SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Reviews

In the past, customers - both internal and external - were crying for data towards the end or the beginning of month, for month-end reporting. Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, these reports are generated and automatically sent to them according to a schedule. This has freed up countless hours spent performing the same tasks, month over month. 

It also enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run.

Depends on the use case. The reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst.

When it comes to visualizations and discovery, SAP Explorer lets the user deep-dive into the data from a visual standpoint.

The biggest area for improvement would be the dashboarding capabilities due to the recent change from Xcelsius to Dashboard Designer. This has created a gigantic ripple in many companies because the skill sets required are drastically different.

Minor at most. As with any application that presents data within a business, stability is critical to the success of the application and it's validity. Building failovers and redundancies around major functions, like accessing reports, data connectivity, and user security, ensures system stability. However, even with the most perfect system and its redundancies, any business intelligence application can run into issues if the data is bad.

Not really. The SAP Business Intelligence platform is a global solution that can be scaled both vertically and horizontally, based on company needs. 

SAP tech support is good. However, I prefer the use of the partners and communities like ASUG or SAPinsider to provide the support we need.

We previously used SQL Server Reporting Services because it was included with Microsoft Server and it was free. The reason we switched was because SSRS lacked the ability to do what we needed without involving IT.

I always recommend using a partner or consultant to deploy SAP BI. Not because it's difficult to install, that part is actually pretty easy, but to properly configure and customize application services and toolsets.

Depending on your size, try to stick with SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge. Most people tend to overthink the licensing. Remember that one concurrent user means that one person can be performing a task at a given time. That does not mean that only one user can be on the system at a time, it means that only one person can be refreshing a report or designing a dashboard. There are tons of ways you can access your data or reports without consuming a license. I've seen cases where five concurrent licenses support thousands of users.

I reviewed a whole bunch of them, everything under the sun.

Get a partner or consultant to help you configure and customize your deployment. And remember that there's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server.

Autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.

The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal.

This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration.

No issues.

No issues.

Technical support is excellent.

No.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users. Currently, it has an option of a Cloud Platform (SAP Analytics Cloud) which has a lower price than the on-premise platform, and you can buy individual licences per user.

We evaluated Cognos and OBIEE.

It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.

It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis. I found the SAP suite of products powerful. They scale well for enterprise use, i.e., thousands of recipients of the output of the products as dashboards and/or reports.

It gets people off Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and sharing the same reports/dashboards, so departments receive the same figures for KPIs and company performance.

This stopped the waste of time in management meetings, whereby people would spend a lot of time explaining different performance results (different Excel spreadsheets) so they could analyze results and plan to act on the results.

More thorough testing of Service Packs before release.

I have used Webi, Universe Designer, and Dashboards for 12 years. I’ve used Lumira for one year.

We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward). We had some instability when applying patches and new releases.

There was poor quality of the testing of new functionality introduced in new releases.

We have not really had scalability issues. The readiness of the products for the enterprise was a strong point.

Patchy. Depending on the product with the issue (eg WebI or Information Steward) the responses can be good (WebI) or awful (Information Steward).

Technical support was hit and miss. Sometimes it was good. Other times it was awful. Especially when the problem raised was hard for them to reproduce. They often ask the same questions over and over.

We didn’t have a previous solution. We have pretty much been an SAP BI shop for a long time.

Setup was quite complex due to the number of environments being used (Dev/SIT/UAT/Prod) and the integration between BI and EIM products. It is even harder now that we use SAP HANA.

Implemented in-house.

Make sure you factor in plenty of time for regression testing as the way SAP release Service packs these days there is good (new functionality) and bad (lack of thorough testing) news.

Over the years, we have reviewed other BI products, such as IBM Cognos and Tableau. Some of them are also in use along with the SAP BI products.

Check the number of intended users and which part of BI you are intending to introduce (reporting, analytics, etc.).

Check out the free trial periods and see if there are options to use cloud computing versus installing it in your own data center.

• Way of creating reports
• Ease of use
• Can connect to any database
• Create models with ease.

In our organization, they chose this product mainly due to its ease of use. They were also able to generate high revenue by identifying their backlog areas.

The calculation engine requires some improvement.

For eight years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

A 10 out of 10.

I would say it's mostly straightforward, because it has a wide range of compatible operating systems and also it was easy to install. The whole software is bundled and provided to the consumer.

It's the best product in the market when it comes to reporting technology.

