8/4/2019 Why BW

1/4

Why BW?

Pfizer: "As well as being tightly integrated with SAP R/3, SAP BW is flexible enough to meet future

requirements without being too maintenance-intensive."

Top 10 best practices for BW

Lauren K. Hoyt

10.14.2005

Rating: -3.81- (out of 5)

Are you looking to leverage the full potential of SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW)? Sillyquestion, you say -- who isn't? Here you'll find ten ways to maximize BW capability, based on the presentation,

10 best practices for top-notch SAP BW applications at SAP TechEd '05. The presentation was given by Janet

Hutchinson, a data warehousing expert from Wyeth Pharmeceuticals, a research-based, global pharmaceutical

company with headquarters in Madison, N.J.

1. Consider: Is BW the "right" platform for this application?

When Wyeth's HR department requested a BW workbook to manage personnel information, the IT department

created a book to meet its needs -- but it took a full eight minutes to run the workbook every time it was used.The problem: The last tab of the workbook included 50,000 employee names.

BW is not good at lists, Hutchinson said. The list was taking nearly all of the time it took to run the workbook.

With a workbook of this type, Hutchinson recommends running it once in the morning, and then posting the list

to the Web so all users could access it without running the report over again.

"You need to consider what the end-user experience will really be like [with these applications]," she said.

2. Get a business commitment to "one truth."

This problem, a common business pain point, according to Hutchinson, struck a chord with Raj Salgam, an ITdirector at LeadingC Inc., a telecom company based in King of Prussia, Pa. The company has been using SAP

BW 3.5 since 2003.

"It's a challenge getting the business to buy in to one truth," Salgam said. "Often the two sides are not in sync."

3. Manage master data as a common resource critical to the success of your "one truth" approach.

Master data in BW is a challenge, Hutchinson said. Wyeth was using a BW workflow system in master datamanagement (MDM), which caused a tug-of-war between the business and the IT side of the company.

Like many companies, Wyeth had difficulty determining who should make changes to the MDM system. While

MDM is considered a business application, IT professionals made some decisions that affect MDM, which

frustrated business users. Wyeth eventually managed to find success when the two sides were willing to meethalfway.

"Our savvy IT folks know the business side, and that has added business value and helped widespread

adoption," Hutchinson said.

8/4/2019 Why BW

2/4

When those IT professionals who understand business needs bring BW ideas to the table, the ideas have real

value for the entire company, she said.

4. Prioritize your BW applications. Determine which applications should get first access to limited

resources.

While BW users see their applications as a top priority, it is imperative to develop a system when to load data

and when to run queries, Hutchinson said.

Hurricane Katrina has recently raised awareness for preparing systems for disaster preparation and repair. It isalso important to have a security strategy, she said. Readying your system ahead of time can save your

company's data.

But prioritizing applications is not easy, she said.

"The hard part is, IT had to deal with it, but [prioritizing] is a business decision," she said. "[But] somebody has

to say do it in this sequence, to relieve the stress on everyone."

5. Leverage "packaged" applications in the form of BW content. Activate and deploy for rapidimplementation of industry best practices.

"SAP's packaged applications are really one of [the company's] strengths," Hutchinson said. "If you need a data

warehouse, I'd recommend BW content to anyone. It has robust features and functionality, and you can use itwithout any other [SAP] applications."

6. Minimize the features and third-party tools. Decide on one way to accomplish a specific goal and use it

whenever possible.

As part of the initial application design, Hutchinson recommends implementing data archiving. This has value

for the business and will avoid costly problems with the BW system in the long run, she said.

Reducing clutter will allow the applications in use to perform better, Hutchinson said. Overall, the system will

see benefits from being "tidier" and more compact.

7. Provide formal and informal training, mentoring and support for all roles, both in the business and

technical departments.

Hutchinson said BW user groups within a company can help organize formal and informal training. Smallercompanies should seek help and training through outside user groups, she said. The SAP Developer Network

(SDN) is yet another avenue for BW support and information.

8. Develop "super users." Leverage their skills and experiences to proliferate the excitement for BW.

Super users can serve as the go-to person for BW best practices or for help with troubleshooting, Hutchinsonsaid.

"It's important to have someone in your company who is staying one step ahead," she said.

9. Manage expectations particularly around performance, ease of look and feel.

8/4/2019 Why BW

3/4

End-user interfaces, delivered by SAP, can be unattractive and confusing to some end users, making BW a

challenge, Hutchinson said. To make the process as straightforward as possible, it is necessary to open the linesof communication with end users.

