SAP BW/4HANA - An excellent choice for data warehousing
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SAP BW/4HANA as our one stop global and holistic data warehousing platform for business analytics that drive business decisions. It is also used for some financial planning use cases to seamlessly blend actuals and planning data to predict and project future outcomes which can be easily analyzed by the business in Analysis for Office and SAP Analytics cloud tools. The embedded BPC 11 component within SAP BW/4HANA is also used for month end financial consolidation as part of the financial close process. SAP BW/4HANA helps us consolidate and harmonize business data from multiple SAP and Non-SAP systems to help better manage and organize data in one central repository that ensure data integrity and identical results across various lines of business globally. I personally have been working with BW and BPC for over 25 years now right since its inception in 1998 and have seen the product evolve and mature immensely over the years and hence big fan of this platform.
Pros
- Very strong out of the box integration with core SAP ERP platforms including S/4 as well ability to integrate non SAP sources of data. The additional bonus is the pre-delivered SAP built business content to jump start analytics projects and reduce time to value significantly.
- Very well thought out data modeling, integration and monitoring tools besides strong ETL capabilities to transform and enrich business data.
- Strong integration with the other SAP cloud offerings such as SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere make it an even more valuable platform. Not to mention the Excel friendly Analysis for Office tool that every business user loves and is very easy to adopt and deploy. The performance on HANA is also excellent to manage huge volumes of data as well as access it quickly for planning and analytics use cases.
Cons
- It would be nice to see tools available within SAP BW/4HANA for cross platform esp. other SAP systems integration from a data extraction and scheduling standpoint. This is to ensure BW data stays consistent with its sources and is refreshed only after completion of core business process activities in its source systems. This is also relevant from a SAC and Datasphere integration standpoint for data being fed from SAP BW/4HANA as these platforms currently only support time based scheduling options with no dependencies possible against SAP BW/4HANA processes. Currently most companies employ an external third party scheduling tool to manage this.
- With the advent of Analysis for Office the ability to publish AFO workbooks has been lost directly from the SAP BW/4HANA platform unlike its BEx Analyzer predecessor which had the Broadcaster. The use of BO Platform is not an ideal use case for this functionality which is very basic in its scope.
- In this age of AI would be nice to see functionality introduced for AI co-pilots like Joule to speed by data modeling and scheduling activities as well as a natural language based querying options within AFO.
Return on Investment
- SAP BW/4HANA has been immensely helpful in eliminating alternate silos of data creation by business users thereby ensuring data integrity and consistency across the organization. The focus is now more on data analysis as opposed to data preparation in spreadsheets saving users hours of laborious manual work in collating data.
- We have been able to quickly integrate and leverage data from multiple SAP systems into SAP BW/4HANA to drive holistic decision making within the organization including streamlining the month end close process using BPC.
- Excel friendly reporting tools such as Analysis for Office have made it much easier for user adoption and training making change management much easier and change the culture within the organization.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
QlikView and Microsoft Power BI
Other Software Used
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Datasphere
