SAP Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019.
SAP BW versions up to 7.4 have reached end of maintenance. SAP BW 7.5 support is extended to align with SAP Business Suite with NetWeaver components. For existing customers maintenance is scheduled to continue through 2027, with extended support available through 2030.
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Winshuttle
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Winshuttle is an SAP-focused data management and robotic process automation platform. It is designed to enable the building and adaptation of Excel and SharePoint-based interactive forms and workflows for SAP without programming.
I do not think - from what I have found - there is a comparative to another product. Winshuttle is in a league of its own. There are some other vendors out there, but I have not found a product that can do what Winshuttle does when it comes to SAP data.
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
Winshuttle is well suited to help any company who has data that needs to move from SAP to 'somewhere'. The output file can be Excel, Text, or Access. Query has been greatly expanded in its ability to use SQL statements directly in the product at the 'pre-download' point. For example, you want to have one column do calculations on the data that is being pulled out of SAP via the Query and placed in a specific cell - this can be done - right in the Query script and the result will be produced in your receiving Excel file. I have another small scenario I call 'On the fly" uses. When our asset team had to change their depreciation on a very large number of assets mid-year, Winshuttle Transaction was very helpful. The update would have taken DAYS and lots of shredded nerves to update.
"Training" I feel Winshuttle was extremely easy to learn' my team and I went to a week long training class on the uses of the software upon finishing the course we all became internal (company) support as well as expert functional users.
"Ease of use" once a user learns the basics processes of the software it is functionally very easy to use and if there are problems with in the processing that cannot be supported internally Winshuttle community and support quickly helped clear up those issues, "if they occurred"
"Processes data FAST" once the transaction is mapped and recorded the user can move through (process) large amounts of data very quickly, saving lots of time by eliminating manual steps.
"Data Error Correction" through the transactional processing of large amounts of data, nothing is ever perfect, usually during data migration process if a single line fails the process stops, the correction is made to the data and the process starts all over again. Winshuttle data migration process doesn't stop it will provide a list of exceptions upon completion of the data load. It does this by only processing the "good" data and when bad data is encountered it is skipped and an error message is created and added to the data sheet. With this process the user now only has to worry about exceptions that didn't load and also knows why the line failed so making correction are easier and faster.
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.
The use of Winshuttle is particularly helpful with systems where data volumes are always very high. If data volumes are not an issue, the use of Winshuttle for cut-over activities might not result in a significant perceivable difference in time savings.
For businesses and sectors that rely on business processes that are complex and tedious with a lot of manual interventions, Winshuttle comes in real handy. However, in situations of fairly straightforward business cases, it would be hard to see perceivable gains from the use of Winshuttle.
At times, the use of complex business process with multiple fields from one transaction needs to be fed into the next for further processing, if the screen sequence changes based on each set of information, the processing could fail. However, these could be overcome by grouping similar screened transactions into one chunk and others into another.
Fantastic tool and honestly the best out there for the particular need. I cannot think of any reason we wouldn't renew as it truly offers the perfect solution to what is often a supremely difficult process. Also, I believe that from a cost perspective it is quite agreeable given the amount of benefit/ROI received
- I have used Winshuttle Transaction and Direct and the interface is simple, intuitive and easy to understand. - Not much technical knowledge of SAP is required before loading the data. - Data can be loaded for any sheet of an Excel spreadsheet - Output messages from Winshuttle are very clear and can be used to as an input to other data loads that use these output data
The winshuttle staff are some of the best in the business. I have been working with them for several years and always have had a positive interaction. There support staff are very knowledgeable. There product managers are very supportive as well and always open to hear feedback on how you like the product and any gaps that you would like to find a solution to better improve the products.
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.
Winshuttle works better with SAP than UiPath does in terms of performance and stability. The time to deploy a Process in Winshuttle is faster and less complex. It doesn't require coding skills as much as for UiPath. Winshuttle excels in batch input operations and also has a useful query reporting tool.
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.
