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 …
Overview
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?
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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Popular Features
- Drill-down analysis (45)9.090%
- Multi-User Support (named login) (46)8.989%
- Customizable dashboards (45)8.181%
- Report Formatting Templates (45)7.777%
Pricing
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What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?
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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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
What is SAP Analytics Cloud?
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?
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 Features
- Supported: Reporting and analysis
- Supported: Data visualization and analytics applications
- Supported: Office integration
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Competitors
- Microsoft BI (MSBI)
- Tableau Desktop
- MicroStrategy
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 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.
Reviewers rate Single Sign-On (SSO) highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews
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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.
November 19, 2018
SAP Quality Engineer Review
SAP BusinessObjects is currently being used by several departments within my company. In the case of my department (Quality), it is used to produce purchase order reports based on the material or supplier being investigated.
- PO Reports by Supplier and Material
- Stock Overview reports
- Processing of POs
- Needs to work on the user interface. It is not particularly user friendly
- No support on Mac computers
SAP BusinessObjects BI platform allows my organisation to use real time business data quickly. This tool is important for us as we using it to extract the data and understand our historical trends on sales, production and operation data. This tool is getting used by different functions at organisation like finance, operations planning, commercial team. It is helping to prepare report from real time data for making business decisions.
- Great reporting platform for business users
- Better data governance framework
- Multi developer friendly tool
- Does not require a user to know SQL query language
- Leverage its automation to set up routine data delivery extracts to the server
- Designing the reports is bit difficult for the standard users.
- Tool's licences are expensive
- Training is required for any SAP standard user to use this tool efficiently
April 03, 2018
Business Objects for Self-Service and AdHoc reporting
SAP BI Platform is used for front end reporting at our organization. It is used across entire organization. BusinessObjects' set of tools are connecting with several data sources like SAP BW, AWS, Oracle, SAP HANA etc.
- Easy, user friendly set of tools specially WebI.
- Different set of applications to support different reporting needs such as WebI, Crystal etc.
- SAP BI platform can connect to several different data sources.
- Try to combine Crystal reports for Enterprise and Crystal Reports 2013.
- Analysis for Office can be more standardized. It faces issues with different versions of Excel and operating systems.
- Some user friendly dash boarding tool can be introduced.
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is being used to host reports created in Lumira and Analysis for Office, to enable the creation, storage, and sharing of data and reports. Our most comfortable state is having someone centrally refreshing reports, saving them to a share point and then sending the link to their organization, so the BI Platform has a big opportunity for productivity savings and a better UX! It's being used globally across all areas of Business Planning and some accounting.
- The fact that you are able to work offline on creating reports and then, within the local client, be able to upload it to the BI Platform and continue editing from the local client, while connected to the BI Platform
- Separation of end user (BI Launchpad) and management/administration (Central Management Console) access points
- Interoperability with other SAP products (e.g. Lumira, FIORI, AA)
- The "FIORI-fied" BI Launchpad still has limited functionality which causes us not to leverage it. It is important to have a consistent UI look and feel for our users but we cannot sacrifice functionality. Therefore we don't have users access the BI Launchpad, we just link them from FIORI, directly to the reports.
- We've found it very hard to find answers to very simple questions (e.g. what is the best approach for security model, bearing in mind the size of our organization). Both directly with SAP and via third-party contractors, we have struggled to find answers quickly, and sometimes at all...
- As with all SAP products, they constantly change their recommendation. One minute, the BI Platform is the way forward and we should invest everything into this, and then the next it is SAP Analytics Cloud, and BI Platform will become obsolete.
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is being used by our supply chain group as well as our sales team primarily, but other management teams also access some modules of SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform in order to support Supply Chain and Sales groups. It is a long way and still on-going process, but we had to first consolidate all business workflows into SAP first which took several years globally. Then next was to implement the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform in North America first to ensure the bugs are worked out before deploying it across the globe over Citrix for all teams to use globally but our data and application remain centralized in North America.
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is powerful and the reports are excellent, as long as your organization is dedicated to consolidate all processes into SAP.
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, when installed centralized and published via remote access tool like Citrix, can be accessed anywhere while data is secure at central location.
- For a BI tool SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is much more user-friendly than offerings from Oracle.
- Dashboard access for leadership is excellent and updates are continually improving the product.
- Implementation of SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform requires large capital investment.
