SAP Business Warehouse Reviews

It's a customized solution for the company's reporting needs.

The real-time information is great. Many reports take a long time, and we can save the data if we have a backlog of information to assess. The Real-time InfoCube is quite useful in terms of getting information fast when we need it. 

The preparation is basically useful. We are using it via integrated BI, BWIP, Business Warehouse, and Integrated Planning. Based on that, we are able to get good information on plans. 

We can integrate analysis into our planning. 

It has good integration with the Analysis Office.

We're able to create different queries and get reports based on what we specifically need. 

I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report. Maybe it's the queries that have been developed in-house. I'm not sure. 

People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report. Maybe they are getting real-time data. However, it is time-consuming in the generation of the report.

They should allow for power users. If SAP really wants to have some insights related to their software's applicability, adaptability, and some areas of let's say, future expansion or future new development, then they should think of taking the opinion of the actual end users.

They should offer up smaller components for smaller companies to make it more affordable and accessible for more companies.

I've been using the solution since 2017.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. 

We have lots of users using the BW-based reports. That's around 500 people. However, we don't have many actual users on the solution itself. 

Technical support from SAP is being provided by our technical teams. There have been issues that our own team has dealt with directly.

We are using the SAP Business Warehouse as well as the Commercial Project Management model of SAP. 

We are also using Analysis Office Integration with SAP.

I have worked with two systems related to BW. One that is an elegant JBA, which is all right. They have products that are BW related. It was also a nice product, actually.

The upside to working with this solution is that it is basically integrated with directly SAP.

I'm not involved in the initial setup.

It is very costly. I can't speak to the exact costs, however. Only larger companies can afford SAP.

The maintenance costs are very high as well. 

I am not the one who is using the different transaction codes of BW since rights are provided to a minimal amount of technical personnel. Those who are going to prepare the cubes or make some queries or something like that would use it. Based on that queries, we are getting reports.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The product is very stable. It has a straightforward maintenance process with essential support services.

They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading.

We have been working with SAP Business Warehouse for 20 years as a partner.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten. There is room for improvement.

We have three customers and 1000 end users for SAP Business Warehouse. I rate its scalability an eight or nine.

The technical support services are good.

The product is straightforward to install and deploy. It takes two to three weeks to complete the process. I install it for the customers and forward it to application executives for data warehousing. The number of executives required for deployment depends on the organization’s size. It requires approximately one to ten people, depending on the project requirements.

I recommend SAP Business Warehouse to others and rate it an eight out of ten. It has a well-documented and straightforward installation process.

Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions. Thus, decision-making mostly occurs through SAP BI or SAP Business Warehouse.

Feature-wise, there are some hiccups with SAP Business Warehouse, especially its integration with various systems, including SAP and others. Populating data onto one screen does not happen in real time, which is one of the areas that our business is concerned about.

Improving SAP Business Warehouse's user-friendliness and real-time capabilities would be beneficial. The improvement would enable users to make decisions and understand their current standing quickly. Also, if there are any issues or fallbacks, we can quickly correct them.

I have been using SAP Business Warehouse for eight years. Our company is transitioning from the SAP Business Warehouse's older version to the latest version. It may take another couple of months for the process to be completed. Also, I am a customer of the solution.

It has been a stable solution all these years, and so we are going for the newer version of the product since we wanted to have a more user-friendly option in our company.

More than 200 people are using the solution in my company.

Our company has been in touch with the solution's technical support team seeking guidance whenever and wherever required.

It is difficult for me to honestly rate the technical support since it is still in progress. While we have had multiple discussions with them, we are optimistic about building the technical aspects.

So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand. As of now, I might be wrong or right since we have not completed and are still undergoing the transition phase in our company. Once it is completed, I can only give feedback on how easy or complex the setup process was for our company. As of now, still, we have some connectivity issues.

The solution is deployed on the private cloud.

My suggestion for those considering the solution is to prioritize setting up the core engine, the ERP. Once that is established, they can evaluate various BI tools available in the market before deciding.

Considering factors such as data extraction, data pushing, and the solution's accuracy, I rate the overall solution a six or seven out of ten.

