Business intelligence best practices and strategies in SAP environments

Transcription

1 E-Book Business intelligence best practices and strategies in SAP environments As companies look to get more value from their SAP application investments, BI is hot. But for SAP customers, it s also a confusing area. Some customers are just starting to implement BI strategies in their SAP environments, while others are confronting investments in BEx tools that SAP won t support in a few years because of its BusinessObjects acquisition. There s also data warehousing strategy to consider -- and to stick with BW or move to another data warehousing platform is a still big unknown for many SAP shops. In the ebook, readers will learn best practices for forming a BI strategy in SAP environments, including whether to stick with BEx and what to do with BW. Sponsored By:

2 E-Book Business intelligence best practices and strategies in SAP environments Table of Contents Consider more than end of support in move from SAP BEx to BOBJ SAP BW or third-party data warehouses a dilemma for SAP customers Leveraging BW strengths and overcoming weaknesses: Should you upgrade to BW 7.3? Celestica launches SAP Business Analytics Center of Excellence project Resources from IBM Sponsored By: Page 2 of 17

3 Consider more than end of support in move from SAP BEx to BOBJ By Courtney Bjorlin, Site Editor A move from SAP BEx tools to SAP BusinessObjects tools should be driven by where the new applications can fill gaps in functionality, not simply by the end of support, analysts say. SAP has said that it will retire many of the Business Explorer (BEx) tools in seven years. But SAP NetWeaver BI/BW customers with no immediate demand beyond what BEx does for them now should stay the course, according to Boris Evelson, principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "If there was such a huge demand for BEx to be continued -- if by the time this expires, there are still tens of thousands of BEx users out there -- [SAP will] want to offer support," Evelson said. "At the very least, people still have a lot of time and room. There's no immediate concern." Shortly after SAP acquired BusinessObjects, the company announced its SAP BI roadmap and said it would phase out the BEx product line -- including the BEx Report Designer, the BEx Web Analyzer and Excel Analyzer, and Web Application Designer -- by In 2010, Web Application Designer clients can upgrade to Pioneer, which combines the BEx Analyzer and Voyager tools. SAP wouldn't break out the number of customers it has using SAP BEx tools, or the number that have moved to SAP BusinessObjects ones, except to say they're getting good traction in the SAP installed base. But most SAP NetWeaver BI customers are still in the planning stages, Evelson said, and are testing, prototyping and evaluating the SAP BusinessObjects tools. Many were already using both the NetWeaver BI tools and BusinessObjects tools prior to SAP's acquisition of the company more than a year ago. Sponsored By: Page 3 of 17

4 "If anything, they're approaching this cautiously, and running both in parallel," Evelson said. Budget concerns, and the size of the investment in the BEx tools, have many customers implementing SAP BusinessObjects tools in a more piecemeal manner, according to Franz Aman, SAP's vice president of intelligence platform marketing. "They can't afford to throw everything out with the bath water," Aman said. "They're deploying nicely together in parallel." At a recent IT forum in Boston, three of the four panelists had plans to standardize on SAP BusinessObjects, naming new functionality and its ability to integrate SAP and non-sap data as the major reasons. But none had implemented the tools yet. "Our goal for BusinessObjects was not only an incorporation of SAP and non-sap data but to make the end users more self-reliant, rather than coming to IT every time they need a new report or a new query," said Day & Zimmermann CIO Anthony Bosco, who added that a Crystal Reports implementation has been stalled by budget concerns. BEx is pretty limited in what it can do, Evelson said. It provides basic analytical functions, but nothing beyond that. It doesn't have a more formal reporting function or dashboarding. Customers should look to Crystal Reports for core reporting, Web Intelligence and Desktop Intelligence for lightweight OLAP, and Xcelsius for dashboarding, he said. Business Explorer, SAP's new "Google-like" BI search tool, is also an asset. The product brings together search and navigation capabilities from SAP BusinessObjects with the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator to help customers mine large data sets in a matter of seconds. The product will be available this summer. "If a customer has found that BEx is limiting and needs to go beyond, [he] should look at the other BusinessObjects tools," Evelson said. "Luckily, BusinessObjects does have a very rich portfolio." In that light, SAP has also made the move a little easier with some licensing changes instituted back in the spring. Sponsored By: Page 4 of 17

