SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Reviews

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.

Platform administration.

Stability. Servers go down, memory leaks.

Support is better than five years ago, but still doesn't measure up.

Speed is sometimes low.

Forced to refresh data every time Excel with Analysis Office is opened.

Crashes sometimes when many prompts are opening.

Costly.

Limited tools.

Should be cheaper.

It is not easy to learn.

Impact analysis (data lineage) features are not available in the tool.

Administrators cannot perform bulk activities.

The price is high.

Initial implementation could be easier.

Customer support wasn't what we expected and could use some work.

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.

Report scheduling and distribution.

Quicker methods to bulk load reports into the reporting pool.

No clear road map, SAP changes the direction every year.

Some more training time is needed to understand, but it's worth the time investment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The BI reporting is not so simple for a non-experienced user.

Mobility and publishing can be improved.

Sharing of BI reporting by users.

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.

Needs to work on the user interface. It is not particularly user friendly

No support on Mac computers

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

One area is the ability to do graphs within BusinessObjects without transferring to Excel