SAP - -BI

Study Material
on
Business Warehouse / BI



Date: – 14 Aug’ 08
• ASAP methodoligy means nothing but
standard process for implementation of
SAP, It consists of 5 phases.

1. Project preperation - consists of
identifying team members and developing
strategy as how to go.
2. Business Blue print - consists of
identifying the client current process,
reqeirement and how SAP provides
solution.
Consists of detailed documentaion
3. Realization -The purpose of this phase
is to implement all the business and
process requirements based on the
Business Blueprint.

4 Final Preparation - The purpose of this
phase is to complete testing, end-user
training,

5 Go Live and Support
BI(Business Intelligence)
BI
Modelling
Eg: ERWIN
Extraction
Eg: Informatica
Reports
Eg: COGNOS
• Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category
of applications and technologies for gathering,
providing access to, and analyzing data for the
purpose of helping enterprise users make better
business decisions. The term implies having a
comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors
that affect your business. It is imperative that
you have an in depth knowledge about factors
such as your customers, competitors, business
partners, economic environment, and internal
operations to make effective and good quality
business decisions. Business intelligence
enables you to make these kinds of decisions.
 The ultimate objective of business intelligence is to
improve the timeliness and quality of information. Timely
and good quality information is like having a crystal ball
that can give you an indication of what's the best course
to take. Business intelligence reveals to you:
 The position your firm as in comparison to its
competitors
 Changes in customer behaviour and spending patterns
 The capabilities of your firm
 Market conditions, future trends, demographic and
economic information
 What the other firms in the market are doing

You can then deduce from the information gathered what
adjustments need to be made.
Businesses realize that in this very competitive,
fast pace, and always changing business
environment the only thing that will help them
gain a competitive advantage over their
competitors is how quickly they respond and
adapt to change. Business intelligence enables
them to use information gathered to proactively
respond to changes. For example Bill Gates the
co-founder of Microsoft was able to anticipate
the changes occurring in the technology industry
and as a result he was able to develop the first
operating software that could be universally
used on computers.
• Benefits of BI
BI provides many benefits to companies
utilizing it. It can eliminate a lot of the
guesswork within an organization,
enhance communication among
departments while coordinating activities,
and enable companies to respond quickly
to changes in financial conditions,
customer preferences, and supply chain
operations. BI improves the overall
performance of the company using it.
Information is regarded as the most important
resource a company has. So when a company
can make decisions based on timely accurate
information it improves the performance of that
company. BI also expedites decision making
because businesses realize that information can
be used to achieve a competitive advantage so
when a business obtains key information they
quickly use it before a competitor obtains the
same information. It also maximizes the
customer experience because when you are
able to properly cater to the wants or needs of a
customer you enhance the customer's
experience.
• Factors Influencing Business Intelligence
Customers are the most critical aspect to a
company's success. Without them a company
cannot exist. So it is very important that you
have information on their likes and dislikes. You
must quickly adapt to their changing demands.
Business Intelligence enables you to gather
information on the trends in the marketplace and
come up with innovative products or services in
anticipation of customer's changing demands.
Competitors can be a huge hurdle on
your way to success. Their objectives are
the same as yours and that is to maximize
profits and customer satisfaction. In order
to be successful you must stay one step
ahead of your competitors. In business
you don't want to play the catch up game
because you would have lost valuable
market share. Business Intelligence tells
you what actions your competitors are
taking, so you can make better informed
decisions.
Business Partners must possess the
same strategic information you have so
that there is no miscommunication that
can lead to inefficiencies. For example it is
common now for businesses to allow their
suppliers to see their inventory levels,
performance metrics, and other supply
chain data in order to collaborate to
improve supply chain management. With
business intelligence you and your
business partners can share the same
information.
Internal Operations are the day to day
activities that go on in your business. You
need an in depth knowledge about the
internal workings of your business from
top to bottom. If you make an arbitrary
decision without knowing how your entire
organization works it could have negative
affects on your business. BI gives you
information on how your entire
organization works.

factors that influence the design of a data warehouse and the structure that data
records are stored

 BW consists among other things of components for data
management (Administrator Workbench), for the definition of queries
by means of an OLAP processor (Business Explorer, BEx) and for
the control of loading processes. It is possible to split SAP BW in
three well defined layers:

 Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) layer - responsible for
extracting data from a specific source, applying transformation rules,
and loading it into SAP BW system.

 Data warehouse area - responsible for storing the information in a
multidimensional structure.