5 The new model, which is consistent with SAP pricing, gives credit for user licenses, but users will still incur license fees in adopting the business intelligence platform, according to a Gartner Research report. SAP customers can leverage existing Professional and Limited Professional SAP Application user licenses for accessing the View and Explore tier of SAP BusinessObjects. This allows users to access secure BI content, content from Microsoft Office and a mobile device, as well as view reports, analysis and dashboards. But SAP customers will have to pay CPU license fees for the back-end package. They'll also pay more for additional users and upgrades to the second license tier, Design and Analyze, which includes designing reporting, ad hoc analysis and creating dashboards, performing OLAP analysis, and performing system administration functions, according to Gartner. Customers can also freely swap licenses between tools, Aman said. For instance, if a company decides it needs more access to Crystal Reports than Xcelsius, it can use that tool without renegotiating with SAP for new licenses. "I think we have the best licensing model in enterprise BI now," Aman said. "The customer's not paying for shelfware; the customer's paying for what [he's] using." Sponsored By: Page 5 of 17

6 SAP BW or third-party data warehouses a dilemma for SAP customers By Catherine Lacroix, Contributor Organizations continue to invest in data warehousing and business intelligence tools despite the wobbly economy -- or perhaps because of it -- as companies try to remain competitive. Yet for companies developing an SAP data warehousing strategy, there are several areas to take into consideration. First and foremost, they need to look at where their data lives now. Whether to turn to SAP for a data warehouse or to a data warehousing specialist depends largely on the company's existing structure. "It largely depends on your data sources. If you're a wall-to-wall SAP shop, it's a nobrainer; but of course, that's not always the case," said Madan Sheina, principal analyst at Ovum Research. As more companies use information like a strategic asset, effective access to that information is key. So, if roughly 80% of the data is coming from an SAP source, there's little reason to look elsewhere. "But if it's less than 60%, then there's little reason to go with an SAP data warehouse," said Boris Evelson, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "You'd be trying to put square pegs into round holes." SAP's data warehouse -- called BW -- is a big database that stores transactional historical information to help business users make decisions. "The SAP data warehouse is not typically architected and wasn't invented to hold non-sap data," Evelson said. Bringing non-sap data into BW introduces complexity. Sponsored By: Page 6 of 17

7 "When you have to build new structures, non-sap structures, it can be tricky and problematic because you have to build the routines from scratch and then integrate these different formats within the SAP format," Sheina said. "It's all about making BW fly in a heterogeneous environment." The top two reasons customers cited for staying with BW (according to a May 2009 report by Forrester, "To BW Or Not to BW") are the large proportion of data sourced from SAP applications, including R2, R3, MySAP and xapps; and tight integration with SAP applications and SAP BI products. Out of the 40 enterprises surveyed for the report, 47.5% stated that more than 75% of the data that feeds BW comes from SAP applications. SAP's acquisition of Business Objects may help companies turn to BW because Business Objects has its own ETL tool called Data Integrator XI -- which is part of a bigger data management suite within SAP Business Objects. "This strengthens [SAP's] BW position as a bona fide data warehousing platform," Sheina said. "It could also signal a change in emphasis, as it will be much easier to consolidate data from non-sap sources into BW, which has always been a source of contention for any SAP system." SAP lagging behind other vendors in scalability Although SAP is one of the largest data warehousing vendors, some users have been dissatisfied that the company has fallen a little behind in terms of scalability. "Competitors such as Teradata, Oracle and IBM can now scale into the petabytes (1,000 terabytes)," James Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester, said. "SAP is making some strides to evolve with BW, by allowing you to accelerate queries using a front-end platform called BW accelerator." He also points out that SAP is going to continue to evolve BW to handle hundreds of terabytes. "So they're making great strides. However, their users are concerned that they haven't been innovating as fast as the competition, and that's a justified complaint." Sponsored By: Page 7 of 17

