Great SAP data analytics product
SAP Business Objects and Business Intelligence is one of the flagship products of SAP. I remember the BW days and then the acquisition of …
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
Overview
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.
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Top Rated
2020
Popular Features
View all 28 features- Multi-User Support (named login) (44)8.787%
- Customizable dashboards (44)8.585%
- Pixel Perfect reports (43)8.383%
- Report Formatting Templates (44)8.383%
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Gaurav Pandey - PMP,ITIL,CSM
SAP Application Manager
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What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.
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The SAP Analytics Cloud solution brings together analytics and planning with integration to SAP applications and access to heterogenous data sources. As the analytics and planning solution within SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud supports trusted insights and integrated planning…
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What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?
The
SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) platform is a flexible,
scalable information infrastructure that aims to help you more easily discover and
share insights for better business decisions. According to the vendor, the integrated, unified infrastructure enables scalability from one to
many tools and interfaces on premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Features
- Supported: Reporting and analysis
- Supported: Data visualization and analytics applications
- Supported: Office integration
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Competitors
- Microsoft BI (MSBI)
- Tableau Desktop
- MicroStrategy
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Apple Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Windows: Server 2008 and 2012; Suse SLES 11 x86_64; Red Hat EL 5 and 6 x86_64; AIX 6.1 and 7.1 Power; Solaris 10 and 11 SPARC |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.
Microsoft BI (MSBI) and Tableau Desktop are common alternatives for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform.
Reviewers rate Report Versioning and Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) highest, with a score of 9.7.
The most common users of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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July 27, 2022
Great SAP data analytics product
SAP Business Objects and Business Intelligence is one of the flagship products of SAP. I remember the BW days and then the acquisition of BO and eventually the rollout of the new SAP data analytics platform i.e. BI. The product is good for large data volumes, month-end closings, analytical analysis, generating 360-degree reports, handling workload, managing process chain, etc. However more the data, more the memory needed.
- Analytics
- Continuous refresh of reports
- Easy customizations using ABAP
- Memory requirements
- Hardware requirements
- Continuous operational support
December 20, 2021
SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja
SAP BO BI Platform can be used for reporting purposes. There are reporting tools available within this suite e.g. Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, etc. These reporting tools help us to develop reports on top of the data available in the database. We can build interactive and beautiful visualizations which help the organization in decision makings. Getting hold of meaningful data in the vast scope of backend data and displaying that in form of interactive reports and visualization help the organization in planning, decision making, and overall growth of the organization. These are the scope of the use case of the SAP BI BO Platform. One can even schedule the reports to get the reports delivered to their email, BI Inbox at any frequency like daily, weekly, monthly, and so on and so forth.
- Maintaining users and user groups in CMC.
- Scheduling Web Reports through CMC to get reports delivered to emails at any given frequency.
- Maintaining roles and securities for different users, users group and BO servers
- Regarding improvement, there is very little scope now as it has already grown up so well from BO BI 3.1 to BO BI 4.0, then BO BI 4.1, then BO BI 4.2 and now the latest is BO BI 4.3
- One improvement I can think of is that it can go on the cloud. For example, a physical box may not be required for the installation of SAP BI BO.
December 14, 2021
SAP Business Objects is a must have for your organisations Reporting and Analysis needs
SAP Bi reporting tool is our companies primary software for Reporting and Analysis. I use it heavily daily and have done it for over a decade. It's highly nimble and allows me to connect to various data sources that have been set up. I can connect and report on Financial values from our Accounting System to our Point of Sale data that holds key sales and product information. Our Account system does not hold detailed product level information but is good for P&L Reporting by Centre and Divisional level. For stock level and margin data, we use Business Objects to build custom reports and conduct various analyses from the required data source.
- Connects to various data sources
- Excellent for building adhoc reports and doing analysis on the fly
- The scheduling and publication functions are great time savers and allow us to manage many regular and recurring reports.
- At the moment we are experiencing some performance issues, but this may be down to our own companies network/infrastructure and not the BI tool
- The older Client version I thought was more stable than the 4.2 web-based version. But this again could be down to the companies network/infrastructure
September 20, 2021
Business Insights at Your Fingertips
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is being used by our Operations team to monitor performance and the impact of changes made to code, to measure KPIs, and the success or failure of a newly introduced feature or code.
- Deep insights on performance.
- Ease of use for inexperienced users.