"Convince end users that while it's not pretty, it has what they need," she said.

Web applications can be used to deploy BW applications, since these applications are typically more

aesthetically pleasing and simplistically formatted, she said.

10. Be prepared for the results of your success -- BW will grow.

Wyeth's BW success has been above and beyond the company's wildest dreams, Hutchinson said. While thishas proven benefits for the business, it also brings new challenges. For example, the production system at the

company has doubled every year since 2001, and the system had to be prepared to handle that capacity.

Can you please tell me the procedure of how to load data from SAP R/3 into BW system?

>EXPERT RESPONSE

Actually this question is more related with BW rather than SEM, but I'll explain the procedure briefly. In

order to load data from R/3 system into BW, (assuming that you R/3 system is defined as source system in

your BW system) you should first maintain certain settings on R/3 side. First identify the applicationcomponent from which you want to transfer data i.e. FI-AP. Activate the standard business content maser and

transactional data datasources (transaction RSA5). Then, replicate these datasources in your BW system and

create infosource(s) and maintain transfer rules for proper field/infoobject mappings. After you created updaterules for your data targets, create infopackage for each datasource. Finally schedule the infopackage with

desired selection options to load the data. At high level process works as described above, there are some

detailed settings and you can find information about the details in SAP help.

I tried to install BW BW central and database instance. Unfortunately, it failed. I not sure what the steps

I'm missing, so I hope to get your guidance on BW installation.

Below steps listed the progress:

1) Central instance installation is Ok.

2) During the database instance installation, while process database loading, the whole Windows hung.

I'm not sure why this happened.

All the logs I checked were fine with no error log I could find.

> EXPERT RESPONSE

Are you loading the Database Instance in a separate host? If not, why are you doing two separate installsinstead of a the Central & Database in one? I don't know what BW release this is you are working on, but you

might want to read the SAP Notes related to the setup. If the database load seems to be hung then there'sprobably a problem creating work processes in the system. You can look if there are any disp+work.exe

processes at all while the setup is running. I have had a few systems where the system needed an immediate

kernel update. But, I recommend you first take a look at the SAP notes.

When using SEM-BCS BW-based, what is the best way to collect data from non-SAP subsidiary users?

How do we provide a data entry form to non-SAP subsidiary users with Financial statement items and

break-down etc.? We want this to originate from the host company with SEM-BCS installed. How can

8/4/2019 Why BW

4/4

we ensure only valid financial statement items (consolidation items)are distributed to non-SAP user for

data input? Can we export validation rule to these data entry form.

> E XPERT RESPONSEThere are two ways to upload non-SAP subsidiary data into BCS:

1. You can use the flexible upload functionality of BCS to upload reported financial data, consolidation

groups, hierarchies and units, financial statement items and breakdown categories etc... from a text file intothe consolidation system. In the flexible upload you can put validation rules and build complex checkmechanisms to validate and ensure that the loaded data is valid data.

2. You can load data using manual data entry layouts. You have to design and develop proper layouts for our

non-SAP subsidiaries to enable them to enter their financial data online.

In both methods, you can use the consolidation monitor to monitor the load of data.

3rd party tools for BW

To best of my knowledge, I have not seen clear product roadmaps after their BI vendors acquisitions/mergers.

For now it's business as usual. In relation to BW integration, each product - say Crystal and Business Objects -

remain individual products. For example, Crystal still is an OEM for SAP BW reporting, while BusinessObjects is a Certified product.

How can I optimize my customer relationship landscape; how can I leverage the BW analytics potential

to provide for the best campaigns, promotions, pricing strategies?

SAP BW comes with a powerful data mining engine that enables complex analytics of OLTP data. The SAPBW Business content in 3.3 comes with powerful data mining algorithms like clustering, ABC analysis ,

classification that enables smart data mining and subsequently feeding the information into SAP R/3 or CRM

for subsequent processing. To launch successful pricing strategies it is essential to study the response of variouscustomer groups to various pricing programs. Using the BW analytics toolkit, it is possible to build data

associateion data sets that can the be fed back into the OLTP engine. The way to approach this by using a newfunctionality within SAP BW called APD (Application process designer). This is a visual data processing

composition engine that enables organization of data flows and updates into the OLTP database. Using thisfunctionality, condition tables can be updated. Here is an example to hightligh the above. A CPG company

wants to study the potential pricing impact of a new product. Using data mining past pricing trends are studied

and the infomration is used to update the pricing condition tables. This information is then sucked into the ordermanagement process and creative discounts, promotions or "buy 1 get 1 free" suggestions are made accordingly