Item: SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

It has got a positive impact as our strategic decisions depend on the SAP BI reports and analyses

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI and QlikView

As we have been using SAP ERP, having SAP BI was one of the key factors in our choice. Also design efficiency, variety of data sources' integration and document versioning gave better advantages to SAP BI over others. Also adding SAP BI during the SAP ERP rollout provided cost efficiency for the tool.

Key Insights

Do you think SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Access, Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM), SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, SAP ERP

Usability

SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence Platform would provide a good value for your report and dashboard needs. But be aware that very complex calculations and formulae may affect the performance substantially. Try to create several simple reports instead of a very complex one. Besides do not forget to ensure you have designed a normalized and versatile data layer.

Support Rating

We are getting the BI support from our SAP support company. Although they are good at some basic staff, they are unable to answer our questions for some complex structures. Sometimes we got the feedback that our request was not possible to implement, however later we found there were some methods available.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Good choice for providing business reports from a variety of data sources

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform