Likelihood to Recommend The proper management of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards requires an expert on the team to manage and build reports. If an organization does not have the proper expertise on board to build and deploy reports it will fail. Data analytics, dropping into excel, and broadcasting of information are major bonuses for the use of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
Read full review Its a great tool to have. The ability to come in the morning and by using the report being able see how the day will go. Seeing the goal and the current inventory and also to be able to adjust as the day goes on. With the report updates the report as changes to the inventory happen live or if any issues arise. being able to see that live and being to react quickly.
Read full review Pros This software is easy to initially learn, and very powerful in producing reusable reports. It is much faster than my company's internal manual queries. The ability to build off of a saved query and share queries to other users is a great positive. My favorite part is that you can run queries in the background and it does not interfere with your current work or slow your computer down. Read full review Allows end users to easily dive into the data without having direct access to the table in our database management software. Can easily turnaround dashboards that are detailed and visually pleasing. Sigma is intuitive and as new features are rolled out it is easy to adopt and incorporate them into new and existing dashboards. Read full review Cons The installation can be very complex and time-consuming, it requires a lot of planning and foresight as to what role the software will play in the organization. The software has a relatively large learning curve that takes dedicated users months to get comfortable with, the UI is a bit intimidating for new users. SAP could organize their help better, it can be difficult to find dependable solutions to issues via their website and support channels. Read full review Viewer level license is quite limited. These users can't download data or even add filters on datasets. Something to keep in mind. Directly querying the underlying data warehouse will lead to increased usage. Not a big deal on something like Redshift, but your Snowflake consumption will increase, potentially by a lot. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The institution has decided to move in a different direction, and will be using MSBI for reporting. I have been very happy with the Business Objects suite of tools, and will continue to use them heavily until we make the transition.
Read full review Sigma has helped us a lot and has become an integral part of our daily workflow. It would be difficult to switch to another platform and have to rebuild the numerous metrics and performance reports that we have already established
Read full review Usability From a server and client side perspective. the Business Intelligence Platform provides a foundation for all aspects of content development, distribution, analysis, collaboration and self service. Ease of use from targeted content delivery through controlled accessibility. Content exporting in the format of the users choice. Scheduling for internal or external delivery. Public and private folders for secure content access when requied. Web based for viewing on the users device of choice without the need to download additional applications.
Read full review It has a clean and modern interface. However, it is not completely intuitive. I think it would be better and easier to navigate with more Windows style drop down menus and/or tabls. There is a significant learning curve, but that may be due in part to the technical nature of this type of software tool.
Read full review Reliability and Availability When we implemented 3.1, we had a tough time managing the system: It took almost a year to stabilize. With 4.0, we want to roll out to more users, and are holding back because of fears about the performance issue
Read full review Yes, as long as you don’t conduct user error sigma is always up and running and waiting for you to complete your dashboards
Read full review Performance Overall, the tool (Web Intelligence 4.2) is fast and solid. One issue is a dependability on JAVA for a full feature report creation/edit capabilities (as opposed to limited HTML option). Second, planned end of JAVA support by major browsers (Chrome is already not supporting JAVA applet).
Read full review It depends, it loads quickly for smaller dashboards but when loading larger amounts of data it takes more time to do so
Read full review Support Rating SAP has released various versions of SAP BO BI. starting from 3.1 and going to 4.0,4.1,4.2 and latest being 4.3. SAP provides support to these new versions. As new versions keep on coming, support for the very old software goes out of scope from SAP. it is when the different organization plans to get their BO content migrated from a lower version to a newer version. The newer version had definitely added functionality and features which ease the work of users.
Read full review Support team is helpful in answering questions and providing help with using the UI. There are knowledgeable people within the support team. There are also good online support tools. There are significant community support resources available. There is however lack of a live support. It would be useful to have live phone number or chat to use.
Read full review In-Person Training SAP authorized training is best, Please go ahead with it. Even lot of online training options/videos available for self learning
Read full review Online Training I haven't used it or got feedback from the end user. Content looks to be pretty detailed. Focused on SQL but not BW.
Read full review Implementation Rating Hire specialists and experienced staff. Mix some beginners so that everyone is not a leader but a learner too. Plan well; architect well; break down implementation in small steps and move towards larger steps. Create a centralized and authorized SAP Business Objects implementation team.
Read full review Was not involved in implementation
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) based on price. It can stack up against others in terms of price and honestly, that's about it.
Salesforce Commerce does a hell of a better job at handling it. However, in the space of Business Intelligence, SAP can do more, and that's why at the end we went with it
Read full review Sigma is by far the best. It is easiest to learn and easiest to use on a day to day basis. I never have to wait for dashboards to load and it's very easy to understand the variables that are going into my visualizations. Best of all I can manipulate the data within Sigma very easily. In these other platforms data manipulation is difficult or must be done in the data warehouse
Read full review Scalability SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform supports SOA Service Oriented Architecture. You can start/restart/enable/disable all the servers. You can seamless do load balancing and clustering. It supports all leading application and web server. Supports LDAP SSO integration. People who can work on excel with training they can work on SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, dashboard, Lumira, Information design tool product suite. Tool is very user friendly and easy to learn and implement
Read full review It is a cloud service offering that is able to expand based on your usage
Read full review Return on Investment By generating and distributing reports in a timely manner, we were able to save millions of dollars for the company which otherwise would not have been visible. Almost realtime dashboard, saved the company a huge amount by showing the outages and kept the company from buying a tool to do just that. It showed the customers who were not paying the bills and were missing in the system due to some loophole. This was visible by doing reporting on the theft usage of electricity. Read full review Monitoring health of cloud platform has allowed the company to anticipate issues before they affect customers – Sigma prompted us building a canary monitoring process that provides customer container health. Customer success has used an activity report to discover customers running runaway processes that they were unaware of, creating an alert to contact the customer and prevent an embarrassing situation. Customer success uses the activity report to prompt conversations regarding increases or declines in behavior that led to increasing contract limits or addressing churn concerns. Read full review ScreenShots