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)9.090%
- Customizable dashboards (45)8.181%
- Report Formatting Templates (45)7.777%
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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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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 Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) and 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
(51-71 of 71)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We initially used Business Objects only in Finance, Procurement, and a couple of other departments. We were in the process of implementing it on a companywide basis. The major problems it addressed were: a view of the overall health of the business, a detailed look at metrics/KPI's, easier access to raw data, the ability to answer pre-defined business questions, reduced reliance on MS Access and Lotus Notes "personal data warehouses", and the ability to explore/discover/mine data when the business question isn't necessarily known.
- Can handle large data sets with very good response time, especially when paired with SAP HANA.
- Highly scalable.
- Capable of producing strong data visualizations.
- Due to the very large footprint/breadth of the solution, it can do lots of things.
- Tight integration with SAP Data Services is a plus.
- SAP's tools are traditionally strong with respect to supporting a global user base, rather than a tool that is tailored 100% to a U.S., English-speaking user base.
- Backed by a cloud offering with a truly global reach.
- Implementations are too time-consuming and costly.
- The components in the Business Objects suite (Lumira, Explorer, WEBI, Analysis, Dashboards/Xcelsius, etc.) all serve different purposes. There is no common look and feel and they all require different skill sets. This leads to challenging training and user adoption and limited BI self-service.
- The security model behind this and most SAP tools is very cumbersome and difficult to implement and manage.
- Customization requires skill sets that are not readily available in most organizations. Other competing platforms leverage Java, C#, JavaScript, HTML-5, .NET, etc.
February 25, 2015
The New SAP BusinessObjects RESTful SDK: What It Means to You
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use BusinessObjects to deliver reports on a schedule basis to management as well as provide adhoc and drill through reporting to staff to help make accurate decisions. The ability to join data between different data sources without users having to touch the data is an important features. We collect data from several legacy systems including databases that were linked throuh MS SQL Server and SOAP Web services through a single Universe to provide a single view of the business to users.
- Designed for Crystal, Web Intelligence and the BI Platform, the RESTful SDK (RSDK) is the next-generation application programming interface (API) for manipulating and interacting with reporting content residing on your BusinessObjects server.
- For starters, it means no more jar files. Or, if you are a .Net developer, merge modules and or .dll files. The RSDK is based on a lightweight, refreshing platform that literally requires no installation. All it requires is knowledge of a handful of URLs and configuring your BOE server for web services (which is already configured by default).
- With the newest versions Windows AD Single Sign on is configurable with your custom application with much less time and effort.
- In classic Java/.Net SDK programming, as a programmer you would interact with an object model. But with the Retful SDK consisting a vast array of API calls, there are many waus to call the application that may or may not get your application the expected result. There needs to be more examplesof actual javascript based calls.
- Prior to BOE 4.0 SP6 there as little parity with the JAVA/.NET SDK so an upgrade to BOE 4.1 is necessary to get the majority of functionality available.
- We have built our own SAML, OAuth, Active Directory, SiteMinder and Ping Identity Connects through to BusinessObjects. I would expect these will be come part of the API in the future.
January 05, 2015
BOBJ: Powerful Reporting Solutions for SAP driven Data
Our Business Intelligence team uses it almost exclusively to build dynamic reports for both out internal users, customers, and vendors to mostly aid in the financial accounting of day to day operations. After our SAP implementation back in September on 2013, BOBJ was mainly used to recreate the reports our customers and personnel relied on to keep the books straight. Now that we have moved onto the Realization Phase of the implementation there has been a wide variety of requests for our BI team to tackle. The one report paramount to me is the KPI report they are developing, which is a currently a manual task I undergo weekly to consolidate the company's most important Key Performance Indicators and used to steer decision making at the highest level.
- Dynamic reporting and consolidation of information from disconnected sources
- Adaptability to needs of shifting business initiatives
- QA environments are understandably slow, but BOBJ's borders on driving me crazy
- Users must be highly trained to maximize the tool's capabilities.
We use SAP Business Objects as our Enterprise reporting tool at our organization. SAP Business Objects is used here for analytics, operational reports, supporting external customers through web services, letters, and custom applications. Thousands of batch reports are created nightly to support business operations.
- The flexibility that BOBJ offers is what sets them apart. We have some pretty complex needs around batching multiple reports and maintaining one schedule. We were able to set this up with a package or publication if we needed it bursted and then have that schedule trigger another batch of reports.
