BI Techniques
When implementing BI techniques, it is extremely important that you let business intelligence experts do the job for you and for your company. As part of the requirements gathering in project preparation, it is strongly recommended to apply use cases to each of the requirements. That is, by not only capturing what the business needs are and how we plan to address them (as part of the project), but also including how reports and dashboards are delivered and consumed, we discover how end users will use the information that is provided to them. With this process in place it will help us further understand the nature of the requirements and functionality each business user needs. This will also help us determine which tool to use, as well as help us with our design approach. By not only considering the needs and requirements of the business user, we can also identify the reporting toolset that will satisfy their needs. As you can see, the process is twofold. First, identify the actual functional requirements, and then identify the reporting component that will satisfy those requirements. The following sections include both a basic background of the product use and the guidelines for mapping required end-user capabilities to the BI platform, starting with an overall baseline approach, as depicted in the illustration.In the field of Business Intelligence, for casual reporting and analysis and general interactive reporting where BW is in place, Web Intelligence with OLAP universes is the first choice. For OLAP analysis where BW is in place, the BEx Analyzer (Web and Excel) client remains the tool of choice until the availability of the SAP BusinessObjects Pioneer. Voyager was the BusinessObjects component that was similar to the BEx Analyzer but should really not be concerned as an alternative. In the future, the preferred solutions for OLAP analysis will be based on the Pioneer project as a replacement for BEx Analyzer and Voyager. For formatted or production reporting from either BW or directly from ERP (ECC), Crystal Reports is the tool of choice. For dashboarding and visualization where BW is in place, the choice would be a combination of Xcelsius with Query as a Web Service (QaaWS) or LiveOffice as a connection layer. Business Intelligence gains more and more importance these days in an organisation’s IT system. We suggest you hire business intelligence experts who have training, knowledge and experience in SAP practices.
