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High priced but with good consultants, implementation and base case uses
November 23, 2018

High priced but with good consultants, implementation and base case uses

Jeff Looby, CPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business Warehouse

SAP Business Warehouse ("SAP BW") is used to aggregate data from disparate systems to create a single version of the truth or run reports / analyses across the entire organization. It is only used by the corporate team as each of the business divisions are extremely loyal to their specific software packages that are pulled into SAP BW (CRM, sales data, etc.).

The most important business problems that are solved is (1) the ability to produce more sophisticated analysis to drive executive decision making and (2) compile certain regulatory reports that are extremely time-consuming if produced outside of a data warehouse.
  • Integrates, stores, and manages company data from all sources
  • Pre-configured information models are better than average
  • Security authorization protocols and flexibility
  • Integration capabilities
  • Certain pruning can only take place on metadata rather than posted data
  • High runtimes for query execution
  • Results still requires fairly significant data verification time and effort
  • Infocube requires significant optimization efforts
  • 10% lower business analyst costs
  • 5% higher productivity
  • 7x as many useful business decisions
SAP BW is best for:

1. Large enterprises
2. Enterprises with 3+ legacy systems with entrenched users (politically difficult to merge)
3. Enterprises with employees who can understand both the technical capabilities of SAP BW and the needs of the business users - ability to speak both languages, otherwise the program could be unwieldy and potentially underutilized (it's not particularly inexpensive)

SAP BW is less appropriate for:

1. Small enterprises
2. Enterprises who have well established, same location, CRM and UFS - the integration of data analysis will be easier and less expensive with other solutions
3. HANA