SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Solutions

Without a business intelligence (BI) information infrastructure in place, medium-sized organisations are more likely to exceed budgets, miss deadlines, improve performance of one department at the expense of the overall business and reward employees for actions that do not improve performance. Ultimately, without BI, the current economic downturn poses greater risk to their business operations.

In today's economy, executives face declining revenues and tough cost cutting decisions. Cost reductions alone, however, are not enough to survive in this market, especially for medium-sized organisations, which typically lack the expansive resources needed to sustain a market downturn, yet have the ability to be much more agile with the right information.

Medium-sized organisations require clear visibility into operations and processes, so they can quickly capitalise on what works well, rapidly identify and address the issues that degrade performance and efficiency, and optimise their use of resources. In addition, organisations must base decisions on fact rather than guesswork. Finally, they need to ensure greater alignment and accountability across all employees, so business performance is maximised within the allocated plans and budgets.

These are all admirable goals. Most medium-sized organisations, however, don't have the information infrastructure in place to meet such requirements. Without a vital information infrastructure that is informed by business intelligence, they are in a precarious spot. Consider:

• Lacking insight to operational inefficiencies, they take longer to identify and address issues that affect performance
• Lacking visibility across the enterprise, they have difficulty coordinating activities across departments, divisions, partners and customers
• Lacking depth of analysis, they miss seeing abnormal variances and understanding root causes that have material impact on earnings
• They tend to perform worse than their peers in making the most of their resources

TAP INTO THE STRENGTH OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

BI provides the tools that help organisations understand, analyse and even predict what's occurring within their business. BI can be used to turn data into useful and meaningful information, and then distribute this intelligence to those who need it, when they need it - so every employee makes timely, better-informed decisions. Using BI, organisations can combine data from a wide variety of sources to see an integrated, up-to-date, 360-degree view of the business.

Effective BI solutions should contain the following functionality:

• Enterprise and operational reporting, ad hoc analysis and dashboards
• Flexibility and ease of use, so you can augment and create reports and dashboards, with little IT support
• Access to information through Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, as well as Web portals
• Security controls for information access
• Low total cost of ownership (TCO), while supporting growth into more sophisticated data quality and data warehousing needs
• Visibility for the entire organisation, whether through desktop deployment, the Web or mobile devices

Flexible and Robust Functionality

Your BI solution should allow you to create, manage and deliver packaged reports; perform ad hoc reporting, query and analysis; and deploy interactive dashboards. Your solution should support a transition to fact-based decision making and help accelerate your company's growth and success.

Simplicity is Key

Your BI solution should make it easy for you to create or modify packaged and ad hoc reports, queries, and dashboards in order to obtain key operational and business insights from business applications. Ease of use is essential for any medium-sized organisation, since IT resources are limited. Furthermore, information for certain analytics may reside in locations other than your SAP application, such as spreadsheets, email systems or other databases. An efficient BI solution makes it easy to incorporate external information into reports, while hiding the complexity of accessing multi-sourced information.

Transparent Access to Data and Business Applications

Worldwide, many organisations continue to use Microsoft Excel to analyse their business and Microsoft Word to create documents. Thus, they want to ensure that their BI solution can bring the most current information from their transactional system into Microsoft Office applications on their laptops and desktops - and do it transparently.

Such functionality can significantly enhance the productivity and effectiveness of all business users. In addition, organisations that have created portals for their employees want to ensure that any BI reports, queries and dashboards can be easily accessed from such portals.

Secure Operations

Organisations also want to ensure that sensitive data is only accessed by the appropriate recipients. They need to be able to specify which roles within the organisation can see specific information within their BI solution.

Low TCO

Medium-sized organisations have limited resources, so an ideal BI solution will ensure low cost of ownership through off-the-shelf integrations, and the use of templates to simplify and accelerate the creation of custom reports, queries and dashboards without the need to hire expensive outside consultants.

The BI solution also should have relevant components embedded within the solution to reduce the need to buy additional software.

SAP BUSINESSOBJECTS BI SOLUTIONS

Designed and packaged to be affordable for any medium-sized organisation, SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software lets you:

• Create, manage and deliver standard and ad hoc reports
• Leverage ad hoc reporting, query and analysis features
• Perform what-if analysis using interactive dashboards
• Deploy complete data quality and data mart solutions with minimal total cost of ownership
• Ensure secure, role-appropriate access to data

Through an intuitive point-and-click Web interface on top of a built-in online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, your business users can access the data they want and analyse it. With dashboards, they can interact with visual sliders and gauges to quickly identify new opportunities and challenges. They can use what-if analysis to understand the impact of decisions before they are made. For existing SAP customers, comprehensive security features use the SAP security model to ensure that users can only view and access the data they have the rights to access.

With an SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software solution that is integrated with Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint, the information from your existing transactional systems can be viewed live, in real time, by the users within these solutions. Thus, incorporating the most current data into presentations, spreadsheets and documents is simple.

The SAP BusinessObjects solution gives you the flexibility to deliver reports, either on demand or at a pre-scheduled time, via email, print or by saving to a shared directory on the server. The solution also supports an offline viewer, which allows users to review reports when they are disconnected from the network, such as when they are in client meetings or travelling on business. As a result, users can always stay in touch with their business wherever they are.

The underlying technology within the packaged solution for medium-sized organisations is designed to make it easy for business users to develop and use BI without relying on the IT department. Users have complete flexibility in how they access, format and interact with their data. Out-of-the-box integration with SAP Business All-in-One solutions and the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component allows users to create ad hoc reports, queries and analytics on top of SAP transactional data.

The package is also designed to enable business users to access data from non-SAP sources, such as spreadsheets, real-time data feeds, log files or any ODBC/JDBC compliant database, while hiding the complexity of accessing such data - and as the complexity is hidden, your business users can create and access sophisticated analytics without any IT help. In addition, the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of solutions contains quick-start packs and a repository of components such as business views, graphics and formulas - all of which accelerate the development of analytics.

FEEL THE BENEFIT

SAP offers a leading BI solution for medium-sized organisations which seek to ensure greater alignment and accountability across their entire organisation, so business performance is maximised within the allocated budgets. The solution provides comprehensive BI features, such as ad hoc query, reporting and analysis, out-of-the box integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint and ease of integration with portals and external sources of data. The solution is specifically designed so end users can create and modify reports, queries and dashboards without the need for expensive third-party consultants. Finally, the solution provides low cost of ownership - a critical criteria for budget-conscious medium-sized organisations.

FIND OUT MORE

For further information on how Phoenix and SAP BusinessObjects can help your organisation respond to the tough economic environment, contact the Phoenix Professional Services Team on 0845 265 1265 or email info@phoenixs.co.uk