Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business Warehouse
We use SAP business warehouse as an entire organization across the board. We use it as a data management system to store reporting data. We also use BEx as an interface to Excel and also use a data model called Infocubes. It also allows us to access data from other non SAP programs through the db link.
- Great tool for operational reporting
- Great analytical platform for enterprise environments
- Great for operational planning and forecasting
- Age of software is showing as it struggles with very large data modules, which were not as prevalent in its early years
- Querying performance at times can be very slow
- Support and development for BEx has been discontinued or hard to find.
- Exporting of data and reports to Excel is very easy for the end user to interpret and manipulate.
- Negatively, the speed at which BW retrieves data and reports is very slow and out of date.
- Addition of daughter application HANA has helped this aging application stay afloat for a few more years. Overall it has been a great tool but it's showing its age very fast.
SAP business warehouse was chosen years ago along with our current ERP software. It currently doesn't stack up well against newer software such as IBM Cognos, or SAS Business Intelligence. The positive side, is that the software has been around for many years and it is easy to find support from other users in the community. The interface is not the best, but after all it is a SAP product.