Building Bridges: Driving SAP NetWeaver BI Adoption across the Enterprise
In today’s world of business, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI) are hot topics and major categories of IT spending. Successful organizations understand the importance of fast, informed strategic decision making, and they know this requires centralized management of key business data and the ability to access and explore that data in order to track performance and make critical business decisions. The CIO is tasked with building a strategy for tracking business performance and making high quality data available to information workers searching for key insights that will help drive successful business behavior. While this strategy is bound to involve BI technology, the actual project encompasses more than technology alone. A truly effective BI solution is one that bridges the gap between the technology and the business, empowering the people who impact the business every day with access to insight that will help make better decisions and drive better business performance.
SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software solutions, comprising ERP, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other LOB modules such as supply chain management, product lifecycle management, and supplier relationship management. More than 41,200 customers around the world use SAP to help reduce operational costs, improve business performance, and gain the agility to respond to strategic changes. SAP’s ERP, CRM and other LOB modules provide the business with the ability to tap into valuable information resources, improve efficiencies in supply chain and other business processes, and strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers, and strategic partners.
With the core SAP modules in place, SAP customers need to unlock the data embedded in those systems, so that it is available for daily operational decision and strategic decision support. SAP customers have mostly settled on SAP NetWeaver as their application platform. For these customers, NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) can help identify, integrate, and analyze key business insights to drive better strategic and operational decisions. But the challenges are still there. For companies using SAP NetWeaver BI, mostly analysts and IT staff have adopted SAP BEx / Web Analyzer as their reporting tools while the executive teams, middle management, and information workers who make the important daily decisions that impact business performance are still left without an accessible solution for ultimate data analysis and reporting. These key decision makers must instead go through the analyst and IT power users in order to get the information they need, when they need it, in order to make critical decisions. This is terribly inefficient and frustrating for both the power users and the end users who could be spending their time much more productively. Once they have the data, the end users are still limited in terms of how they view and manipulate the data they have, and they face the possibility that aspects of their data selection will change before they are able to take any planned action.
For the CIO, the low adoption rate of the NetWeaver BI tools, BEx and Web Analyzer, along with a still tedious decision making process can be a reputation killer, making it appear as though the strategy for empowering the business information workers and optimizing their ability to generate insights and take direct action is still not delivering the intended results. The CIO’s challenge is to grow the impact of the SAP solution overall and prove the power and effectiveness of SAP NetWeaver BI by providing better, more direct ways for end users to access important and useful business data. The easiest solution for the CIO is to implement a strategy to keep tight dependency and reliance on the SAP platform while providing information access with powerful and intuitive tools that enable more direct access to the SAP data they require. There are a variety of 3rd party solutions that specialize in empowering information workers with better BI tools; however, most of these solutions unfortunately do not leverage the SAP investment to the greatest extent. For the CIO looking to streamline the IT organization and technology investments, the integration of a 3rd party solution that provides end users with access to the existing SAP platform can be a difficult challenge to overcome.
The right solution for the general end user is one that is native to SAP’s platform and also allows users to have control over the data they track, choosing that which is most relevant and personalizing their views to reflect the data they’ve chosen. Users get the most out of important and useful business data with self-service reporting and analysis that delivers comprehensive reports from which users can seamlessly perform moment-in-time analysis and get to the bottom of problems. By avoiding tedious processes and working directly with relevant and up-to-date business data, the people who impact business performance every day can become more involved in daily operations, identify problems and exceptions before they drag down performance, and make important decisions to drive business success. The easier these tools are to use and the more efficiently they perform with the SAP back end, the more likely they are to be adopted by end users. The right solution also ensures that power users, analysts, and IT do not give up the knowledge they have built around SAP’s core BI tools, nor does it replace these tools; it rather extends the reach of SAP NetWeaver BI and SAP BEx/Web Analyzer and makes SAP data more available while reducing the burden on power users, analysts, and IT.
To learn more, attend the upcoming webinar from Panorama Software, hosted by SAP Insider:
Self-Service Reporting for SAP NetWeaver® BI
This webinar focuses on key strategies to extend the reach of SAP NetWeaver BI to more decision makers inside your organization:
- Extending the value of SAP BEx and Web Analyzer
- Solving the challenges of enterprise wide deployments of SAP NetWeaver® BI
- Reporting, Analytics and Dashboarding made easy
- Making it easy for mid-level managers and their staffs to get timely, relevant information that provides insight into operations, not just pretty reformatted reports from source transaction systems
- Enables user to interact with reports to perform actions including drilling-down/up, slicing dimensions, using parameters, adding new characteristics, and searching for specific data.
- You will also learn how Panorama and SAP collaborated on improvements to the MDX-based open analysis interfaces to SAP NetWeaver BI (BW).