The features that are most valuable are report and dashboard development, universe layer, ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources, ability to develop robust semantic layer, ability to combine different data sources and data federation.

Provides a platform for developing reporting that can be used by end users, which will give relevant, consistent and correct results. Also, ability to combine data, I created a report based on SAP data from BW and combined it with data from SQL server to be able to report on the data in a way that would not have been possible to do except with manual steps. The solution I built replaced a manual process that would take 3 weeks and provided an automated solution. We were able to get the critical analysis in a small fraction of time and able to run the business better as a result.

Can be a little buggy. As with any system you need to do the work to set up the foundation; nothing is as easy as you install it and all your problems are solved.

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

No issues with deployment.

Sometimes encounter some bugs. SAP seems to have taken the approach of letting the users test the product lately.

No - the system is very scalable.

Customer service was average.

Technical support was average.

I've developed many solutions to replace solutions using Access and Excel.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I've done implementations myself.

I'm not sure, as I've been part of projects as a part of the larger organization. In general, it could be very high or very low. I know that BOBJ is costly - so you would need projects to justify the cost.

Not sure haven't been involved in this aspect.

No.

Definitely cost justify it. If you have a lot of manual processes involved in getting the reporting that you need, then this product will definitely help. You can cut out all the manual steps.

Universe Designer is the product's most valuable feature because you can manage joins or derived tables as you wish.

The business can create their own reports and dashboards.

Maybe they can improve some features in report designer, like the possibility of associating colors with the dimensions. For example, if you could associate blue with the dimension "France", red with "United States", etc.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I have not yet encountered any issues with scalability.

I rate them 9/10. Very good and very fast support from SAP.

I used Jaspersoft and I changed at the same time as I changed jobs.

I think the pricing and licensing is expensive, but the tool is aimed at the big companies.

If the business case calls for creating static reports/dashboards, this tool is awesome. If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it.

I guess most customers seek SAP BOBJ for its visualization and intuitive user experience.

Most of the customers where we implemented SAP BOBJ have used Analysis for Office because it uses Excel as its base and it increases efficiency. Mostly, we have seen businesses run faster because they use SAP BOBJ.

Of course, there is always room of improvement:

• The SAP BOBJ suite needs to be more stable and seamlessly integrated with SAP BW and SAP HANA (one-time variable creation, etc.).
• I would like to see one tool that combines all of the capabilities, be it ad-hoc, formatted, dashboarding, etc. I guess SAP Design Studio is that right tool.
• More OLAP functionality should be added, so that adding key figure characteristics can be done directly on the reporting side.
• Also, I think one major confusion that all customers have is what tool to use and when? It would be a good idea to slim down the options to make customers’ lives easier.

It is a really great suite with a lot of different options and a great user interface, but requires improvement on stability and scalability.

• Design Studio is very flexible because we can use JavaScript.
• We can use CSS styles for stunning visualization.

• Design Studio is a highly optimized tool for integrating with SAP BW and SAP HANA. Obviously, that increases reporting performance.
• Complex requirements can be met using JavaScript.
• The CSS editor saves time.

In Design Studio version 1.6, when creating a custom geo map component, we are not able to associate a shape layer with data sources.

We have used all the business objects tools, but this one satisfies all of the business requirements in an optimized way.

It’s a straightforward and simple tool to install.

It was a simple to implement after we met the prerequisite before installing it.

• Data integration
• 64-bit architecture

I would like to see the capability to directly access social media data.

I have been using it for 14 years.

We have encountered so many issues when the architecture and design was fragile.

Technical support is 10/10.

I previously used Microsoft DTS. Microsoft BI products are ideal for small-scale businesses. whereas SAP BusinessObjects is suitable for enterprise-level implementation.

If you have the skills and time, initial setup will be easy.

I worked for both vendor teams and in-house teams. I have been involved in the implementation of complex BI solutions on the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform in major USA and Canadian companies across different industries.

For successful implementation, you need a technical expert who has specialized in the area of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) with in-depth knowledge of the data warehouse lifecycle processes (DWH design and ETL development) and extensive hands-on experience with both the SAP Enterprise Information Management (SAP Data Services) technology stack and the SAP BusinessObjects reporting products stack (IDT, Universe, Web Intelligence, Designer, Dashboards).

The manager should be from the in-house (for decision making) team and the technical experts should be from the outside (vendors and consultants).

SAP has different kinds of licensing for mid-size to large enterprises.

If you want to implement SAP Analytical applications, you need skilled resources with clear requirements.