SAP Business Object Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is used widely in our company across departments like Finance, Planning and Sales. Due to the different software solutions have been implemented in different business units, a tool should be available to combine different data sources to produce management and operational reports. Currently this tool is SAP BI in our organization.
- It has a good capability of combining a variety of different data sources like ODBC, Excel, SQL Server, text, etc.
- Design is relatively straightforward and is flexible enough to let different functions be used in different scopes (whole report, section of a report, etc) to create parts, combining data from different sources.
- There are different design interfaces like HTML, applet and rich client which may be handy in different circumstances.
- Scheduling of the report updates help you organize timing of your report activities.
- Although limited, comparison of the updated report with its previous data is a good feature.
- Adding complex functions and calculations may significantly slow down the reports.
- Comparison of the report data histories could be extended. Currently you can only compare your report with only previous run but not with any older versions.
- Web, applet and rich clients UI's do not always have the same design functions available, for example.
- You may find yourself unable to export multiple reports at the same time in web interface where you can do it in the rich client interface.
- More flexibility in report design could be helpful such as copying report sections between different reports, multi select and modifications of sub reports, etc.
- Drilldown could be improved . For example, a feature to export drilldown structure to Excel or faster drilldown would help a lot.
April 22, 2021
SAP BO and I: A love story
SAP is currently used by a single department but for data that is pulled business-wide. We integrate the date of various departments and create reports in order to find out any casuality issues across the business as well as to determine if changes in one area are having the desired effect across the business. It addresses an issue we had with data being difficult to link together across large areas of the business to see if the data held by one department could be used to make savings in another.
- Ingest data from multiple areas of the business and use them to generate easy to understand reports.
- Report scheduling is simple and efficient allowing the team to run reports at a variety of different times to suit the stakeholder's needs.
- The metalayer takes away some of the complexities of other programs, allowing the end user to interact with the program in a clean and efficient way.
- We have had some difficulty linking up with data in some of our web portals. This has caused a large amount of development time, and support has been less than its usual helpful self in this regard.
- Older versions had functions which have now been removed, or replaced with less effecient functions. For example the HTML output option.
- Some configuration issues have arisen when we have attempted to configure API'S. Some require a JDBC connection, which was slightly more difficult than expected.
December 09, 2020
SAP Business Objects: Review by a Grumpy Old Customer
SAP Business Objects has been a primary BI/Reporting solution for the City of Chicago for the past 14 years. It is being used by all city departments to report off practically all city databases. Available to all city employees via Web Intelligence module, it provides simple AdHoc capabilities, as well as advanced options for power users and developers.
- Simplicity. It is very easy for a non technical user to create and format a report in Web Intelligence. This is especially true with the new 4.1 release.
- Report distribution. Several options available, such as FTP, File Location, BO Inbox and Email. Each is very intuitive and simple to use without any confusing, very technical options (ex. Oracle's OBIEE).
- Scheduling. This is a very important feature that is being used a lot here at the city (over 700 scheduled reports run every night). Very robust scheduling engine that can be easily configured and adjusted by the administrator if needed.
- Service Pack/Fix Pack reliability. Each SP/FP fixes certain bugs, but unfortunately sometimes messes up other features (problematic upgrade from TOMCAT 5 to 7) which can be very frustrating. That is why we carefully test every one of them in our DEV environment before promoting it to Production/
- JAVA vulnerability. It appears SAP is slow with latest JAVA client (needed for Web Intelligence report creation/edit) support. This creates issues when users update their JAVA release to the latest version, which is not yet supported by SAP resulting in error messages.
- Internal reporting on Business Objects environment. You can report against user activity (from the audit tables), but there is no build in tool/capability to report on BO content, users, security environment which is very helpful for the administrators. Third party expensive tools are needed (APOS).
December 01, 2020
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Review
We have currently deployed SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform in our company for Analytics reporting on SAP Concur Modules. We also deploy SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform for our customer to address their business needs and provide cognitive analytical solution
- SOA Service Oriented architecture
- Architecture scaling and deployment can be managed easily, clustering nodes and servers to give scalability
- User friendly administration modules
- User friendly reporting modules like Web Intelligence, SAP Lumira, SAC
- Strong semantic layer supporting multi-source database
- Waterfall model design is used
- Need to compete with Agile architecture and design
- Quick turn time like Modern BI agile tools
- Online training
- in-person training
Yes
Yes, LCM tool is awesome. Tool is much mature than what it used to be in past BO5.x series
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP BO BI is widely used in my organization since it is a tool that does not require an understanding of coding and provides a good supplement to support tools such as Excel and pivot tables. It is a good tool for a business analyst to do reporting and data visualization.
