SAP Business Warehouse Reviews

SAP is a great multipurpose tool within our organization, it allows us to greatly manage our PO costs, Work order statuses and add steps as required, manage work requests and notifications.

Hard to initially use, transaction codes can be confusing at times, but by saving them as favorites it becomes much easier.

Ensure you have someone knowledgeable with the program to assist with initial use, and then you are all set. It seems almost like a daunting program with many options and tabs,etc. to choose, but over time it becomes second nature and is a great tool for many businesses in many different fields or work.

Better management of PO's, work orders, etc. allows faster turnover of work projects and requests and better cost management all around.

Extraction methodologies available with core ECC, large volume data analysis, infocube designing, store of historical characteristics, advanced planning and optimization(APO) feeding capabilities. The integration platform also allows communications with various external PLCs to effectively extract shopfloor manufacturing data to report on utilization, downtime etc.

Data merging when extracting only delta feeds from ECC, integration issues with web-based dashboards, parallel data feed extraction when building historical data baseline.

SAP BI/BW provides a reliable platform for datawarehousing and provides accurate data for various types of reporting - Management, analytical and optimization. The reports can be customized specific to an organization and made user friendly. Although the strength of BW is integration with the core SAP ECC system, it can effectively talk with various external data modules and programmable logical controllers(PLC)s to produce manufacturing reporting to measure effectiveness of an assembly line/overall production. There is a learning curve and the system needs people with special skills to support it.

BW is used as the main data warehousing platform. It provides the single truth data for various applications that use historical data, trend analysis and demand planning. This has improved the planning process drastically, with more visibility of demand for manufacturing. Available to promise process also has been optimized and the data feeds from the PLCs have been effectively utilized as the manufacturing dashboard reports.

For custom reports, use the data warehouse to filter and format dashboard analytics that are meaningful! An excellent tool for specialized reports with custom formatting. Ideal for leading and lagging metrics reporting. The best features are: data warehousing, big data, data import, sql language support, parallel processing, stability and business intelligence. This supports our business operations perfectly All in all the best tool in the suite for custom reporting.

It can be unwieldy when you first use it but the learning curve is definitely worth it. It took six months before I was fully knowledgeable in its functions and use. Speed and graphical interface improvements would be good. As it is SAP, some find the strict functionality limiting and long for more flexible tools.

It is an essential tool in the SAP suite - well worth the investment reporting and analytics. Excellent for data warehousing, big data analytics and business intelligence. Use a leading software implementation consulting firm to deploy the solution for maximum effectiveness and value. I would recommend Accenture or IBM consulting.

Management reporting and analytics - providing meaningful metrics to management for strategy execution. Simplifies reporting and distribution of reports. Data warehousing, big data analytics and business intelligence. It is the central store for all our business data including financial, operational, safety and human resources.

Nothing. I can't think of anything that is good about the BW.

This is without a doubt one of the worst applications I have ever reviewed. The BW is great for consulting revenue because it takes forever to do anything in it. SAP is pitching using it with HANA, which if one did, would eliminate much of what the workbench in the BW does. At client after client the reports that BW is responsible for creating take forever to arrive. Companies that have the BW tend to rely on spreadsheets, so the BW is one of the worst investments in the overall IT stable of any company. Deloitte and IBM and others love the BW because it means money in their pockets.

The BW is dated in its design, but was never a good design, to begin with. There is never a good reason to use it.

This review is not for a specific application. I have often worked with BW resources on projects, and whatever I want to do, it always is more complicated than it needs to be when the BW is involved. BW also shares its workbench with a forecasting application called SAP DP. This poor quality workbench is one reason that SAP DP is such a difficult application to implement and to get value from as well as having such high maintenance overhead.

SAP BW is not very complex and is a widely used architecture. It has pre-defined connectors and data models for SAP source systems. Possibility to use BW as the framework for some other SAP applications. Good performance. Third party support - there are vendors that are certified to access the SAP BW system. BI users can quickly get answers to business questions, rather than spending hours reading through volumes of data.

SAP BW is very SAP oriented. No further developments for SAP BW front-end tools. SAP's future focus on SAP Business Objects and SAP HANA and not so much on SAP BW. Difficulty managing large data volumes. Complex interfaces. Difficulty managing large data volumes. Complex interfaces.

SAP BW is very flexible and meets our company's individual requirements. Gives the opportunity to better access and get a better understanding of key business metrics such as sales and to predict future performance. This BI tool can provide more accurate historical data, real-time updates, synthesis between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive 'what if?' analysis," eliminating the need to guesstimate. One of the great benefits of SAP BW is it allows companies to gain visibility into what customers are buying (or not), giving them the ability to turn this knowledge into additional profit and retain valuable customers.

Data modelling options

Transformation and routines that can be set up in between

Pricing to upgrade and inability to handle text.

SAP BW as it stands today is not something new implementations would be going with. In todays world there is SAP HANA and many open source solutions such as Big Data.