The most useful feature is definitely the speed.

I think it's natural that we have BW on HANA because the developer has SAP systems. At the end of the day, it provides the integration we need out of the box. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data.

I would like to see a more comprehensive package in the future. SAP did that, but when you go to BW on HANA, and then you want to go to BW4HANA, that's basically two migrations. BW4HANA does offer everything that we're lacking in BW on HANA, but two million migrations in five years isn't really salable to the business.

The solution is also very pricey. 

I think that there should definitely be more integration. Whatever they make available in BW4, they should make it available in BW on HANA. But SAP has clearly stated that they are not doing any development on this. They are concentrating on BW4 and the DWC.

I have been working with this solution for 15 years.

We did have problems with stability, but it wasn't the software; it was the hardware. Everything is in memory, and there are a lot of memory modules, and some of them just gave up. The issue is with SAP itself. Apart from that, I think it's reliable. 

This is a tough question because, especially with HANA, you have to buy physical memory modules. It's not like you just put in one additional hard drive and then everything is fine. I'm not happy with the scalability.

We have a really good technical consultant from our SAP agency here in Hungary, and I'm very happy with him. The problem is that there is only one of him, and he has 10-15 customers. For the support that is provided to us here, I would rate it 4.5 out of 5 because of the availability.

The problem with SAP is that when you create a ticket on their site, it normally takes two to three weeks to go through, which is why we go to our consultant.

The direct technical support could definitely be faster. I would rate the standard support 3 out of 5.

For setup, you definitely need tutorial planning and a second set of eyes—even a third set of eyes—when it comes to code checking and things like that.

I would rate setup 3.5 out of 5.

It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else. So what you see on the bill at first is not exactly what you will pay, to say the least.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

For a company that's looking to implement BW on HANA, my advice is to go for it. But at the same time, also look out for the DWC, Data Warehouse Cloud, which currently comes with BW Bridge. I think the two together can basically cover all needs when it comes to integration.

We already were having a lot of transaction data in the SAP R3 system. We were doing the extraction, transformation, and loading process every time, ETL from SAP R3 to SAP BW and leveraging it to develop and design certain static reports. They were static in nature; they were not really very beautiful or very impactful reports, but they were used by our senior management. They are still being used by our senior management.

The solution has improved our organization because we used to have a finance department. Payroll is a routine affair there, so some reports were required by the finance department for expediting their reconciliation which could be used in the closing of bank, closing of the books in the organization. We have helped them use the tools in that manner. There were also things like our generation was real-time captured in the transaction system. We tried to fetch the data from the transaction system and tried to aggregate the data in this BW system and help the management with the data at the click of a mouse.

The most valuable feature is the new version of Business Explorer Analyzer. That is a very good version because there are a lot of analytical features of Excel also. Additionally, in the SAP BW cockpit, there are features for real-time data acquisition, so RDA. That is a good feature.

One area that could be improved is the Business Explorer still needs to be developer-friendly also.

Another improvement would be to develop certain connectors to get hold of the external data. That aspect also needs to be strengthened. It needs to be reinforced because there were issues when we were integrating the SAP BW system with a source system, which is other than the SAP R3 system. The dependency that is currently there between SAP R3 and SAP BW, needs to be enhanced, augmented.

In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed.

I been using the solution for eight to ten years.

We have 1,000 plus users in the organization.

With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side. They do respond and they're very courteous. Technical support doesn't make you go around things. They try to find a solution and they reach out to you in time. That is very important because quick service is also very important.

The client tools of SAP BW are very straightforward. I don't have any issues with the installation part. Installation is quite friendly, quite speedy.

In the initial phases of deployment, we had an integrator, then we switched over to the consultants. The integration partner was Siemens at that time when Business Warehouse was launched, and then gradually, we took third-party consultants only when there was a need.