 Reporting - responsible for accessing the information in data
warehouse area and presenting it in a friendly way to the end user
• BW is a very common warehouse solution in
companies which use also SAP R/3. This is
because BW contains predefined R/3 extractors,
related OLAP cubes, authorization roles, query
views and reports integrated in the so called
Business Content. Thereby a shorter
development of DWH solutions is supposed to
be possible.
• BW is now part of a suite of SAP applications
called NetWeaver. Other components of
NetWeaver include SAP Enterprise Portal (EP),
Web Application Server (WAS) and Master Data
Management (MDM)
• OLTP(On-line Transaction Processing)
Operational systems for collecting and
managing the base data in an
organization, such as sales order
processing, inventory, accounts payable,
etc. Usually offer little or no analytical
capabilities
• OLAP is an acronym for online analytical
processing. It is an approach to quickly
provide the answer to complex database
queries. It is used in business reporting
for sales, marketing, management
reporting, data mining and similar areas.
Some people have suggested that an
alternative and perhaps more descriptive
term to describe the concept of OLAP
is Fast Analysis of Shared
Multidimensional Information, or
FASMI.
• The Multi-Dimensional Model (MDM)
• Comprehensibility for the business
analyst is reached by organizing entities
and attributes that are arranged in a
parent-child relationship (1:N), into
groups.These groups are called
dimensions and the members of the
dimensions dimension attributes, or
attributes.
• The strong entities define the dimensions
For the business analyst the attributes of a
dimension represent a specific business
view on the facts (or key figures or KPIs),
which are derived from the intersection
entities.

NORMALIZATION
• The process of reducing a complex data
structure into its simplest, most stable
structure. In general, the process entails
the removal of redundant attributes, keys,
and relationships from a conceptual data
model.
The process of converting complex data
structures into simple, stable data
structures.

• The basic process of mapping an ERM to the Star schema is shown on the following
graphic

The key elements of a Star schema are:
Central fact table with dimension tables shooting off from it


 Fact tables typically store atomic and aggregate transaction information,
such as quantitative amounts of goods sold. They are called facts.


 Facts are numeric values of a normally additive nature.


 fact tables contain foreign keys to the most atomic dimension attribute of
each dimension table.


 Foreign keys tie the fact table rows to specific rows in each of the
associated dimension tables.

STAR SCHEMA


ERM MDM

1) STRONG ENTITY 1)CHARACTERISTICS
2) WEAK ENTITIES 2) ATTRIBUTES
3) FACTS 3) KEY FIGURES OR FACTS
4) INTERSECTION ENTITY 4) FACT TABLE
• Extended Star Schema:
• Many of the problems associated with the
basic star schema are resolved with the
BW extended star schema. With the
extended star schema, attributes are
removed from the dimensions and placed
outside the InfoCube in master data
tables.
Extended Star Schema

• The graphic shows a multi-dimensional BI data model


• Reporting systems of all kinds are
common in today’s enterprise
environment. Many of these systems,
however, are unable to provide the kind of
information that you need to help you
make complex decisions.
• Data warehouses, such as the SAP
Business Information Warehouse (BW),
provide the kind of decision-support
system that is needed in today’s business
environment.

Flat file source system OLTP System
BI Content is delivered as an add-on to SAP BI. The
naming is SAP NW 2004s BI Content Add-On 3. This
will be referred to as Business Content.

• Purpose:
 Business Content is a pre-configured set of role and
task-related information models that are based on
consistent metadata in SAP Business Intelligence.
Business Content provides selected roles within a
company with the information they need to carry out their
tasks.
This information model includes integral roles,
workbooks, queries, InfoSources, InfoCubes, ODS
objects, key figures, characteristics, update rules, and
extractors for SAP applications.

Business Content can:
Be used in particular industries without
being modified
Be modified, meaning you can work with it
to any degree of detail
Serve as a template or an example for
customer-defined Business Content.

• Implementation Consideration
On one hand the comprehensive Business
Content for SAP Business Intelligence
enables a quick and cost-effective
implementation. On the other hand, it
provides a model that is based on
experience gained from other
implementations which can be used as a
guideline during implementation.
• Features of Business content
SAP Business Intelligence delivers pre-configured objects under the
collective term “Business Content”. These objects speed up the
implementation of SAP Business Intelligence because they deliver
complete solutions for business information needs.
• Business Content includes:
 Extractor programs for SAP systems
 DataSources
 InfoObjects
 InfoSources
 Data targets (InfoCubes and ODS objects)
 Variables
 Queries
 Workbooks
 Crystal Reports
 Web templates
 Roles
Business Explorer (BEx) Analyser
The distinct new features of
SAP BW 7.0
• Renamed ODS as DataStore
• Unification of Transfer and Update Rules
• Push Of XML data into BI system (into
PSA) without Service API or Delta Queue
• Introduction of BI accelerator that
significantly improves the performance
• Load through PSA has become a must
• Search functionality has improved, you
can search any object
• In BW 7.0 we create Transformation Rule
that replaces both transfer and update rule
that exists in BW 3.5
• We don’t create “infosource” in BW 7.0.
The “data transfer process” gets
automatically created as soon as we
create transformation. So data is directly
fetched from data source by using data
transfer process. We can assign it to
multiple datasources also.

Advantages of using data warehouse
• There are many advantages to using a data
warehouse, some of them are:
Enhances end-user access to a wide variety of
data.
Increases data consistency.
Increases productivity and decreases computing
costs.
Is able to combine data from different sources, in
one place.
It provides an infrastructure that could support
changes to data and replication of the changed
data back into the operational systems.
Concerns in using data warehouse
Extracting, cleaning and loading data could be
time consuming.
Data warehousing project scope might increase.
Problems with compatibility with systems already
in place e.g. transaction processing system.
Providing training to end-users, who end up not
using the data warehouse.
Security could develop into a serious issue,
especially if the data warehouse is web
accessible.





ThaNks !!