In 1972, five systems analysts began working nights and weekends to create standard software with realtime data processing. Twenty-five years later their vision is a reality: SAP is the world’s market and technology leader in business application software.  read more

Conclusion

With the growing network of processes and systems, the need for efficient management support systems is also increasing. However for this it is not enough to place a company strategically and give guidelines for its further development. Instead it is essential to have real time analysis and graphical visualization of the key performance indicators. In SAP BW automatic assimilation and analysis of information is possible. BW gives a holistic view of the company by considering both the financial data and non- financial assets of the company. As corporate planning is often not done in one common planning tool (e.g. turnover plan in a sales system and cost center plan in excel) studying interdependencies and coordination among them has become even more tedious. Thus the strategic management system must establish a planning process through all levels of planning in the company to make the data available for all responsible persons in one system. With SAP BW it is possible to upload data of different planning tools, manipulate planning data and write back changed data to the operational system. SAP BW can also be used as early warning system to inform the responsible persons about critical indicators on the basis of already defined thresholds of these indicators.  read more

Analysis of BW support navigation facilities integrated to BW 3.0

OLAP BAPI: SAP BW 3.0 comes with the OLAP BAPI Interface (OBI) which provides functions that can be used by third party reporting tools to access BW Info cubes. It provides an open interface to access any information that is available through OLAP engine.

Integrating with XML: OLAP BAPI serves as the basis for the SAP implementation of XML for analysis. It is an XML API based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) designed for standardized access to an analytical data provider over the web. The XML interface introduced with SAP BW 3.0 release accepts XML data streams compliant with the SOAP. Unlike all other SAP BW interfaces in XML interface the actual data transfer is initiated by the source system.  read more

Understanding the role of storage services layers in architectural model

* Master data manager: Master Data Manager generates the master data infrastructure containing master data tables as well as master data update and the retrieval routines. It also maintains master data and provides access to master data for use by SAP BW reporting components and for exporting to other data warehouse services for analysis and access services.  read more

Components of ETL Services at Database of File Level

* Operational Data Store: It stores detailed data and supports tactical, day-to-day decision making. A SAP view ODS as a near real-time informational environment that supports operational reporting by interacting with existing transactional systems, data warehouses, or analytical applications. SAP BW allows flexible access to data in the ODS, the data warehouse, and the multidimensional models.  read more

Fundamentals of ETL Service Architecture

ETL service comprises of two parts: Staging engine and Storage Service. Staging engine manages staging process for all data received from several source systems. It interfaces with the AWB scheduler and monitor for scheduling and monitoring data load processes. However, Storage Service manages and provides access to data targets in SAP BW and the aggregates that are stored in relational and multidimensional database management systems.  read more

The administration services in SAP BW can be availed through Administration Workbench (AWB). It is a single point of entry for data warehouse development, administration and maintenance tasks in SAP BW with Metadata modeling component, scheduler and monitor as its main components as described in the figure hereunder:  read more

Building SAP BW into multi-tier architecture model in Business Services

Being implemented on top of SAP Web Application Services SAP’s BW provides a multi-tier architecture (figure shown below), along with a complete software development environment, system management tools and additional functionalities such as currency conversion or security. Although it is closely related to SAP R/3, SAP BW is a completely separate software package which comes with automated extraction and loading facilities.  read more

Analytical View of Business Information Warehouse Model

SAP’s BW is based on "Enhanced Star schema" or "Info Cubes" database design. This database design has a central database table, known as ‘Fact Table’ which is surrounded by associated dimension tables. These dimension tables contain references to the pointer tables that point to the master data tables which in turn contain Master data objects such as customer, material and destination country stored in BW as Info objects. An InfoObjects can contain single field definitions such as transaction data or complex Customer Master Data that hold attributes, hierarchy and customer texts that are stored in their own tables.  read more

SAP’s BW Information Model: Overview

SAP’s BW information model is based on the core building block of InfoObjects which are used to describe business processes and information requirements. They provide basis for setting up complex information models in multiple languages, currencies, units of measure, hierarchy, etc. The key elements in the SAP’s BW information model are:  read more