But for existing clients, there are a log of things that you need to consider before decisions to stay with SAP BW or to migrate to HANA or Big Data

Reporting problems and paradigms are what SAP BW is best suited for. It allows you to create custom data marts that are a tailor fit to your orgazniations reporting needs.

SAP BW is a great data modelling reporting platform with numerous options to meet whatever your requirement you might have

The most like-able part of this SAP program is how open ended it is. Customization is almost unlimited, and you can set reports to run off of one click.

Because this system is in fact so wide open, it takes a long time for a new user to become competent.

Invest in in-depth training, especially for an SPM Super-User

The ability to track every item and transaction in your warehouse so precisely makes everything easy. Reports on metrics/goals are easy to pull from the system, as well as tracking productivity of individual users.

I've been using SAP BW for over 5 years now and I love the way I can setup all my queries in one template and have it refresh for weekly reporting and other adhoc reporting via saved filters. The speed that BW runs is very fast even for queries that return over thousand rows of data.

The UI interface is not very intuitive and might be overwhelm for users who are not tech savvy or do not have data analytic backgrounds.

I would definitely recommend SAP BW to other individuals who are in the retail business for their daily data mining and to generate reports. It is very efficient to use and once you have the template set-up, you can save the view and use it for later on.

Generate consistent weekly, monthly reports to upper management in a timely manner by queries to our system databases.

The ability to analyze the business data which helps with all areas of business decision making. Have the business data in one place to report against allows you to optimize business processes, act faster, be more flexible, and keep up with current market trends and requirements.

Technical difficulty in running the SAP Business Warehouse. It is a very complex system and the long term success is based on having the right people in place during you initial implementation. Otherwise, you can spend a career fixing one SAP Business Warehouse system. The tools are complex, a business knowledge of the data is a MUST, and end user training can be difficult.

Be prepared for the results of your success -- your SAP Business Warehouse will grow. You will need lots of space and hardware!!

The business problem solved by the Data Warehouse is having all your data in one place to report against. It gives the business users UNLIMITED options on building and execution reports...given that you have enough hardware to run the complex reports users want to create!

I love that you can get so much information from SAP within seconds. You can get pricing, account info and productivity within SAP. The details down to the penny can be found in SAP so easily.

I do not like how you have to remember all the codes to get to certain sections to find information. This can be rather challenging at times. And there are certain areas that you have to have two windows open at a time to get all the info that you need to proceed.

Be sure to learn as much as you can before purchasing. This can be trying but once you get it down, its totally worth every penny for your company.

We have been able to get down to exact production and stock checks.

- User friendly

- Paralell processing is the best i have seen

- installed on all common database systems

-Took quite a bit of time to get the system and going withot any bugs

- Customer service

- lack of help articles

Its ok, for a small company but I think any large scale company will have a hard time implementing this into thier systems.

Building our warehouse system with SAP. After implementing, we expect our produtitvity to rise.

It has the features to integrate all kinds of business data both characteristics and key figures and draw relation to extract knowledge.

The main problem I felt was the UI. It is pretty tough to handle especially for new comers. You have to be very careful while operating it.

We were creating information from the transactions data of GBI in the US subsidiary and extracting larticular information as and when needed.

this product of SAP Business warehouse has a lot improvement for the customer. SAP HANA is part of the next step that most of the customer need to have in their road map.

SAP IQ product is the most downside product from SAP company. we spend lot of time, energy, money try to get this production to work in our SAP landscape.

Bank of america financial application and book of record

Easy integration with backend systems like SAP or non-sap to fetch the data

integration with JAVA to run Bex query with version 7.4

one of the best, most secure, to meet exact requirement, business warehouse SAP product for generating the publishing the report with data from any of your backend system

to generate the report and broadcast the financial data to our finance department with secure information gateway

Integration with SAP. Pricing (that it is included with SAP business suite). Its really a vert good basic data warehouse that meets corporate analytics needs,

The inability to get the data from BW to other systems. It is a sort of technical nightmare. The licensing of BW also does not allow taking a table dump from BW to other systems.

Ability to provide a stable corporate reporting and analytics system. This product is the basis for over 500 reports for past six years.

It accumulates data from several sources into one usable data set.

It's very slow to use. Every time you click something there's at least 30 seconds of waiting.

Have a lot of patience, but great for getting good data.

I'm using this to get sales data from multiple sources. Business Warehouse has been very helpful in this regard. It's the best way to do global analysis.

- Query ECC quickly

- Bookmark features allows you to quickly to send you work to other people or come back to the same report in the future

- Export to Excel/CSV feature

- Runtime / time out error if data set is too large

- Can be slow when running a large set of data

- Needs knolwedge of dataset

- Financial Statements

- Variance analysis

Info regarding upgrading to SAP BW to SAP HANA and performance.

How easy or difficult is the process.

I don't want case study more on technical side info.

on-going Performance and how to make business process is ease.

I don't like it. I really do not like this tool, so I have nothing good to say.

Not intuitive. I have been taught this tool a few times, but just can't figure it out.