- We wanted to offer our external clients the ability to access information by calling a web service from their external applications. Using Query as a Web Service we were easily able to offer this to them. The Query as a Web Service client tool is easy to use even for a non-technical user. We have our clients create a report with what they want to see and then we turn it into a web service and let them consume it.
- We had a need to produce mass amounts of emails to our customers that would give them a summarized view of their accounts. Using the bursting option we were able to produce a single report that is sent monthly to each customer with only their data on the report. We created a custom application that our business could use to maintain a table of email addresses that the report should be sent to each month. This eliminated the need to have IT involved.
- We are not on the latest version (4.1) yet and would love to get there, but SAP has made this difficult. We have to add hardware and we are currently using the .NET Infoview. This is no longer supported in 4.1 and they only have Java BI Launch Pad. We have a considerable amount of work to convert over.
- SAP Support Portal is very difficult to use. It makes you login every page you go to and trying to get help is very difficult. I find most answers through trial and error or the BOB.
- I would really like to see the ability to schedule a report to an email, but rather than attach the report it includes a link to the report in the email. I know Cognos has this functionality and I would like to see it here.
- I also would like to see the ability to schedule to a text format. Currently it only lets you save to this format when you have the report open.
December 18, 2014
BO go or no-go
We use Business Objects for our enterprise reporting needs, various departments get their canned reports daily/weekly. They are able to run ad-hoc jobs. Business Objects addresses the need for massive report distribution and quick easy solutions to end users.
- Robust and sophisticated and can get the easy and quick answer to the business
- User friendly
- Easy scheduling and distribution of reports
- The SQL engine can be re-engineered , sometimes it will be over-head on database to fetch simple answer.
- Can be more powerful querying tool with lite/web versions with analytic reporting features
November 29, 2014
Bank Analyst Infrequent User Review
Currently the product is used in our operations areas such as Finance and Accounting, Credit Administration and Client Services. We utilize it to pull data and create reports on our data. Not everyone has access to it because of the sensitive nature of the data it has access. We address day to day business reporting. It is highly useful for automating daily reporting such as past due loans, overdrafts, closed and new accounts and other such daily reporting that no longer needs human interaction to be produced.
- Very easy to move fields around.
- You don't need to be a guru to work the program.
- Has many options on manipulating reporting.
- Able to have reports automated.
- When in the data provider and selecting fields, it gets clunky when the folders don't close up after going into another folder. You have to manually close the other folder before going to another.
November 04, 2014
SAP Business Objects: Easy-to-Deploy Great Looking Management-Level and Routine Enterprise-Wide Reporting
It is being used by the Financial Reporting team to write and burst operating metric reports to chief decision makers who do not want to "touch" the ERP Accounting system. It is used primarily for all producers in the organization and used by the Managing Director team. Addresses issues of usability and ease of use in getting key metrics quickly into decision makers' hands.
- It leverages existing data stores well to pull into SAP BO universes.
- It bursts reports via email in the form of PDF or Webi files very well.
- It is easy to build new reports from the ground up with extensive functionality within the report.
- Would be nice to more easily combine databases from disparate sources together into one universe.
- I wish there were more pre-built graphs and charts.
- Personalization parameters to filter reports to certain groups of users could be improved upon; kind of cludgy in our version.
October 08, 2014
You don't need IT staff to write your reports!
Business Objects is the tool used to report agaist our ERP, Lawson. It is used across the organization, and has been in play here for just over 10 years. We did not think that Lawson had a reporting package that met our needs, so Business Objects was chosen both for canned Financial/Operational reporting and for our adhoc reporting needs. We have trained multiple financial users to write reports using the Webi tool and these reports are in turn, scheduled and automatically staged and/or emailed to our users.
- SAP Business Objects handles massive amounts of data and does so very efficiently.
- The generation and organization of our data using Universes helps us to generate reports that are very easy to build. It's a drag and drop system that allows us to build reports with confidence that the data is correctly displayed.
- Business Objects helps our finance analysts to be more productive in supporting our medical customers with both financial and operational reports.
- Business Objects would be even more useful if it was integrated with a planning tool.
September 26, 2014
SAP Business Objects XI 3.1: Super-Sized Business Intelligence
The Jackson Group uses SAP Business Objects to analyze trends in healthcare survey data. We have both internal and external users who are able to take advantage of it's portal for online data access, dashboards and reports. SAP BO, along with Crystal Reports, enables us to combine data from many different sources into one standardized reporting platform.