- Nice visualization.
- Nice reporting.
- Integrated system.
- Required java.
- Based on Adobe.
- Stability.
January 28, 2020
SAP BI Review
We are using SAP BI for analysis and reporting purposes. We use this within the insurance industry. We had some issues with a client regarding reporting and used SAP BI to help solve this problem so we could stop doing this manually.
- It is easy to use and is easily understandable.
- Lots of built-in functionality which makes things easier for developers.
- Paid tool.
- Connectivity should be better with the latest data sources.
December 25, 2019
A good tool for a business analyst
I used SAP BO BI in my previous job as an energy market analyst. It is a good supplement to embedded with Excel tools such as VBA, Pivot Tables, etc. Because of that, it is fairly flexible to extend its ability in analysis and calculation. However, since I moved to be a data scientist, I have barely used this tool.
- Nice, interactive visualizations.
- Suitable for ad-hoc analysis.
- Costly.
- Limited tools.
December 14, 2019
SAP offers a sufficient tool with their BI Platform
SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform was used for analytical reporting within the Strategy, Marketing, Operations, and Finance departments. It is used like a front-end tool to data ware systems in the back-end to query data and make analysis. It has a built-in reporting display mechanism but we have been using it for generally extracting data. Even though the report displays are getting
better and better every day, Excel, MS Power BI reports are better.
- Data extraction.
- Connection to the SAP universe via a good front-end.
- Should be cheaper.
- It is not easy to learn.
December 12, 2019
SAP BI Platform
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP BusinessObjects BI is used as the reporting tool. We have SAP BW as our business warehouse system and SAP BO is on the top. We also have other reporting tools as SAP Lumira.
- Collaborative.
- Ease of use.
- No clear road map, SAP changes the direction every year.
It is being used across the whole organization to make data-informed decisions. Human resources, Finance and various schools use BusinessObjects for their daily activities and also do the ad-hoc reporting.
- Easily adaptable for any level of user's technical ability to use reporting tools.
- Ad-hoc reporting capabilities.
- Impact analysis (data lineage) features are not available in the tool.
- Administrators cannot perform bulk activities.
December 10, 2019
Possibly the best reporting tool you can have.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform in several companies. I used it successfully in different kinds of industries (retail, manufacturing, etc.) to manage different reporting areas (basically financial and sales reports). The most important feature of this solution is its availability to adapt to any requirement.
- Crystal Reports allows you to get any report and in the layout you prefer.
- Customisation to any area and to get any report you want.
- Once learned, it's really easy to use and understand the logic.
- Some more training time is needed to understand, but it's worth the time investment.
October 30, 2019
Get over the set-up hump and you are in the clear!
When working in pharma marketing there are a lot of different platforms that produce massive amounts of data from many different locations, SAP Business Objects BI Platform acts as the centralized hub for the synthesis of all of that information and spits out easy to digest reports containing insights that can be shared with all levels of the business.
- Real-time business intelligence.
- Data consumption is super simple.
- Integrations with Microsoft office.
- The price is high.
- Initial implementation could be easier.
- Customer support wasn't what we expected and could use some work.
October 28, 2019
BI Platform Review
Used throughout the enterprise. Crystal reports are used to dump data into other home-grown solutions.
- Easy access to fully developed reports
- Ability to schedule report output to different destination types.
- Platform administration.
- Stability. Servers go down, memory leaks.
- Support is better than five years ago, but still doesn't measure up.
October 25, 2019
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform - The corporate on-premise solution from SAP
I have used SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform in countless companies and covering different types of industries with excellent results. It allows you to solve all the reporting needs as well as the development of boards and the massive distribution of information automatically. It you allows to meet the needs of different types of users, as many as the management area as the power users.
- Operational reporting through the SAP Web Intelligence tool
- Pixel-perfect reporting through SAP Crystal Reports
- Visualizations with SAP Lumira
- Avoid the need to use Java in certain functionalities.
- Avoid reliance on Adobe Flash on certain features.
- Improvement in the need for adaptations for mobile devices.
September 18, 2019
On-Demand Reporting Made Easy
We use the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform for our reporting and dashboard data analysis. GP Dynamics and our custom ERP are the data sources we need analyzed. It is being used across all departments for real-time reporting, which is used to manage our daily activities of registration, airline flight data, resource booking and forecasting, budgeting and program execution.
