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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

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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Recent Reviews

Happy User

7 out of 10
July 21, 2022
I use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to broadcast reports to our customers. This is our analytical suite for reporting and monitoring our …
Continue reading

SAP BI Review

6 out of 10
January 28, 2020
Incentivized
We are using SAP BI for analysis and reporting purposes. We use this within the insurance industry. We had some issues with a client …
Continue reading
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 28 features
  • Drill-down analysis (45)
    9.0
    90%
  • Multi-User Support (named login) (46)
    8.9
    89%
  • Customizable dashboards (45)
    8.1
    81%
  • Report Formatting Templates (45)
    7.7
    77%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • 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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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.7
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.2
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.7
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.3
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9.4
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.8
Avg 7.9

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

7.5
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

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

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsApple 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 ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(842)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 71)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Gaurav Pandey - PMP,ITIL,CSM | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
SAP BI product was improved a lot in terms of performance as BW on HANA ( suite on HANA ) product however the product was optimized to run on the HANA database. Anyone new planning to go for BI should consider BW4HANA which is a new optimized product running on SAP's flagship HANA DB. This has excellent integration with FIORI and SAP cloud platform ( Analytics Cloud ).
July 21, 2022

Happy User

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to broadcast reports to our customers. This is our analytical suite for reporting and monitoring our baseline data for procurement and logistics operations. Our organization is an Information Technology group that manages a very large amount of assets along with procurement activities. SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is our only way to manage reporting and soon-to-be SAC.
  • Broadcasting reports on schedule
  • Showing data analytics that have drill down capabilities
  • Monitoring and managing custom report by user
  • Ease of use
  • Reports building can be a challenge unless your an excel wiz
  • Easier use of adding in other data sources
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is used to create reports for different business users as per their requirement. The logic is built on the backend through SQL. Business Objects is used to schedule the report at a fixed frequency as well as to provide the same to business users for an Adhoc use.
  • Scheduling of Reports
  • Formatting the report as per business requirements
  • Good user interface for users and developers
  • Not able to paste multiple values without semi-colon while filtering the data. Adding semi-colon makes the functionality difficult to use.
  • User interface can be improved
  • It is costly
  • The performance of the report decreases if complex logic/functions are added
SAP Business Objects is well suited for the scenarios where most of the logic is written on the backend (in some other application) and one can expose that data for the business users through Business Objects. It is easy to schedule the report, format the same and download the data for analysis. Some simple calculations can also be added on the BO side as needed It is not very appropriate for complex calculations/logic.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
the product is used to manage applications and dashboards created for various organizations which use the corporate data warehouse along with SAP
  • visualize data
  • enable interactions
  • real-time connectivity
  • browser crashes sometimes
the product is suited very well when pulling data from SAP data sources including Hana. other scenarios where it is less appropriate is for hadoop data sources, the connection requires ODBC.
Saurabh Raheja | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
A best-suited scenario which I experienced in the SAP BO BI platform was the scheduling of the web reports in any format, e.g. PDF, Excel, etc, and getting those delivered to BI Inbox, emails, DLs, etc. at any frequency e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This will help users to get hold of the latest data and get the output handy within their email whenever they need it. This is turn will help in important decision makings, planning, etc of the organizations. The less appropriate scenario that I faced was creating different user and user groups with respect to location, data involvement, etc. Managing the huge list of user and user groups and assigning appropriate roles, e.g. admin role, read-only role, etc can be a tedious task at one go.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It is great if you have many data sources where you need to draw information from. We use it to pull data from the Accounting system universe and the Point of Sale Universe to combine customer, product, and P&L data where needed.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
It is a great tool for teams who are trained in understanding the metrics it can provide. It is not suited for users with little understanding of performance trends and how this tool works.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Ben Williams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Dariusz Zyskowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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).
Key question: who is the intended audience? Do you want your regular, non technical users to have report creation capabilities? If so, then BO is a way to go. Developers/Power Users can use other BO tools (Design Studio) to create elaborate, more advanced reports, graphs and dashboards.
Dharmesh Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Best suited for SAP data source. Seamless integration with SAP BW/BEX queries. Integrates with all SAP Modules. Supports all the traditional relational database, big data, data lake.
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.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is well suited for a business analyst who performs basic data analysis and data visualization and output into the report originally through Excel or without too deep understanding of coding or any other data science tool that allows them to perform the analysis in R or Python.
January 28, 2020

SAP BI Review

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
The main functionalities are data extraction, analysis, reporting, and displays. The newer versions seem to offer better usability, especially the cloud version, but my companies were using on-premise versions. Therefore, we didn't have the chance to use any newer functionalities.

I would suggest using the cloud versions because in time new reporting capabilities are introduced. This way after 3 years, users do not need to start using Excel for my reporting purposes.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
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.
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.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
October 28, 2019

BI Platform Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Martin Lopez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Browser based reporting using Crystal Reports is a core strength. Crystal is the most sophisticated reporting tool available that I have found.
April 02, 2019

Why SAP? Why?

Michael Diaz-Suarez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
One of the things I like about BusinessObjects is that, as a BI manager, I can help varying levels of users. For example, if I have a user that has no interest/technical skill, I can build up a universe, create an InfoSpace, and design some view sets. If the user is more advanced, maybe I just need to build the universe and let them play with the view sets. Users can insert themselves in the BI process where they feel comfortable.

I dislike that there has traditionally not been a good method of restoring a single item when a user accidentally over-engineers it or deletes it altogether. And until recently, there hasn't been any kind of versioning. If there is much customization of the environment, it takes a little more effort to upgrade an existing environment or stage a new one.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Tim Dorscher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
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