- User training tools provided by SAP for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is lacking interactive content. Improved user training material with version updates would be very helpful for implementation and continuous education.
- Managing version upgrades and hotfixes for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform with more control to users to have time to plan for upgrades.
January 16, 2018
A solution that will grow with the company
The SAP BO BI has been used for several years within the company in the areas of production planning and reporting, budgeting, market data analysis. The main source data comprise in-house data (ordering system, production plan, production performance) and external data (market data, dealer/distributor data]) and social media data. The main tasks of the solution are in a regular reporting as well as ad-hoc analytics. Examples of business problems are production reporting, trend analysis, competition analysis. The platform is used in a multinational environment of a large production firm.
- Very good scalability and a real must if you have an SAP as the main ERP system in the production across several factories.
- Very good vertical integration with other SAP tools and even other main ERP solutions.
- A good choice for a publicly traded company, where a robust auditable system is a prerequisite for getting transparency into internal.
- Mobility - in the version currently in use it is complicated to build responsive mobile reports
- We have integrated the reports on SAP HANA data, and SAP BO did not deliver the required results - the solution had to be replaced by SAP BO Design Studio, purchased additionally.
- Pricing - this is not a technical feature, but for companies with only a handful of analysts, this could be an insuperable problem.
August 31, 2017
Is SAP BusinessObjects Good for your company?
Business Objects is currently being used across the whole organisation. It helps users to get instant information for what they are looking for. It helps them to get financial data on the go, maintain all the vendor and dealer information, automate the data, and schedule the reports to the vendors/dealers directly. It's easy to use it for ad-hock queries, easy for understanding the company DB, etc. It's one of the best tools for the company to evaluate data and getting the right information.
- It can get the right set of information in the format you want out of the whole organisation wide data.
- It can allow you to automate the data to be shared with internal and external vendors.
- It allows dashboards, analytics and graphical representation of data for better understanding.
- The Lumira tool needs to be stabilised.
- Scheduling of dashboards and analysis need to be simplified.
August 25, 2017
SAP BusinessObjects BI - the budget killer
SAP BusinessObjects BI (BOBJ) is used across the organization. Access to reporting is the main problem it addresses however it's limited by the number of licenses available to our end users. It also addresses our need for pixel-perfect reporting and distributed reporting.
- Merged dimension queries.
- Flexibility with Universe Query vs. Free-Hand SQL.
- Licensing cost is very prohibitive for smaller/medium-sized businesses.
- Upgrades to BOBJ are non-existent without additional cost.
- BOBJ is severely lagging on available technologies at the current price point.
July 19, 2017
SAP BusinessObjects review from an early adopter
SAP BusinessObjects is the transaction level detail query platform within the organization - we have trained and continuously train users on BusinessObjects for self-service mode so that they can generate and customize their own queries without depending on a central IT team. It is very prolifically used within the organization as we are a highly analytics driven organization.
- Easy to write queries
- Easy to transfer to Excel and analyze data
- Customizable queries can be written
- One area is the ability to do graphs within BusinessObjects without transferring to Excel
September 16, 2016
How Business Objects reporting saved the company millions of dallars
In my previous experience working with a utility company for seven years, we used Business Objects to do reporting. The reporting was on customers who did not pay in a timely manner. The reports helped the company approach the customer before they ran into default. Such implications and many other reports helped the company see the issue beforehand and fix it before they even faced the issue. I could say that it was used for a sort of manual predictive analysis.
- Ease of Reporting - The reporting interface is so easy and adaptable that any users will be able to learn it and start using it for their own ad-hoc reporting purposes.
- Universe - lets you gather data from disparate sources and lets you perform reporting as it is just one source.
- Scheduling and distribution of reports is so much easier and you do not have to have all the users log on to see the reports. They can be emailed directly to them.
- The input parameters in the webi report can be improved.
- The promotion management tool is not that great. It can be improved quite a bit. It does not provide apt details of failures.
- In the scheduling options, it would be nice to schedule something and not send the report out when it is empty.
June 11, 2016
SAP BIP what is it and what can it do?
The SAP Business Intelligence Platform is an enterprise solution for the distribution, and analysis of business decision making content. We have it deployed on premise and in the cloud as our primary reporting business analytical tool. It managed through the product development life cycle (Development,Test and Production). Web based access is provided from any location secured by Active Directory Single Sign On.
- Online report development [for] a query. Business Objects uses a Symantec layer to turn the complex underlying data to user identifiable objects for business queries. This makes it a good choice for self service environments.
