SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Reviews

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is an on premise solution with a lot of history and allows you to solve all kinds of information exploitation needs for different types of users.

The website is not intuitive. Lumira is an utter disaster. Need third-party products to oversee the environment. Search continually malfunctions. Not enough default configuration settings that can be customized.

We need to create/open reports every month. The manual way would be to download data manually from SAP BW and then paste in Excel to start formatting/cleaning. With SAP Analysis Office, we create a report once. Next month when we open it, we just need to change the time frame and refresh the data. It takes 5 mins to open and update data.

If you want to get some tools for business analysts, who are fairly familiar with Excel but easily get intimidated by code and programming, then this tool might be an ideal tool to leverage. However, if you just have a group of data scientists, the tool won’t be needed.

BusinessObjects BI can be used to combine data from different sources and report on the semantic objects, well suited for ad-hoc analysis for Business Analysts. It has both conventional reporting tools like webi, crystal reports as well as visualization tools like Dashboards tool.

Coming to ease of creating visualization dashboards, it is bit challenging to use Dashboard tools of BO compared to other tools in the market like Tableau.

We used this system to pull inpatient data from various sources. It was nice to use SAP Business Objects BI Platform because they put such a high priority on data security. The privacy of the patient information was incredibly important which is why we went with the platform in the first place. It had to comply with specific HIPAA compliance items and it did the job.

SAP BI platform provides a good solution to prepare reports spanning a variety of different data sources. Also it has a good number of functions and scope variables that let you introduce complex aggregation. However, it is important to design the universe very carefully and optimized since the reports can get too long to run, even too long to navigate between sub reports.

SAP Business Object Business Intelligence (BI) Platform was used in the cases when we wanted to show data in something like a grid or table format. It can be easily understood because it provides summary-like pages along with filters that can help us directly fetch data.

Browser based reporting using Crystal Reports is a core strength. Crystal is the most sophisticated reporting tool available that I have found.

When you have SAP BW as the backoffice behind SAP BO platform it is highly recommended. The BI platform has many native connectors to Infocube or BEX queries which allows the easy creation of reporting, having the same information we currently have in our BEX Analyzer reports .

I used it mostly for sales and financial reports. It has been adapted perfectly to all the needed sales and cost reports our controllers desired. Able to cross reference the info between different areas and get really useful analysis and KPI's.

BI was used to manage our parts and machines. It can be used to manage your factory or systems to properly allocate items to select places. However the system does not respond well, and it can scale well provided you have an actual team knowledgeable in this field. Once you get it set up it works well, but of course, if you try and add new implementations, it can become hazardous to your business.

It is a graphical way of getting to the data housed in an SAP Warehouse. It allows users without specific database knowledge to access the data they require and manipulate it in other tools they may be more familiar with. It serves a function and it does that reasonably well. However, it is not the most intuitive platform for new users if that is your audience.

The software is fantastic at pulling data from a wide variety of sources, such as the cloud, servers and even desktops. We have used this to generate reports based on a wide data sample. Whilst we haven't attempted it with the software, it is probably less appropriate to use it for single data sources that have a consistent data set. It's not that I think it couldn't handle it, it's more that it may be overkill for such a straight forward task.

SAP BuisnessObjects BI is great when used as a database. Not so great if the user wants to use it as a dashboard. Based on the access level I've been to SAP I can't create graphs in SAP directly. To do so I must export the data to excel and use this application for all my reporting needs. Its also important to note that the exporting function Spreadsheet for PO's tends to download symbols that are translated as pictures in the middle of the data table

I think that some times the restrictions are only in costs. But for me, WebIntelligence can be adapted in many situations, a lot or a few users, a lot of data or a little data...

SAP Business Objects is well suited for mid to large enterprise environments. It can handle multiple data types from almost any different source. It can be overly complex and expensive for a small organization or an organization new to BI. Microsoft's Business Intelligence may be a more realistic option for some customers.

Our Database Team can easily create Universes and simplified data models to be published to our corporate data warehouse. Experienced users can consume this data and build some valuable reporting and dashboards. Anyway, end users prefer a more dynamic tool to handle the reporting and dashboards like MS PBI for example.

It's well suited if you have a smaller team who are looking to develop more collaboratively and enable easy sharing, scheduling etc. of reports and documentation. It can also be expanded to a wider organization but there are complexities (such as security - where we decided to just leverage the database security and open everything up at BI file/folder level). For a larger organization, it certainly isn't quick to implement and with SAP changing their strategy so much, you will soon be out of date. Analytics cloud is certainly something you should look at first.

BusinessObjects provides a platform for any business which has SAP GUI to use it for reporting and extracting the data directly to report to executives in short time. It is also easy to customize, design the report from raw data for a skilled SAP user. This tool is becoming useful for reporting financials, inventory and billing reports to understand sales. A user needs to know basics of writing a SQL so that they can make queries and automate the reports.
It is less appropriate if we need to customize certain complex calculations for the management .

SAP Business Objects BI Platform is well suited for self service and adhoc reporting.
SAP Business Objects BI Platform may not be appropriate for creating quick dashboards and sharing.

Use it anywhere where scalability and performance are required, especially if newer SAP version has been implemented.
The mode users will use it, the better - otherwise, the pricing policy could spoil the ROI. Very good integration possibilities, with other standard enterprise applications. Support of various data resources, incl. XML, OLAP etc. including the ability to connect to JAVA, MS Sharepoint, MS Office and .NET applications.

The programmer community around SAP BO is HUGE. It is quite certain, that the problem you have has already been solved by someone else. It requires a little digging in discussions, but the help is mostly available. You definitely cannot start small with SAP BO. It feels too costly,

If you have a large budget and large staff to manage the deployment you can fare very well with BOBJ. Distributed reporting is excellent, however, to get benefits from big data you must also purchase HANA - more cost with more technical resources.