My advice when considering this solution is that a proper planning strategy is a must for going on a journey with a reporting and analytics solution. From my experience, I can tell you that organizations just venture in for a reporting, analytics solution without even framing a proper strategy as to what they would like to see as the end result and how they would like to approach it. That is the only thing that is important. Otherwise, the journey is smooth with SAP products. But you need to be clear in your head, and planning really takes the majority of the time. If you have twelve months, then I think you should plan for four months, so that the last eight months are a smooth journey for you.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We have used SAP Business Warehouse to monitor and manage supporter donations and campaigns.

SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations.

I have been using SAP Business Warehouse for more than 10 years.

The stability of SAP Business Warehouse has been good. When we are doing charity work we do not do many transactions. The performance has been within the limits of the solution. We are not doing millions of transitions to see an impact on the stability.

SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 10 to 12 people using the solution in the community and once the campaign report is generated the entire business start to use the solution. We have approximately 200 people in the whole business.

The technical support is good, we have never had a problem with them.

There are two groups of people that do the implementation and support of SAP Business Warehouse. One group is for the build phase, the other group is for the support phase. There will be a handshake between these two groups, on how to go live. In the build phase, there are approximately seven to eight people are available for support, we agreed to not exceed more than four. However, this seven will be continuing for longer for deployment and new developments. 

Anything on the support side, if they find any challenge, they can easily reach for a phone and receive input from the builder team to resolve them quickly.

The two clients that have been using SAP Business Warehouse have found that it does not quite fit their use case. However, there is not any CRM or ERP that fits their needs specifically. In the charity use case, they have found challenges.

I rate SAP Business Warehouse a ten out of ten.

We have end-to-end SAP. Therefore, we have the operations system, which is ECC6, which is the ERP. This is used for day-to-day data consolidating of purchase orders, finances, etc. We have 16 business lines. 

When the data comes, we need the reports for the management and we need consolidated and aggregated data. For that, we use Business Warehouse. NetWeaver is a platform, however, on top of it, you use different products. Therefore, on top of NetWeaver, we have BW overlayed for aggregated data for its management. It can be displayed as necessary in data visualization tools, like Business Objects, Excel, Tableau, Power BI, etc. 

The main purpose of our BW is to consolidate data and show the trends for the last, I would estimate, ten years.

BW is our bread and butter. We use it every day for reporting, for analysis, data consolidation and aggregation, drag and drop queries, etc.

There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer. 

The solution has very limited options, so we have to mix and match some functionality formulas we create in Business Warehouse. The rest of the formulas and functionality we try to deliver on the front end via direct objects. Therefore, there's a lot of improvement needed. 

My understanding is that they are going to discontinue Business Warehouse so that they can push HANA, including Native HANA, S4 HANA, and BW/4HANA.

This platform has reached its limitation. In order for SAP to improve it, they have to provide a new product, which they have: BW/4HANA. 

BW/HANA is much better than the native standard Business Warehouse. It has new options, new functionality, is faster, has pre-built processes, etc. It has all the data processes from a different company's best practices, and they give it to you by default, just out of the box. This is what Business Warehouse should have been, and it's good they are pushing HANA instead of BW.

I've been using the solution for six years.

In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable.

The solution isn't that scalable. It depends on a lot of factors like what the budget of the company is. If it's scalable in terms of hardware, then we'll have to acquire new hardware and new costs start to pile up. We are not scaling it. If we go overboard with the size, then we just try to reduce the size. We haven't ever tried to scale it. We don't want to spend more to do so.

We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least.

I cannot recall if we previously used another solution or what it was. Before SAP, the company was using a third-party tool on Oracle or some other SQL database. We have been running SAP for the last 10 years, and I joined the company in the past six years. I wasn't here when SAP was originally implemented.

Initial set up is pretty easy. You just install it and connect it to ECC. The tables are already there as well as the business content. If your company has a lot of customized processes, then you have to adjust a few things. 

Otherwise, if it's a fairly new company, then you just have to connect ECC and the data will start coming in. You can do batch jobs and create aggregation. The initial implementation is fairly easy in that scenario. 

Our solution is strictly on-premises due to our company policy to not place anything on the cloud. 

Consultants with technical experience are helpful. They need to understand the processes, as well, however, because designing is the key. Designing right from the start is the very important if you want the product to work for you. 