- Is has robust built in security that is can be customized and granular down to the object level. It also has integrated security modules that [can be] utilized with third party security interfaces.
- The base platform can be scaled horizontally and vertically to meet growing demand on Windows or Linux.
- A suite of developer tools are also incorporated with the base platform to provide the use of the right tool for the required task.
- The Platform Search tool can be troublesome to establish in a clustered deployment.
- Issues that are repaired in on release, should not resurface in a future release. This is rare but annoying when it occurs.
- Some of the developer tools require more documentation that what is provided.
June 10, 2016
Awesome tool for reporting and dashboards.........
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP Business Objects is used by our entire organization. It helps resolve complex reporting issues. We use this tool for ad-hoc reporting, sales analytics reporting and supply chain reporting. It also helps us manage a large group of user base in an enterprise environment. It does support creation of reports for all the sales hierarchy from sales rep to management.
- Connecting to multiple sources irrespective of whether it is SAP or non SAP.
- IT, HR, Finance and Sales reporting.
- New intutive look to develop reports, charts and static and dynamic dashboards.
- Customer support, I think for any tool based issue I face on a daily bases often times requires a ticket to be opened for SAP which sometimes takes forever for resolution.
- The process of educating developers when a new feature(s) have been introduced should be made easy.
- Time for a resolution from SAP should be faster.
May 25, 2016
Business Object: Scalable and Easy to use !
We are a wide organization and we have several ERP systems on top of other local systems. We use Business Objects for operational and management reporting and mixing all of the systems we have.
Key users are making reports available to the whole organization
- Combine several sources of data
- Very quick report design
- Formatting of data.
- Combine different universes by letting end user define the primary key
May 25, 2016
Best Reporting tool in the BI Market
Currently SAP Business Objects is being used across organization by different teams like Engineering, Offering, Sales, Marketing and Product Teams.
I have developed multiple canned and ad-hoc reports as per business needs. Basically this serves the purpose of reporting provisioning, billing and usage information of the different offerings Citrix has.
I have developed multiple canned and ad-hoc reports as per business needs. Basically this serves the purpose of reporting provisioning, billing and usage information of the different offerings Citrix has.
- Easy to build and debug reports both with OLTP and OLAP data.
- Multiple features like merging, fetching data from multiple sources and data security are integrated in BO.
- Easy to share the reports with users by scheduling and publication like features and also it comes with a nice portal, Infoview.
- SAP BO should have application connectors for applications like Marketo
- Switching database schemas for the same table should be there.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have professional experience in business intelligence. The SAP BO solution can be used in any department of an organization. This system solves any problem regarding data integration or data consolidation. It allows users to analyze information, see trends, and define KPIs with very powerful reporting and visualization tools.
- It´s a very complete suite, that covers all needs in a BI project - extraction, data consolidation, data warehouse design, report and analysis tools.
- The dashboard designer is very powerful and it´s an easy way to visually key operational tracking data like KPIs and scorecards.
- The data services is a very complete tool for data extraction and information consolidation. Allows for multiple connections and workflows.
- The middleware is very complex, sometimes you don´t know how to configure data connections.
- The business objects tools are the result of various acquisitions, sometimes the integration between them is not complete.
- A high level of specialization is necessary to configure BO.
In my prior organization, SAP Business Objects was the organization's company-wide Business Intelligence platform delivering reporting, ad-hoc reporting, and visualizations to the business. It brought with it a unified approach to delivery, and rapid development while also putting self-serve reporting in the hands of the business users taking full advantage of the universe architecture in 4.1.
- First and foremost the business presentation layer is top-notch (previously called universes, now called business layers). This architecture provides an object oriented development layer for use across the platform including WebIntelligence, Lumira, Dashboard Designer, and Crystal Reports (Enterprise).
- Crystal Reports is still a standard among reporting tools, and the next evolution into enterprise is on the right track. Crystal Reports has always been the defacto standard in enterprise reporting and the enterprise version brings with it better integration with Business Objects.
- The launch pad provides a great delivery mechanism to business users. Security is very granular and easy to maintain, and providing users with their own document space allows each user to maintain their own work spaces.
- Web Intelligence is a great ad-hoc tool. Users coming from Excel will have enough familiarities to be able to transition easily. It really unlocks a world of opportunities for the normal business user to do analysis and reporting in a controlled manner.