8 In addition, SAP's competitors are expanding into more complex data mining functions like scoring and database analytics. SAP doesn't have a strong focus on data mining and advanced analytics efforts, according to Kobielus. "BW customers are frustrated by the fact that it doesn't scale, and it's more complex to administer and design integration code," he said. "SAP BW is a good data warehouse, but it's not intuitive enough. But they know that, they're evolving that. SAP realizes they need to continue to beef up that product, because customers are looking for ways to migrate away from BW if they can." In-house BI specialist key to success with SAP BW The next consideration when it comes to strategy concerns systems integrators. "BI and data warehousing is not plug and play," Evelson said. "It requires lots of customization, it's all about best practices, it's not like you can buy a textbook and do it yourself." More than just implementing it, SAP BW requires some specific skills to keep it up and running. "The biggest shortcoming of SAP BW is not on the implementation side -- although that can be complex -- but in keeping it running," Kobielus said. "First of all, BW shares a lot of code with its parent R/3 product; it uses the same kernel and ABAP languages. It isn't necessarily the functionality of the product but the cost involved in implementing and keeping it running." As a result, companies have to make sure that they have a BI specialist in house. "Finding those resources can be difficult and costly," he added. "They also have to make sure that they understand some of the processes in R/3. They have to understand how the data is structured and the process models are upgraded in BW to analyze it." According to Sheina, Business Objects helps by broadening BW and extending it on the front end. "Before, the front of BW was Business Explorer, which was a complicated tool. Now, with Business Objects, SAP extends its breadth and its value at the back end and the front Sponsored By: Page 8 of 17

9 end as well," he said. "The complexity is still there, but it does give you more leeway to source a complete end-to-end BI data warehousing solution from a single vendor." "The company needs to continue to understand that the world is not SAP-centric," Evelson said. "They need to make tools more open. But, on the other hand, by making them more open, you lose some precision, so it's a fine line: better integration vs. being more open." There will be an ongoing role for BW as a big database to do predictive models, according to Kobielus. "It's a valuable investment that customers don't want to squander, but they need to be able to leverage it for its full potential." Sponsored By: Page 9 of 17

10 Leveraging BW strengths and overcoming weaknesses: Should you upgrade to BW 7.3? By Courtney Bjorlin, Site Editor SAP customers can expect several improvements in the forthcoming SAP Business Warehouse (BW) 7.3 release, but it came at a cost -- SAP skipped a release. Early this year, SAP announced that it will scrap the BW 7.2 release because customers wanted more functionality in fewer upgrade steps. That new functionality includes enhanced modeling tools and better integration with SAP BusinessObjects and EIM tools to increase scalability and reduce development time. Beta shipments of 7.3 started in July, and the product is set to go into ramp-up in November. Even with the boost in functionality, BW customers still face a tough decision on whether to upgrade based on SAP's plans for its Sybase business and appliance strategy moving forward. For example, customers have complained about BW s scalability, the difficulty of connecting to non-sap data sources and the development time required on the customers part. Some consultants say that smaller businesses are increasingly turning instead to SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts -- pre-built data marts for SAP and non-sap applications -- for this reason. They enable shorter development cycles and are easier to deploy. Still, between 10,000 and 12,000 SAP shops, mostly enterprises, have deployed BW at the heart of their SAP application initiatives, making it one of the most widely deployed data warehousing platforms. SAP shops like it because it is integrated with NetWeaver, and the analytic modeling and reporting layer and pre-packaged business content is highly complementary to SAP s ERP data model. SAP customers that sole-source BI/ERP can report and analyze data from SAP s operational systems, according to Madan Sheina, principal analyst with Ovum. Sponsored By: Page 10 of 17

