might need to get trained in multiple tools
 Most common scenario is companies wanting to replace BEx with Web Intelligence.
Although some BEx reports can be replaced by WebI, it is not the full replacement for
BEx.
 Advanced Analysis, which used to be refered to as Pioneer, is the next generation OLAP
analysis tool from SAP that can take over BEx functionality.

Page 13

Planned Product Directions for BI Solutions

Richest offering for all business users

Discovery &
Exploration
SBOP Explorer

Enterprise
Reporting
Report Designer Crystal Reports

Ad Hoc Query,
Reporting, &
Analysis Web Intelligence

Dashboards,
Visualization
Web App Designer Xcelsius

Advanced
Analysis
SAP BEx Analyzer Pioneer

Enterprise Data
Warehousing
& BI Platform
SAP NetWeaver BW and BWA SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise

Page 14

7
 The Right Tools for Every Business Role
Enterprise BI = Different Business Users With Different Needs

Manage by metrics. In
a hurry to get answers
Executives & Managers

Access and interpret

data for executives and
managers, using BI
tools Business Analysts

Day to day
operational needs
underserved by
traditional BI due to
“complexity” Information
Consumers

© SAP15
Page 2009 / Page 15

Mapping The Right Tool to The Right Scenario

Supporting an Enterprise BI Strategy

OLAP AD-HOC PRODUCTION

Professionally EXPLORATION ANALYSIS QRA DASHBOARDS REPORTING
Informed

Executives,
Managers
Crystal
SBOP Reports
Explorer Xcelsius

Information
Consumers Web
Intelligence
Voyager /
Business
Business Explorer
(BEx) /
Analysts Pioneer

Technically Full Interactive Experience, Responsiveness Limited

Capable

Page 16

8
 Choose the right reporting tool
A simplified approach

Page 17

Available at SAP Press

Reporting and Analytics using

SAP BusinessObjects

Inside SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

Integrating SAP BusinessObjects

XI 3.1 Tools with SAP NetWeaver

Inside SAP BusinessObjects

Advanced Analysis
Page 18

9
Contact
Vijay Vijayasankar
Associate Partner, IBM Global Business
Services
eMail: Vijay.Vijayasankar@us.ibm.com
Twitter: @vijayasankarv

10