- Integration with Microsoft Office is great with the newer collaboration of Power Query. The organization was able to move away from cube driven analysis and into self serve dimensional analysis utilizing universes with Excel.
- To stay relevant, SAP is going to need to introduce a self-serve dashboard tool to compete with the likes of Tableau and other emerging companies.
- Dashboard Design is SAP's weakest area, in particular Dashboard Designer (formerly XCelsius). This product is very dated and feels like legacy.
- The development tool integration into the platform as a whole is lacking. Each tool seems to have a different way for connecting and interacting with data and feels a bit broken and non-cohesive.
- Predictive Analytics could benefit from some attention. Explorer is a decent discovery tool but would benefit from the next generation of whatever it will become and bring better predictive analysis.
March 16, 2016
Useful Web Based Tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Reporting account levels information and statistics, individual level information and statistics, and querying marketing databases for advertising purposes.
- Well formatted tables of data, similar to an Excel pivot table but for larger data sets.
- Scheduling tasks to run at a later time or date.
- Easy formula editing, if someone knows how to use the functions in Excel they'll be able to work with Business Objects formulas.
- You can't easily run large data sets. Normally you have schedule these projects.
- You cannot email the result automatically to a regular email user. You can only send them an email to the systems built in Inbox.
- End users can't create their own computed value/fields, generally you need IT to do that in the back end.
March 12, 2016
My experience with SAP BO
As an IT consult and working for a consulting firm, we typically consult other organizations on SAP and inmost cases we help them to implement and deploy SAP. Sometimes clients do not have a lot of experience with SAP products especially with SAP Business Objects. So our job is to provide support and guide them to better understand the language of SAP.
- SAP Business Objects reduces total cost of ownership (TCO0 which gives advantage to a better performance and scalability.
- BI platform.
- Data exploration.
- It can cost a lot of money to implement SAP business objects.
- It can be a little hard to understand the software and the way SAP business objects works.
- You will need to have plenty of servers to make SAP Business Objects work.
February 22, 2016
Know why customers go for Business Objects
SAP Business Objects is used by data stewards in following departments: Marketing, Finance, Business Development, Corporate etc. It is used across the whole organization. It provides data for functional and operational decision systems.
- Various tools to implement end to end BI, for example: ETL, Reporting, Dashboarding
- Good connectivity with CRM, ECC and other SAP systems etc
- Data Security, Visually intuitive, Ease of use
- Webi, Rich Client, SAP Dashboard, Crystal Reports reporting tool to cover needs of a variety of users
- SAP should provide free software and licenses for students
- SAP Extractors are designed by third party, so no support for those
- Reporting with no semantec layer
February 11, 2016
sap
It is being used across our company for customer SLA reporting and as a method of invoicing. We also use it for internal analytics.
- Ease of use. Allows non technical end users to be self-sufficient in regards to ad-hoc reporting .
- Visual aid creation. Allows a more varied approach to presentations.
- Exporting formats. A variety of formats allows for a wider assortment of uses.
- Difficult to implement
- Difficult to create rights for various users
- Need more format types for exporting.
November 19, 2015
SAP Business Objects Great for Application Intergrations
SAP Business Objects was being used by those who made purchasing decisions.
- Easy to access reports
- User friendly and easy to learn
- Integrates with Microsoft Word
- Excel reports overlapping with Crystal Reports, which may cause issues with future Excel report updates
September 15, 2015
Business Objects SRC - Excel on Steroids
Our company is very diverse and Business Objects SRC has been able to satisfy all the budgeting and planning needs across the board. Regardless of the data to be reported on or the planning cycle and even the level of planning detail, we have not found anything that Business Objects SRC cannot do.
- Ad hoc reporting
- Planning using trending and seasonality spreads
- High level to very detailed analysis
- One negative is being limited by the version of Excel that Business Objects SRC uses. On occasion a report or a query is maxed do to the row/column limitations.
March 10, 2015
SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 for use in Ambulatory Healthcare
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The product is a great central platform for BI needs.
- User can be setup to have access to specific data elements.
- Reports and documents can be published and pushed out to each user.
- The software can be distributed via a central server rather than maintain software on each user's computer.
- The software typically requires training to use and is not very intuitive.
- The security setup is difficult to learn and understand.
- There have been some compatibility issues when connecting to the latest non-SAP data sources.
- Updating and upgrading the software is not easy.