11 The customer base is split between customers running BW 3.x and BW 7.x releases, according to James Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. In turn, a lot of ISVs have built tools to optimize the database design, workload management and loading in BW deployments, Kobielus said, providing customers with a host of software optimization options. Another advantage to BW is that SAP doesn t integrate a database into BW; it leaves that choice up to customers. They can run and store data in a BW cube and choose an Oracle, Teradata, SQL or HP Neoview database, for example, Kobielus said. But the product has its notorious weaknesses. First is its scalability, and, consequently, performance. BW doesn t scale beyond 60 to 70 terabytes across a 4-node to 8-node cluster, Kobielus said. A lot of the newer data warehousing software can scale to petabytes. Despite well-entrenched tuning techniques, performance has always been an issue -- one that more and more users have to buy the BW Accelerator (BWA) to correct. With a BWA, query performance in BW is reduced from several minutes to seconds. But the BWA is expensive, and many customers can t afford it. In turn, while the BWA is an appliance, BW itself isn t sold as a pre-integrated appliance. The appliance model itself is becoming a competitive advantage for other vendors, namely, Oracle Exadata, Kobielus said. That said, SAP is aiming toward an appliance strategy now that SAP has acquired Sybase and its database business, he said. Under the development effort termed HANA -- high-performance analytical appliance -- customers will see more of a complete, appliance-based packaging and delivery of BW that s integrated with the BusinessObjects front-end tools, data integration tools and the SAP application suite, Kobelius said. In HANA s architecture, the data will be persisted in memory, and calculations are done in memory. It ll be virtualized across many processing and storage nodes, making it massively Sponsored By: Page 11 of 17

12 scalable, enabling real-time data integration and real-time data query. This will all be integrated with ERP and other applications, Kobielus said. Sybase will be a big part of this, but HANA is not the next generation of Sybase IQ, the vendor s analytics server, Kobielus said. Customers looking to factor an appliance strategy into their SAP landscapes can expect the technology driven by HANA to be released sometime in 2011, Kobielus said. In the short term, customers will find several improvements in BW 7.3, including enhanced in-memory scenarios and delegating more calculations to the front-end BW Accelerator product. There s enhanced capabilities and performance, increased flexibility and simple configuration of the cockpit. It ll really set the stage for the HANA release next year, Kobielus said. Specific improvements, according to SAP, include: Semantic partitioning. There is a single point of entry for creation and administration, wizard-based creation of data models and data flows, easy remodeling of the partitions and full integration of archiving and nearline storage. Graphical user interface. The graphical data flow modeling is fully integrated into the data warehousing workbench, enabling easy graphical design of complex end-to-end data flows and detailed technical customizing facilitated by forward navigation. There s automated tools to aid in the development effort -- including a dataflow wizard, a dataflow copy tool (to copy an existing dataflow or a process chain) and a dataflow migration tool (for migrating data from BW 3 to 7, for example). Accelerated data loads for data-store objects and master data. Tighter integration with SAP data services for accessing non-sap data. There s a new source system type on BW called Data Services, which can create simple dataflow from DataStore to BW DataSource. There s also tight integration of Data Services into extended SAP NetWeaver BW Data Flow concept. Sponsored By: Page 12 of 17

13 Tighter integration with the SAP Business Objects tools and other SAP performance management products such as SEM, as well as enhanced business planning and BW add-ons. Enhanced functionality for SAP administrators, including support of complex development landscapes, mass change function for authorizations and version management for MetaData objects. Should you upgrade? Most users tie a BW upgrade to an upgrade to ECC 6.0. If BW 3.x is performing fine in terms of queries and load performance, and ad hoc reporting, there s really no need to upgrade, Kobielus said. But many customers are finding an easier, and cheaper, approach in Rapid Marts, according to Brian Jordan, executive vice president of Kogent. BW is more of a multidimensional, proprietary approach to data warehousing, and it is extremely IT-centric, especially for a small- to midmarket company with little IT staff. It s difficult to put BusinessObject on BW because BusinessObjects is a relational toolset. Therefore, BW takes four times longer to implement than RapidMarts, Jordan said. For instance, to build a dashboard, users need excelsius to connect to Microsoft Live Office, to BusinessObjects universe and then connect it to a BEx query. There s just a lot of workflow, and a lot of development cycles have to occur to get what the customer needs. They just don t play well together, and it s very painful to integrate that two, Jordan said. With a Rapid Mart, you get that up universe up and built on top of it. You connect it the universe and it s ready to go. Sponsored By: Page 13 of 17