- Easily allows end-users to build their own customized data queries and reports.
- Reports can be exported to excel or pdf with one click in order to be shared with other stakeholders.
- Once built, reports can also be scheduled to run at specific intervals (daily, weekly, etc) and automatically e-mailed to stakeholders, saving time.
- I know that most of my wish list items have been addressed in BO 4.1, items such as mobile functionality, easier connections to Xcelsius dashboards, and a better analytic workbench. We have not reached a point where we can update, but hope to do so within the next six months. Because of this, I do not think it is fair to list weakness on a product that is two versions behind.
September 23, 2014
SAP Business Objects tool review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using SAP Business Objects globally across the organizations. It helps us mainly with our on demand analysis and sending the daily information to our end users thru batch reporting.
- Very nice security system.
- It's a very robust tool which can handle around 30000 users.
- Very easy to use.
- Support is really weak. Most of support engineer doesn't know about tool.
- Support should get back quickly.
- Tool is little expensive.
September 15, 2014
Give Business Objects another look
We currently use Business Objects Web as our main enterprise operational reporting tool. We also use it for internal and external sales reports. Our BI reporting teams are on the business side vs. on the IT side. This tool provides a shorter development time and supports our business centric reporting model. This tool also supports the needs for Dashboard metrics reporting used by the operational departments.
- Speed to market - The BO universe allows us to respond very quickly to business changes and demands. The development of the universe and reports is a business function. This places the business knowledge hand-in-hand with the development.
- Allows users to modify reports to meet their needs. BO WebI is a very user friendly tool that allows users to take a production report and modify it and then save it for future use
- MS Office integration. SAP live office allows sections of reports to be embedded and refreshed directly in MS Office products such as PowerPoint. This helps reduce keying errors and time spent refreshing presentations to leadership
- Support. Like many large organizations SAP relies heavly on the user commuity and documents to support users. If you are a midsized company your best solution is a regional consulting partner.
- License agreements. You really need a good negotiation team to get the value for the money. Stay away from the named user agreements.
September 12, 2014
A Quick Summary of Business Objects
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Business Objects is being used as a reporting tool for both IT and business teams. It's relied upon to query a number of data sources including Oracle databases, datamarts, and EDW data stores. Reports are primarily created and maintained by a combination of IT and business teams. Business objects provides the ability for quick adhoc reporting and scheduling of routine reports.
- Quick ad hoc reporting of standardized information from the same datasource
- Easy drag and drop interface for new users to get acclimated to existing datasources without having to know the intricate join logic
- Web based interface allows users to easily share and distribute reports they create
- Scheduling allows users to setup a report to run for any time and frequency they prefer with little maintenance.
- Hard to keep track of changes to reports and report recovery
- Frequent version upgrades require businesses to update their infrastructure and reports
- Diminishing support from SAP for the Business Objects suite
July 21, 2014
SAP BOXI review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Business Objects was required for the use by analysts in data analytics and business intelligence. As part of the service management, all the incident management information was being collected in the BO database and it was then used for reporting. Specifically I used it for extracting reports and customising the cut of information I needed for analysing the service management trends, problem ticket details.
- It is a very robust application and is easily cutomisable.
- The dashboards and reporting aspect is very user friendly hence training on the application is not necessary. It did provide for drag and drop once the BO Universe was set up.
- Setting up the BO Universe needed programming knowledge at the time. I am sure that the newer versions are better.
June 02, 2014
Quick, Intuitive System
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP Business Objects is the primary database used across the whole organization. It allows employees to pull sales, purchase, and inventory data and perform analysis on this data. In my role, I use Business Objects to pull sales data across product categories, at the category, brand, and/or item level. I then use the data that I have pulled for various projects, including SKU rationalization, customer analysis, brand analysis, etc.
- The system is fairly intuitive, not much training required
- The system is much faster than systems I have used in the past, such as Oracle BI dashboards
- It is easy to "drill down" within the application
- Naming conventions seem to be an issue; additional character space could be allotted
- It may be helpful to add per case or per pound metrics
- It would be helpful if the item description could be split up, ie separate item # from description
May 30, 2014
Business Objects - Can We Live Without It?
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Business Objects is being used heavily by many departments at Citi to perform various analytical functions and research of various products and cases. I use Business Objects on a daily basis to run my early morning reports which highlight the daily trending of key performance indicators and help me understand what cases need to resolved more urgently. The only issues i think it could be more user friendly and easier to automate. I believe the new version of 4.1 should be a lot better.