Mining KPI metrics.

easy to drag and drop variables for queries. information is pretty fast to obtain.

Reports should be easier to manipulate and save.

powerful for every level of detail on product and customer performance.

Meta data , BI content and slicing and dicing functionality in old Bex

WAD and limitation in APDs , not allowing key figures in master data.

improve APD , RRI and exceptional aggregation to meet easily with any requirement

I have developed chain of reports for complete supply chain solution with great visibility of gap in their business process.

Easy to use and business can easily close using faster reporting

Hard to make changes to logic and also replicating data takes time

time it takes to replicate data

Started comparing with data lake where we have use several products to build solution, in SAP BW we have everything available in one production for eg ETL, modelling, scheduling, reporting.

Support packs are required ferquently with new version and if we opt apply OSS notes, there is always risk of breaking whole system

After migrating to HANA, reports are faster and business users love it.

The Architecture to keep data available fro reports

Require advance skills to model good designs

Provide data and reports to the business to make proper decisions

reporting, broadcasting, integration with java part

the load and the technical restriction with space consumptions

yes I highly recomand to switch and use for SAp BW now a days can use BW4 HANA, SAP BW on HANA for fastest reporting with realtime solutions

financial reporting and broadcasting the reports, beneficial for compay to use with existing reporting tool such as SAP BW

We get real time sales data which in turn check the inventory status , based on levels, purchase requisition/PO created and sent automatically.

Connection from ECC to BW could be tighter with no failures.

Real time data from Sales, procurement, planning and warehouse management is displayed on dash board which is time saving and right decision at right time.

Integration with SAP data sources (ECC) and SAP reporting tools

Lack of flexibility and ease of use for integrations to other systems

Ability to solve complex business issues through reports delivery with focus on values based on complex logic and calculations

Usability is good...it is very user friendly

Nothing really that I not like about it.

Reporting

The ability to customize daily reports! It is nice to be able to customize your report in BW instead of going through multiple SAP transactions.

The process of building the type of report you are looking for (complicated).

N/A

Compliance Reports to show which activities are coming up for service.

Speed , efficiency and reduction of info providers make development fast by just developing DSO .

Storing data for multiple sources in Hana is expensive.

We are consolidating data from different sources including SAP smart ops , APO and 3rd party . Building dashboards in design studios

SAP BW/BI is great to utilize for your BI requriements when using any SAP suite

I do not like the long learning curve to understand the SAP BW

We use SAP BI because we are also using other SAP products to run the business

It is capability to extract data from any source system and multiple option for reporting.

Data loading time is a bit concern. You can not see real time data In BW system, there is always time lag to come data in BW for reporting..

Yes.. Good product for various business reporting needs.

It is quite important for business reporting wit huge flexibility.

We have to option to save variants which makes it easy to run recurring reports.

It could definitely more user friendly. It takes time to get used to.

We use it to run reports connected to CATS and for analysis backup.

The slice and dice feature of OLAP reporting. consolidated view of data.

Fast moving tools/upgrade. Sometime the directions or first guidance are not available and that complicates or leads us to not using the new functionalities

Reporting - one source of truth

SAP Business warehouse allows us to quickly and effectively run reports that provide insight into our numbers.

Without HANA, Business Warehouse can run extremely slowly.

We are using Business Warehouse to run reports and performs analysis on all sorts of data.

Common problem areas leading to performance issues have been Push-down to HANA.

Transformations (AMDPs) pushed down to HANA has been plagued with bugs, but now stabilizing.

Various, greenfield implementations should consider implementing BW/4HANA in place of BW on HANA.

It is simple, but there is not much else to like

Format looks so old and it's slow to load

it's a very simple interface, at least the version we use in the BCBG shop

Inventory

It is efficient at collecting SAP data and allowing us to use BOBJ to report against the data.

It requires another landscape to house the same data

Reporting using existing SAP data in a better formatted.

Rock solid with few technical issues. Its been around for a while

Old technology. Cloud is the future with BW most likely to not be supported

Good reporting and data aggregation

integration with other SAP modules is very seam less

Not a very friendly product. In general working on SAP products and maintenance is pretty cumbersome

General Data ware housing problems.

Historical data that can be retrieved for dates in the past

Screen refreshes are taking too long. Dragging additional objects is slow

Historical data reviews

Improved speed of reporting. It rocks.

Waiting for it to be deployed since we really needed to have faster reporting.

Faster, user-based reporting on demand.

OLAP engine to enable optimized query analysis, simplified architecture

Complicated integration with Non SAP reporting tools like Tableau, Qlickview etc

Operational and management reporting

Ease of use and a powerful analytics tools

Data Modeling is little complex and multiple toolsets

Reports and Dashboards for Operations and Executives

Best analytics platform with amazing xs connectivity

Limited options with BEX and Less user interactive

SAP S/4 HANA, ORACLE, SQL Server

Ease of use for developers and architect

Upgrade was really painful and many issues were found.

Reporting