SAP Business Warehouse

Purpose

Reporting, analysis and interpretation of business data are crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly and in line with market needs. SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) provides tools and functions that enable companies to attain these goals. In SAP BW, you can integrate, transform, and consolidate relevant business information from productive SAP applications and external data sources. SAP BW provides you with a high-performance infrastructure that helps you evaluate and interpret data. Decision makers can make well-founded decisions and identify target-orientated activities on the basis of the analyzed data.

Integration

Integration with In-Memory Technologies

By using in-memory technologies, you can enhance the performance of SAP BW. In particular, they make it possible to efficiently process demanding scenarios with unpredictable query types, high data volumes, high query frequency and complicated calculations.

If you use a database to persist data, you can make it possible to access the data for a BW object faster by storing this data as an index in SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator. More information: Creating and Managing BWA Indexes in the BW System.

Besides the performance benefits, the SAP HANA database for data persistence offers further benefits when executing analysis and planning scenarios. In particular, you do not need a SAP BW Accelerator to improve performance. More information: Using the SAP HANA Database.

Integration with BI Content Add-On

With BI Content, SAP delivers preconfigured role and task-based information models and reporting and analysis scenarios for SAP BW that are based on consistent metadata. BI Content provides selected roles in a company with the information that they need to perform their tasks. The information models delivered cover all business areas and integrate content from almost all SAP applications, as well as selected external applications. For more information, see the SAP Help Portal: http://help.sap.com/bicontent.

Integration with SAP Business Explorer

SAP Business Explorer (SAP BEx) - the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Suite - provides flexible reporting and analysis tools for strategic analyses, operational reporting, and decision-making support within a business. More information: SAP Business Explorer.

Integration with SAP BusinessObjects Business-Intelligence-Solutions

You can evaluate SAP BW data by using the SAP BusinessObjects products. More information: Integration with SAP BusinessObjects.

SAP BusinessObjects tools allow you to make efficient and effective use of interfaces in the analytic engine. More information: Integration with SAP BusinessObjects.

Integration with SAP Enterprise Information Management

In the Data Warehouse, integration with SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward provides extra possibilities for using SAP BW. More information: Integration with SAP Enterprise Information Management.

Features

Function Areas of SAP BW and SAP BEx

Area	Description
Data Warehousing	Data warehousing in SAP BW enables the integration, transformation, consolidation, cleanup, and storage of data. It also incorporates the extraction of data for analysis and interpretation. The data warehousing process includes data modeling, data extraction, further processing of data, and the administration of the data warehouse management processes. The central tool for data warehousing tasks in SAP BW is the Data Warehousing Workbench.
Analytic Engine	The Analytic Engine provides OLAP functions and services, as well as services for BW Integrated Planning and analysis process design.
SAP Business Explorer	These SAP Business Explorer tools include query, reporting, and analysis functions. As an employee with access authorization, you can evaluate past or current data on various levels of detail and from different perspectives on both the Web and in Microsoft Excel. You can also use the Business Explorer tools to create planning applications, and for planning and data entry in BW Integrated Planning. You can use BEx Information Broadcasting to distribute content from business intelligence by e-mail, for example, as precalculated documents with historical data, or as links with live data. You can also publish the information to the portal.
Generic Tools and Services	Various tools and services support you in developing SAP BW objects and processes, supplying data in the system landscape, performing tests and traces, as well as monitoring SAP BW in your system landscape.
Interfaces	SAP BW provides an open architecture in many areas: You can extract data from various systems into a SAP BW system and evaluate this data for your reporting using various front-end tools.
Using the SAP HANA Database	Using SAP HANA as the database for SAP BW enables highly efficient processing of queries and Data Warehouse load processes. As well as replacing the old database, SAP HANA also replaces the SAP BW Accelerator, thus simplifying administration and the infrastructure.