- Ability to easily modify queries
- Refresh rates are fast
- Ability to schedule reports to inbox saving time from running recurring reports
- Good java development environment, user friendly interface
- Some of the reports takes forever to run, I know the data request is large but that can be improved
- Some functionalities like building a report or query could be made easier.
- Provide some short slides on best practices in running BO
- A demo on how to build a report should be included in the software
- How to schedule a report
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP business objects is used for financial reporting at our firm. It is primarily used in the finance community at Citi. It allows us to get financial data that we are not able to get in other financial systems. We specify the parameters and it provides us with a large data set, with which we can pivot the information. It works seamlessly with Excel.
- Works seamlessly with excel
- One of the few financial systems that allows our team to retreive a large amount of financial data
- Great data accuracy
- The program can be hard to use at first as some of the controls are not intuitive. Would recommend that SAP create a tutorial for new users.
- Creating the layout of the report can be glitchy at times - sometimes it allows you to create a report, other times it doesn't.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use SAP Business Objects on a daily basis to obtain the data needed for our management to make decisions and prove theories.
- Business Objects is great at data pulling and filtering.
- The ability to create your own metrics and dimensions in a key component in reporting efficiency.
- Being able to publish and schedule reports is crucial in information sharing.
- Business Objects is not the easiest or most intuitive program to use. I recommend you seek out training or at least user to user guidance when picking up the tool.
- It is difficult to customize tables, charts, etc in Business Objects. The program lacks and innate ability to improve the appearance of reporting.
- It's is hard to manipulate the data within the program. I often use the program to get to an adequate level and then dump the information into pre-made excel reports.
January 14, 2014
SAP Business Object Rocks!!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Is very useful tool for reporting purposes.
- Easy Integration for different platforms( .Net Java..)
- Good user interface.
- Ability to create report dashboards.
- More customizable graphs.
October 17, 2013
Business Objects 4.0 Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- This is a complete reporting tool, it provides ad-hoc reporting capabilities for the users.
- It does not store huge amounts of data. We cannot create datamarts but we can use them for reporting.
July 02, 2013
Business Objects - SRC
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Highly flexible reporting environment. Easy to write your own reports.
- Business Objects was fair at Budgeting. It allowed a lot of flexibility in creating a budget that meets the customized needs of any organization, but along with that it can be clunky and a little difficult to use. I would say the reporting ability was much better than the budgeting capability.
- Another aspect that this product does well is that it allows endless ways to consolidate different business units, departments, sites, etc. You can roll up a region, district, certain departments, etc. easily. This was a major advantage to my role overseeing 30+ hospital sites.
- SRC had a delay in information until the month's operations officially closed and the data was fed into the system. Other products that I have used allow you to see activity throughout the month. Knowing that it isn’t final, you can still get a sense of how revenues/expenses are stacking up for the month, etc. In addition, other operational metrics, like Average Daily Census, Admissions, etc. should be able to be tracked daily, rather than having to wait until the month is over.
December 21, 2012
Problems reporting against an OLAP database.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- I would score an 8 if reporting on a relational database - performance is good and the product works well.
- Features and options are good. It can cater to many different use cases, depending on end-user requirements.
- The suite contains multiple tools - OLAP, Explorer, Dashboards. It's highly versatile with a great variety of tool-sets. It doesn't force people to do things one way using a single tool.
- However, continuing problems in reporting against an OLAP database reduce the overall score to a 6.
- BW / Business Objects integration: SAP has more work to do here. Version 4.0 has removed major obstacles in stability, but we still have a lot of performance issues. The Business Objects features have been limited by the BW background. I would give this a score of 5 overall.
- SAP is pushing an in-memory database solution - HANA. SAP resources are focused on moving BW to HANA database. I believe BO performance will improve significantly as a result of this. We want to re-evaluate our data warehousing strategy, middle of next year. We are going on two paths currently. We want to take a step back and re-evaluate if SAP has a better solution.
- Dashboard tool sub-standard relative to Tableau. Takes weeks to get working vs. days in Tableau to build.
- Mobile compatibility is far ahead in Tableau.
- From the admin perspective, Business Objects is not fine tuned out of the box.
- Rolling out support packages is not disciplined -sometimes every 2 weeks, sometimes every 2 months.
- No good alerting and monitoring systems.
- No handshake to BW - e.g. send something on a trigger basis from another system to Business Objects.