SAP BW


What is SAP BW?

SAP offers two ways of data warehousing using SAP HANA: 1) the data warehouse application approach using SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA, and 2) the SAP HANA Native Data Warehouse.

What is SAP BW?

SAP offers two ways of data warehousing using SAP HANA: 1) the data warehouse application approach using SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA, and 2) the SAP HANA Native Data Warehouse.

Data analytics is as vital to business success as the products and services they sell. But data volumes alone do not equal analytics — the proper consolidation, quality, access, meaningful transformation, and reports make it valuable. For most companies, what turns data into value is investments in data warehousing technologies.

SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) packages a powerful set of data warehousing solutions and tools to enable companies to curate data from many sources, including SAP HANA and other databases — integrating, extracting, and transforming them to derive meaningful insights for the business. SAP BW gathers, converts, and retains data from both SAP and non-SAP applications, providing access to it through reporting, business intelligence, and analytics tools. It also acts as a development platform for building and adjusting data warehouses, managing data-related tasks, generating reports, and creating analytics applications. Business users access SAP BW through customized applications, and unlike typical data warehousing solutions, SAP BW solution offers the flexibility to define data warehouse objects and manages them based on the platform and specific constraints.

Benefits of SAP BW

Data Warehousing: In SAP BW, data warehousing facilitates the integration, transformation, consolidation, cleanup, and storage of data. It extracts data for analysis and interpretation. The data warehousing process involves tasks such as data modeling, data extraction, data processing, and the administration of data warehouse management processes. The Data Warehousing Workbench is the primary tool for performing data warehousing tasks in SAP BW. Some of the key features and benefits of SAP BW are:

Enhanced features: SAP BW is a collection of BI content such as pre-built extraction routines, meta-data, InfoCubes, information models, reports, and channels. This comprehensive package ensures immediate analysis and reporting capabilities without the need for extensive customization. Organizations can measure their system performance, optimize reporting, and monitor security. This enables them to efficiently assess the overall performance of their system, streamline report generation, and ensure the integrity of their data and processes.

Adaptability: BW is highly adaptable and allows modifications and additions to data sources, meta-data, InfoCubes, and reports. For example, custom ABAP code in transformations, InfoPackages, and DTPs can be written.

Advanced Analytical Capabilities: The MultiProvider tool in BW enables users to perform complex analyses on multidimensional data sources.

Secure and Persistent Data Storage: BW provides permanent data storage, ensuring that historical data remains accessible and eliminating the risk of data being purged or lost like in transactional systems. Users can easily navigate through data across different time periods, perform trend analysis, and make future projections, which is typically challenging in transactional databases.

Data Identification: Identifying and rectifying bad data is crucial to avoid project disruptions. BW offers tools to detect such errors, enabling users to pinpoint the source of the incorrect data and address the underlying issue promptly.

Decision-Making: Irrespective of the company size or the stage of data intelligence implementation, leveraging BW enables organizations to derive valuable insights from past data and make well-informed plans for the future. It goes beyond serving the IT function by empowering marketing, sales, and operations teams to make strategic decisions that drive the organization forward.

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19 results

  1. SAP business warehouse update

    SAP Business Warehouse is SAP's workhorse data warehouse system. Always innovating, SAP has continued to extend the value for both new and existing SAP Business Warehouse customers with new functionality in SAP BW/4HANA. In this session you will hear about: -The latest innovations in SAP BW/4HANA -Upgrading your existing system to the latest BW/4HANA technology…

  2. BI & HANA: Case study: How Callaway Golf unleashes the potential of embedded BW for real-time dashboarding

    Published: 01/March/2019

    Reading time: 1 mins

    Learn how Callaway Golf leverages embedded BW functionality for its real-time reporting needs. here Norman Ruppert If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.... This content is for Mastering SAP Premium Access and Mastering SAP Preferred Access members only.Log In Join Now

  3. Use Cases for Embedded SAP BW in Your SAP Transactional System

    Published: 21/December/2017

    Reading time: 11 mins

    SAP system users have had the ability to run an embedded SAP BW system inside SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), starting with SAP NetWeaver 7.0; Suite on SAP HANA; and SAP S/4HANA. See how to use this capability (since it is included in your SAP transactional licenses) with minimal pain and cost. Key Concept Although...…

  4. Use a Generic RFC Function to Call Functions in Another SAP System with Serialized Parameters

    Published: 10/October/2017

    Reading time: 6 mins

    The integration of data and processes among different SAP systems has always been challenging and expensive in development. You can dramatically reduce the development effort in system integration by exploring the generic presentation of functions/methods and the generic presentation of parameters in a generic Remote Function Call (RFC). Key Concept A Remote Function Call (RFC)-enabled...…

  5. Cascading Prompts: The Next Generation of F4 Value Help Filtering

    Published: 20/September/2017

    Reading time: 28 mins

    Use native SAP HANA modelling techniques and enhancements to provide end users with a user-friendly, real-time variable selection process across massive amounts of data. Key Concept Achieving consistent and relevant user prompt selections across multiple BI front-end tools has been a key area for many BI implementations. Value help and the cascading filtering of a...…

  6. Optimizing SAP BW on SAP HANA

    Published: 01/May/2017

    Reading time: 22 mins

    After technically migrating to SAP BW on SAP HANA, leveraging capabilities of your SAP BW on SAP HANA system that are pushed down to the SAP HANA database and do not run on the application server is key to a successful optimization road map — and it is a challenging task. In this live Q&A,…

  7. Quick Tip: Best Practices for Designing SAP BW BEx Queries and a Comparison of Connection Options

    Published: 15/February/2017

    Reading time: 8 mins

    This checklist helps you learn SAP BW BEx Query design best practices to enable you to build performance-optimized SAP BW BEx Queries. Also see a quick comparison of the three SAP BusinessObjects connection types: Business Intelligence Consumer Services (BICS), relational, and Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) connections. This quick tip also helps you decide which…

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    How to Use BICS to Connect SAP BusinessObjects Client Tools to SAP BW (Part 2)

    Published: 07/November/2016

    Reading time: 12 mins

    Learn step-by-step instructions for how to create a Business Intelligence Consumer Services (BICS) connection and then use it to connect three BusinessObjects reporting tools: Web Intelligence, Design Studio, and BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office, to an SAP BW BEx Query. Key Concept A Universe is the Semantic Layer that resides between the database and...…

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    How to Use BICS to Connect SAP BusinessObjects Client Tools to SAP BW (Part 1)

    Published: 24/October/2016

    Reading time: 8 mins

    Learn how the Business Intelligence Consumer Services (BICS) connection works internally, and connects Business Explorer (BEx) Queries to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 client tools. Key Concept Business Intelligence Consumer Services (BICS) is an optimized data access protocol used within SAP systems. It connects SAP BW Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) sources, such as BEx Queries and InfoProviders,...…

  10. Agile Data Virtualization in SAP BW with Open Operational DataStore Views

    Published: 17/October/2016

    Reading time: 11 mins

    Open Operational DataStore (Open ODS) views are a new type of SAP BW modeling object. Instead of SAP BW InfoObjects, Open ODS views are defined with fields that are aligned to the datatypes of the external relational source they represent. Learn about the rationale behind developing these new types of metadata objects and the modeling...…