SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP BW/4HANA

SAP BW is best for: 1. Large enterprises 2. Enterprises with 3+ legacy systems with entrenched users (politically difficult to merge) 3. Enterprises with employees who can understand both the technical capabilities of SAP BW and the needs of the business users - ability to speak both languages, otherwise the program could be unwieldy and potentially underutilized (it's not particularly inexpensive) SAP BW is less appropriate for: 1. Small enterprises 2. Enterprises who have well established, same location, CRM and UFS - the integration of data analysis will be easier and less expensive with other solutions 3. HANA

Incentivized

Some scenarios where SAP BW/4HANA is well suited are retail industry, supply chain, finance, warehouse, stocking processes, BI, [and] some finance analytics reporting. Some scenarios where SAP BW/4HANA is less appropriate [is when] relational queries are needed [and] in some small business with infrastructure limitations. Another scenario that is less appropriate is for ABAP processes requirements.

Incentivized

• It tracks bin locations for parts which can be really helpful.
• SAP Business Warehouse tells you who has a part checked out so you can find it.
• It shows current parts shortages so buyers are flagged to get parts on order based on current demand.

Incentivized

• High speed data warehouse regardless of data volumes.
• Excellent integration with SAP systems and Data sets.
• Simplified data modelling due to columnar data base.

Incentivized

• Support comes slow. This is not a limitation of the software itself but could be a symptom from the local office. Once we get support everything works along smoothly.
• It is always important to review the instructions. This is not a system that does well initially with personalization without review of standard procedures. A log of time can be lost if the technicians and programmers working with the data are not following correct procedures.

Incentivized

• Enterprise license pricing is very expensive and run-time license limits the usefulness of the tool.
• Integration with SAP Analytics cloud for write-back to BW/4HANA. Live connection is only read from SAC.
• Make run-time licenses more useful.

Incentivized

SAP BW/4HANA requires specialized skillsets around data warehouse modeling and the access to data, however the modeling capabilities are intuitive and have now become accessible to both SAP and non-SAP data warehouse specialists. This new model allows for Interchangeable skillsets and access to a broader pool of experts throughout the industry, as well as easier access to data.

Incentivized

SAP Max Attention and general support for SAP BW/4HANA is broadly available. Truth to be told, MaxAttention has a premium cost but brings great engineers. So this being an enterprise capability and extremely critical, we did not consider cost as the main factor since support works well. Just keep that in mind when making your selection.

Incentivized

SAP Business Warehouse scores higher in data warehouse functionalities for integration to SAP ERP and other SAP solutions such as SAP CRM, SAP APO, and SAP SRM. Standard SAP data source extractors which are available in SAP ERP can be used immediately for full or delta replication into SAP Business Warehouse. System governance in SAP Business Warehouse is top-notch with change management support for migration between system landscape from the development system to production system.

Incentivized

SAP Analytics Cloud is complemented by SAP BW/4 HANA through connectors that work in real-time and allow the display of indicator information in interactive and user-friendly visualizations. SAP Data Services integrates with BW/4 HANA allowing to automate the loading of information in the system taking as a data source a wide variety of platforms.

Incentivized

• Exporting of data and reports to Excel is very easy for the end user to interpret and manipulate.
• Negatively, the speed at which BW retrieves data and reports is very slow and out of date.
• Addition of daughter application HANA has helped this aging application stay afloat for a few more years. Overall it has been a great tool but it's showing its age very fast.

Incentivized

• Faster turn-around to enhancements
• End users can query structures that are not limited to multi-dimensional models.
• Performance improvements means that business user can do more in the same time compared to traditional BW

Incentivized