SAP BW

Formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

While it does have some limitations, it is an extremely solid product.

Using SAP ERP as the primary data source can speed up Business Intelligence deployments with pre-built objects, extractors, data flows, cubes, and queries. It also provides a way to consume data with both SAP and non-SAP Business Intelligence tools. Additionally, it allows for the addition of new features and applications on top of the SAP Business Warehouse backend, such as SAP Business Planning and Consolidation. providing not only a strong data warehouse repository but also a financial application in a single box.

Now with Advent of B4HANA we should prefer B4HANA over BW. If budget is constraint BW is still superb tool with great capabilities. It is one of the tool with all capabilities of ETL, Modelling & Reporting. We can say that its a Super which alone is sufficient to cater need of any large/mid cap company.

SAP Business Warehouse allows us to run reports fast and accurately, allowing us to gain an understanding of our business, besides its built-in semantic data management models, it offers ease of use with a variety of data management systems, as well as data input by XML and other data sources.

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

SAP BW, being an enterprise data warehousing tool, is good for storing most of the data generated by systems. It is a tool to run reports and review trends. It is a good tool to compare and organize data as well. If you are new to the software, it can be very tedious to learn.

SAP Business Warehouse is suited for large chunks of data. It is great if moving from older systems that could not process or report on the data they had collected. I do not feel it is appropriate for smaller sets of data. By saying this I am not suggesting that it does not do well with large records and record sets. It can handle those equally well but if there is limited data to work with this is not a reasonable option.

SAP BW is well suited where source systems are SAP such as ECC, CRM, SRM, SCM etc. For non-SAP data sources, it may be less appropriate.

SAP Business Warehouse is well suited for large size corporations (more than 5,000 employees) with SAP ERP deployment and with multiple SAP modules (Finance, Materials Management, and Human Resources) deployment. SAP Business Warehouse needs to be supported by highly trained staff to take advantage its full functionalities. SAP Business Warehouse is less appropriate for small and medium-size corporations (less than 5,000 employees) as full SAP Business Warehouse support might become too expensive. SAP Business Warehouse is also less appropriate for an organization where SAP ERP is not used.

We use it to track parts in the warehouse. This includes leaving and coming. If you have parts that come in and have to leave multiple times to have other work performed, it does get a little tricky. A lot of the times, part numbers have to be changed for coming and going and after they are worked on. I don't feel like it is the best in this scenario, but I don't know if any other software is either.

It works fine in scenarios with complex structures, large amount of data, despite the limitations of speed.

SAP Business Warehouse is great when all your data comes straight from SAP, but BW is also fine for combining SAP data with data from other sources (we combined with a CRM for consumer complaint data). Unless BW is being used to feed another BI dashboard, end user capability is limited to trained personnel.

SAP Business Warehouse would be a great piece of a software for a small company with small data. It does its job very well but once you start adding large volumes of data it gets very slow. Situations where speed is not a primary factor would be an optimal environment for SAP BW

It is mainly suited for the clients who already use an SAP shop and already have SAP ECC/SAP HANA. The rich BI content in this tool makes it different from others and I think that is the core strength of this tool. Moreover this is an application which uses online analytical processing methodology. This helps in easy multidimensional analysis of the data compared to other RDBMS applications.

SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is great with structured data sources where fields and ETL schedules are clearly defined, however, I'm not sure how it would work with unstructured data sources. If your OLTP source is ECC, BW is the logical OLAP solution; integration is easy and most extractors are ready to use out of the box with little time to set up.