- Fast, on demand reporting.
- Rapid development of new business analysis.
- It is low maintenance once configured and deployed to production.
- Report scheduling and distribution.
- Quicker methods to bulk load reports into the reporting pool.
April 02, 2019
Why SAP? Why?
SAP BI was used for our office to gauge manufacturing and product analytics. It was supposed to solve the problem we had with our business portion of our software. However after deployment, we quickly found out it was not so easy. It was used in manufacturing and parts management.
- It has a great way of displaying information.
- It's affordable.
- It can scale well provided you have good support.
- The interface looks like it's something out of 1999.
- Customer support is horrible and honestly it's a lottery any time you call.
- The system crashes constantly.
February 23, 2019
SAP BO - Top rated BI system in a multinational organization
I have used BusinessObjects for over 2.5 years now. It is great tool for scripting and developing reports. It has easy drag and drop options to select what variable you want in your final report. If you have large number of facilities and have data stored in multiple universes, it allows you to create a combined query and get final report from multiple universes. You can send your scripts to other individuals within your team. For any recurring reports, you can schedule them and they run whenever you've set them to run. It has some amazing quick filters that can be used while writing your script that allows you get tailored results.
- 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.
- There is a learning curve to understand how to use the queries/objects and decide which data to pull, so there is training required.
- Some of the "result objects" also do not pull data but that is likely due to our internal data, not Business objects itself.
- The tool's license are expensive but you get what you pay for. SAP's business tool licenses in general have never been cheap but that ensures you get proper product support whenever needed.
February 13, 2019
SAP Business Objects is a complex but valuable tool.
SAP Business Objects platform is currently in use by two departments across our enterprise with a total of about 200 people. These departments take requests from businesses across the enterprise and work with them to generate reports based off of criteria that the business decides. The whole organization benefits from Business Objects.
- It is a very flexible platform with many different add-ons that provide lots of different functionality.
- If configured and installed correctly it can be a very robust and dependable platform for the business.
- It has the ability to handle almost all types of data sources you can throw at it.
- 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.
I use it to gather data from our SAP Warehouse to report out our financial information and high and low performing/selling products. It allows us to gather that data and put it into Excel where we can then use other tools to create visualizations of the data in our monthly, quarterly and yearly reports.
- Allows significant customization and filtering of the data when creating reports.
- Is an easy, relatively user-friendly way of accessing the data.
- No SQL or other programming languages needed for queries.
- The interface is old and unintuitive. The tooltips are helpful but for someone new to it there is little help in where to begin and what to do
- This may be our systems but it is slow when querying our data.
- For some reason when exporting the data, if I choose reports it never exports ALL the data so I am not sure what function that option is supposed to provide.
January 29, 2019
SAP Business Objects to Empower the Enterprise Data Consumption
We use SAP BOBJ to extract data from our ERP (SAP ECC6 EHP6) thru some Pre-defined Rapid Mart schemas. Once data is loaded, we created Universes and do the required ETL (Extract Transform and Load) to model the data to be consumed to all organization from Finance and Costs to Maintenance, Production, Sales a, d Purchasing. Users have either BI reports ready or they use Microsoft Power BI to consume the data.
- Easy connection to ERP (SAP) thru pre-defined Rapid Marts or tables.
- Easy connection to other Databases (our plant data or our custom apps).
- Strong and reliable ETL functions.
- Stability.
- The BI reporting is not so simple for a non-experienced user.
- Mobility and publishing can be improved.
- Sharing of BI reporting by users.
Recently, I did for production a report sales in WebIntelligence, which started with 30 users and the main heads in company, and now are in process for 100 users. Additionally I am in a project for Finance users, the objective is to create a set of reports in Web Intelligence and a dashboard in Design Studio.
- We can expand results for a lot of users in a short time.
- The tool WebIntelligence is easy for the user and the training also is in a short time.
- It is possible to inherit the security that is implemented in SAP BW.
- Funcional users can be independent for generating your own analytics.
- I am using WebI 4.1, and I think it has deficiency in a variety of charts, for example vs Power BI.
- I generate my principal reports from BW querys, would be wonderful if for example in IDT if I could edit the BW query in like a: change names, create folders, new ratios...
- Some times when I need change the data source in special from a BW query, is difficult.