There are multiple teams within our company. In my team, we are only concerned with BW and BO. With other teams, there are probably many other instances where someone that is using the solution is connected to other data sources and may be providing the data to the suppliers outside SAP using the portal. I don't know much about it because I'm not involved in this process.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

Our primary use case includes logging the reports on OpenTech manager. We wanted to slice and dice across the PO - whose POs, number of POs which are created, number of POs whose payment is pending, whose payment was done or the turnaround time from PO to payment cycle, etc... For all this we had to extract the data from SAP and build the cubes with the measurement and dimensions, and to slice and dice. For this, we used these cubes that provided VW. We connected it to our dashboard which is Tableau and used the dashboards for the management.

The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice. But the reporting is not that interactive because of its reliance to Tableau. We have something called Excel Analysis, which we connect to the cube and do the slice and dice - so that is the best part.

The other best part, and why we moved from Microsoft to SAP BW, are the ready-made connectors where we can extract the data from, which was something that was a challenge for us to pull in SQL Microsoft Warehouse. So the delta features and Excel features are some of its advantages, which we've found. And with SAP it was easier for us to directly get the data immediately, rather than purchasing licenses and all. So although we have an additional connector for SQL extraction for the data from SAP to SQL, that connector doesn't provide us the feature of extracting delta data.

All the reports were already depending on SAP data. But anything in which we needed to combine data to their applications we were trying to pull with Microsoft Data Warehouse to those different users.

In terms of what can be improved, they already improved the features of SAP HANA, and since we are not migrated now, we are using SAP VPC and consolidation where they provide those VW's for HANA. Once we go there, we will be able to understand that differentiation point and what could be improved or could have been provided more. But as of right now we're in a very early stage so I don't see anything else that is required.

In the next release, I would like to see BW integrate the visualization with the reports which are in SAP HANA. If that gets into BW in the next release we would be happy rather than having to purchase different business objects, like for the front end, or Tableau, or other SAP products. Instead, of buying that, BW could provide us better visualization. Then we don't have to put data into other tools and build things out there.

My organization has been using SAP Business Warehouse for a year.

I have no issues with the stability as of right now. Everything boils down to the servers and the configuration. So apart from fees, no issues related to BW.

My team members who are handling SAP have been in touch with support. I would evaluate support at four out of five. We are happy with it.

The setup was straightforward.

The only thing which we needed help with, and are still struggling with, is getting to know the AW server. That really helps because we always have to be dependent on a vendor or a consultant company to help with our strategy.

If SAP could help with that, it would really help us with the hardware requirements. Because we are not on the cloud, we still struggle with the SAP and always have to be dependent on a partner to give us all the information. There are existing details about the basic configuration and requirements based on the data sizing - that calculation is available and it really helps.

For BW we use a proper software integrator to help with their part and implementing it for us. But I think their experience is very limited. But since we wanted a partner who knows Microsoft Warehouse and BI, we have connected as partners. As far as the sizing and installation, everything was done by our team within our organization. The vendor is only responsible for creating the cubes and the reports but we implement the infrastructure installation.

SAP Business Warehouse is really good. I had already used it in four prior organizations and this will be my fifth organization using it. It is pretty good as far as SAP Data is concerned. So right now, our licenses are only limited to SAP Data because it is for external data, then we need to purchase additional licenses, which we have now gone ahead with.

So that's where one of the challenges is. They have ready-made connectors for the SAP, data transfers, extractions, cube production, and all the applications. We build the data and the reports. They are trying to deliver the data as compared to extracting the data from SAP to SQL Tables and then building the same logic and producing the report. We prefer that when it comes to SAP Data.

My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP Business Warehouse an eight. 

As I said, a few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared to Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution.

Because if I already have an SQL Server, my licensing fees and the server licensing cost for installation all go drastically down.

They also give us a free reporting tool. For the data view, we need to have user-licensing and every cost gets increased, as I said. For example, we have a license for SAP Data, and for external data, we also have to purchase one more license, and again for a visualization tool. So that way, licensing costs keep increasing with BW.