SAP BW or Business Warehouse and its business importance

SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is SAP's business intelligence solution, which enables comprehensive evaluations and reports based on a wide variety of company data. All company data, such as human resources database data and Excel lists, are grouped in SAP Business Warehouse.

SAP Business Warehouse consists of a combination of databases, analysis tools, and reporting applications. These reports should be used if companies want to optimize their processes and remain competitive.

 

But… What is SAP Business Warehouse?

SAP BW can be described as SAP's business intelligence solution, which enables extensive evaluations and reports based on a wide variety of company data.

 

What features does the SAP BW 4HANA package have?

SAP BW is a Business Intelligence (BI) product provided by SAP. Let's remember that BI package products are tools for referencing and analyzing all the data necessary for business operations; but understanding their features allows you to make the most of their original functions.

SAP and SAP BW are often the first choice when looking for BI solutions. However, the BI solutions market is broad. Therefore, it is always good to know that there are many alternatives in the BI solutions market that can be adapted to your company. Especially when it comes to flexibility and usability.

SAP Business Warehouse 4HANA can work with data from different sources in real time. It offers integration with Apache Hadoop, Spark, and other big data platforms and direct access to business processes.

In this article, we will explain the features and their relevance in the SAP BW 4Hana package for data analysis work.

 

The transition from SAP BW to SAP BW 4 HANA

SAP BW itself is a data storage platform that extracts, collects, organizes, and integrates large-scale important business data from SAP for data analysis with excellent scalability.

SAP BW/4HANA was launched in 1998 as SAP BW (Business Warehouse) and started with the purpose of having a better visualization of management indicators and multidimensional analysis of company data.

Since then, the functions of the Data Warehouse have expanded to adapt to the times and new technologies; but the emergence of SAP HANA marked a milestone for the SAP BW version.

It was here that all kinds of processing performance could be improved and, in this way, significant business improvements were created for each business. At this point it was reborn as SAP BW 4HANA.

 

What is the concept of this Data Warehouse?

The strengths of this concept are basically divided into 4 characteristics: simple interface, open, advanced, and high performance.

Simple Interface

In conventional BW, the interface offered information that could perform several functionalities, but it also had the disadvantage of complicating some operations, especially order processing. In contrast, in BW 4HANA, functionalities are reduced without sacrificing efficiency, achieving a simple structure without redundant elements.

It is open

BW 4HANA is designed to be open not only for internal use but also for external tools. In traditional BW, a set of external tools was limited because the design was based on SAP's specific connection method. However, in SAP BW 4HANA, any tool that can access SQL can be used as desired.

By being able to coexist with external tools, SAP has become very versatile; especially for companies that want to maintain their existing system environment as much as possible.

It has an advanced interface

In conventional BW, most of the work, including data modeling and monitoring, was done in SAPGUI. But BW 4HANA has improved this point.

It is designed to allow the use of easy-to-use modeling tools integrated with HANA Studio.

It is high-performance

Since SAP HANA is an in-memory data warehouse, it achieves data queries and loading at an extremely high speed. Therefore, SAP BW 4HANA also eliminates the need for summaries and statistics updates, and performance can be improved by applying algorithms.

Data warehouse

With SAP BW/4HANA, users can capture and link any data. We are talking about large amounts of information, that is, not only SAP data, but also data from applications from other software providers, unstructured data, geodata and Hadoop data. Historical data can be linked to live data. It is a complex process that helps the digital transformation of companies.

It can be said that it is an improvement for companies that want to incorporate the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning into the future of their business processes and the management of their database.

Is it possible to migrate to SAP BW 4HANA?

If you already have a BW environment in your organization's system, you may be able to migrate to BW 4HANA. To achieve this, it is important to discuss it with SAP consultants who will recommend using existing migration tools such as SUM/DMO and with them you can migrate your existing database to SAP HANA.

Then, the data flows must be migrated to new flows. And finally, you must update to BW 4HANA and the migration will be complete.

 

In conclusion

SAP BW/4HANA is a next-generation model of the historical BW series and is a product with high potential.

Follow us on social media and share this content.