14 Celestica launches SAP Business Analytics Center of Excellence project By Courtney Bjorlin, Site Editor Last year was a tough time to get buy-in for any IT project -- especially one with as ambitious a name as the "Business Analytics Center of Excellence." But in November 2009, Celestica, an SAP ERP and SCM shop, went live with several projects on the SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 platform. In less than a year, it went from the proof of concept stage to tool selection to go-live, with a team devoted to business intelligence and deep analytics, according to Tianbing Qian, senior director of business support solutions, who is responsible for IT strategy and delivery in analytics, collaboration and integration. Celestica is a global electronics manufacturing services provider based in Toronto. Qian said the project, and its subsequent success, was driven by a mantra from his CIO, Mary Gendron: "We're going to demonstrate the power of analytics through live action, not through PowerPoint slides." Demonstrating the ROI of analytics through action was key to maintaining support and launching a project in such a short time frame, Qian said during an interview at Sapphire in Orlando, where he discussed the project highlights and offered advice for getting executive buy-in. "If you have the executive support, you have all of the data, and all of the endorsement to put a dream team together," he said. That dream team at Celestica is made up of traditional IT staff, operational research specialists and data mining specialists. Proofs of concept were crucial in gaining and maintaining executive support, Qian said. His team did a live proof of concept on a real data mart, analyzing actual customer data. When the first was revealed, every department wanted in on it such that Qian did five proofs of concept in two months. Sponsored By: Page 14 of 17

15 He also recommended focusing on the right questions, in order to bond with the stakeholders. Lots of organizations focus on answering questions that the super users have, but Celestica spent a lot of time working with executives to answer their questions with the proofs of concept. Those questions were really the ones with the high monetary potential. In turn, in order to help sell the project, Qian wrote a 140-page business plan, analyzing what the best practices were and where the organization wanted to go. Obviously, there are certain financial objectives, he said. But at the end of the day, it's about strategic goals, customer and financial goals, and achieving many types of operational improvements. "I would argue, it's more than just a business case," he said. "I wrote a business plan. I feel if we focus just on the ROI, it restrains the potential." In the third quarter of 2008, Celestica bought SAP BusinessObjects licenses and implemented the tools on an Oracle database, which it already owned. Several projects were up and running by November. In a short time frame, Celestica has realized value from several projects associated with the Business Analytics Center of Excellence. Internally, the organization created a spend portal to track the top-down visibility detail level of all spend, giving insight and visibility into different cost-saving opportunities. In the past, managers were chasing down information from multiple ERP systems. Qian also focused on creating cross-functional linkages. For instance, his team created a portal called the sales and operations planning portal that links sales and operations information, providing end-to-end visibility across functions. That helped drastically reduce product cycle time -- from weeks to days. Customers have seen improvements from the project as well. The Business Analytics Center of Excellence helped develop reports and predictive insights to help analyze cross-company value-chain data and pinpoint opportunities to reduce product returns, helping customers to reduce cost and improve end consumer loyalty. Sponsored By: Page 15 of 17

16 In turn, they helped develop reports and predictive insights to help customers analyze past history and better forecast future demand and product mix, which in turn helps reduce inventory and improve service levels. Qian said implementing BusinessObjects allowed them to focus on the end-goal -- delivering analytics. Because the tools are so easy to use and work well, they didn't get in the way of the project. "BusinessObjects does its job; the tools never become a major issue," he said. "I really didn't want this to become a BusinessObjects implementation, but a business analytics implementation. I think that's the model. The people, the leadership, the process. That plays a much more dominant role than the specific tool itself." Sponsored By: Page 16 of 17

17 Resources from IBM Cognos software on the SAP NetWeaver platform About IBM At IBM, we strive to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industry's most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices and microelectronics. We translate these advanced technologies into value for our customers through our professional solutions and services businesses worldwide. Sponsored By: Page 17 of 17