SAP BW
April 26, 2016

SAP BW

Mark Liston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business Warehouse

We use it in our finance departments for different accounting purposes. It is connected to our OLTP ECC system and we ETL the data daily to enhance end user reporting. Our biggest gains from using BW are the ability to have self contained ETL and also move reports from the OLTP (ECC) to the OLAP (BW) side.
  • ETL, great at taking data from OLTP source, flat file, etc... Easy drag and drop for transformations.
  • Great reporting possibilities, easy to connect with BO, BPC, etc...
  • Great Master Data Management (MDM )for BPC - helps us maintain master data for BPC.
  • Quicker standup of BI Content, seems some of the 3.X content is still being used in 7+ which is a bit confusing.
  • Enhance the query designer side, would be nice to see real time preview of the report.
  • Enhance process chain maintenance, e.g. make it easier to kill jobs, restart, etc...
  • It has helped with our collections and disbursements reporting, helping us proactively identify trends.
  • It has helped with our banking, helping us identify banking needs.
  • It is easy to manage, for how much ETL we are are doing, we only need 1-2 FTE to manage.
I have previously used MicroStrategy Analytics for reporting and I can confidentially say this is a better option. First, we can do all ETL in the system and not have to rely on another tool. Second, it is easy to integrate with the SAP Lumira platform which seems to be much more powerful and easy to use than MicroStrategy.
SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is great with structured data sources where fields and ETL schedules are clearly defined, however, I'm not sure how it would work with unstructured data sources. If your OLTP source is ECC, BW is the logical OLAP solution; integration is easy and most extractors are ready to use out of the box with little time to set up.