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SAP BW

Score8.5 out of 10

193 Reviews and Ratings

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What is SAP BW?

SAP Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019. SAP BW versions up to 7.4 have reached end of maintenance. SAP BW 7.5 support is extended to align with SAP Business Suite with NetWeaver components. For existing customers maintenance is scheduled to continue through 2027, with extended support available through 2030.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features SAP BW has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 193 ratings of SAP BW's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)

    Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.

    Category average: 9.6

  • Location-Based Data Governance

    Refers to how well the software enables users to comply with data privacy standards regarding the use of precise location data for customers.

    Category average: 9

  • Multi-User Support (named login)

    Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.

    Category average: 9.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Visualization

    The product’s support and tooling for analysis and visualization of data.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Administrative Automation

    The product’s capacity to automate administrative tasks such as patching, scaling, and creating backups.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Self-Optimization

    The product’s capability to monitor and adjust internal metrics and systems to keep performance as high as possible.

    Category average: 7.6

Reviews

What users are saying about SAP BW.
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SAP Business Warehouse - An old and gold solution for analytics

Incentivized
Raghuram SubramaniamView profile
Solution architect in Information Technology at Bosch (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAP Business Warehouse acts as a Data Warehousing and modelling tool for data analytics. It extracts data from different ERP systems and consolidates them for global reporting. The SAP Business Warehouse system connected with AFO and SAC offers analytical reporting for the use cases. The integrated planning and BPC cubes present in SAP Business Warehouse offers planning capabilities as well for FI usecases

Pros

  • Integration with SAP source systems is robust
  • Planning with SAP Business Warehouse data
  • Business content delivered by sap
  • Customization and enhancement options

Cons

  • Planning feature is not flexible compared to other planning tools like SAC
  • No options for AI ML usecases
  • Connectivity with third party tool for visualisation

Return on Investment

  • For Statutory and Regulatory reporting needs were automatised and provided a huge work reduction
  • The planning feature helped the business to anticipate the budgeting needs
  • Additional costs were need due to lack of cloud integration

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Informatica PowerCenter (legacy) and Microsoft Fabric

Other Software Used

Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Anaplan

SAP Business Warehouse - Scalable Integrated

Venu Arvinth Nandha KumarView profile
IT Project Manager in Manufacturing at HILTI ASIA IT SERVICES (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, SAP Business Warehouse is used as centralized data warehousing and reporting solution also it is integrated with multiple sources like S4HANA, workday, PIPO, Sales force and reports are built on top of AFO and dashboards are built on top of SAC also we use LSA++ architecture in our data flow. We use three tier landscape

Pros

  • It allows data integration from multiple sources
  • It also allows advanced analytics and real time data transmission
  • The ETL process (Extract, transformation and Loading) can be designed as needed

Cons

  • Performance with larger data set
  • Complex hierarchies
  • Query runtime can be improved for complex logics

Return on Investment

  • It provides single source of truth for reporting needs
  • it provides ability to make data driven decision
  • Sometimes it's hard to get the real time data
  • It is useful for any histroical data reporting

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Public, IBM Cognos Analytics and Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)

Other Software Used

SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, SAP Business ByDesign

SAP BW - mature and solid data warehouse.

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Corporate (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Still the main workhorse for enterprise business intelligence across all business domains and various SAP and non-SAP sources.

Pros

  • Stability for loads, monitoring and adjustments.
  • Scalability for enterprise BI.
  • Authorization
  • Core functionality like currency an UOM handling.

Cons

  • Line of business co-development.
  • Sourcing data from API endpoints.

Return on Investment

  • One truth instead of department specific definitions.
  • Repository for golden record for master data from multiple operational systems.
  • High performance analytical engine that is very cost effective compared to snowflake.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Fabric, SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Data Cloud, Snowflake and Databricks Data Intelligence Platform

Other Software Used

Anthropic Claude, SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Datasphere

SAP Business Warehouse has made data analysis simpler

Incentivized
Sandesh PasariView profile
Marketing manager in Marketing at WACKER (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use this product to track daily sales activity, market segment level database maintenance and profitability tracking.

Pros

  • Managing sales data
  • Preparing pivot of available SAP data
  • Extracting reports

Cons

  • It has high loading time when big data is extracted
  • Can provide automatic data visualization
  • It is expensive for mid sized companies

Return on Investment

  • It has improved our sales tracking
  • Preparing reports has become easier
  • Reduced time to market

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Zoho Analytics and Tableau Prep

Other Software Used

Salesforce CRM Analytics, Google Analytics, Microsoft SharePoint

BW Review

Incentivized
Andy Dahmus
Developer in Information Technology at Cintas (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is the core of all of our reporting. We have been using BW for around 15 years and our business couldn't run with out the product. We connect BW to all of our SAP systems including CRM, ECC, MDG in order to get a full picture of our company and how we can inovate.

Pros

  • Integrates data
  • Solid Security
  • Mature product where users are comfortable

Cons

  • More native connectivity to other sets of data
  • push more things down to the DB

Return on Investment

  • a single report has with data from multiple sources has saved us over $ 20m

Other Software Used

Eclipse

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