The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehouse, I would to see added features that simplify the product very well now. They are coming up with a terminology called SAP BDC where they are consolidating their tools, SAP Data Sphere for integration and SAP BW for the ETL and warehousing parts, and SAP Analytics Cloud. They are packaging these three features and calling it Business Data Cloud; they are fully coming on the cloud. We have to wait and watch; they have been speaking about BW/4HANA for quite some time now, but the customers or clients I work with are not finding great interest and it was seen as a candidate for evaluation. I have seen people looking at the latest technologies who are already on cloud who started building from scratch on cloud, such as Snowflake or Databricks, which can process very huge amounts of data and also address unstructured data, where SAP lags behind in cases where there is a need to bring in unstructured data. I have worked with SAP Data Intelligence, which earlier used to be called SAP Data Hub. The unstructured data is not greatly handled in SAP at this point in time.
Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and bought a different tool. The job ran overnight. If I run the report at 5 PM on Friday, I won't get Friday’s data. I would get only the data of what was done up until Thursday. I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old. Though the responses are good, I cannot use them effectively for making decisions.
SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.
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.
Assistant Professor at a university with 201-500 employees
Real User
Jan 26, 2023
SAP Business Warehouse has a few areas for improvement. One is that it takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed. I also find the performance reporting function of SAP Business Warehouse challenging, so that's another area for improvement. What I want to see in SAP Business Warehouse in the future is for it to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Power BI. I also found Microsoft Power BI more flexible and quicker to learn than SAP Business Warehouse. Making some developments on Microsoft Power BI also requires less effort and no technical expertise. In contrast, SAP Business Warehouse requires some technical expertise, so I want that improved in the future.
The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance. In a future release, we would like to have the capability of running big data solutions and integration with the other databases, like Hadoop.
What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid. SAP has released BW/4HANA, and the database has changed. Still, in the next release of SAP Business Warehouse, I'd like to see the capability to run big data solutions and integration with other databases, such as Hadoop, which is currently not there.
Mechanical Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Aug 4, 2022
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.
Engineer( IT) at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Dec 28, 2021
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.
It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore. It's a product that needs experience and needs knowledgeable users. You don't typically find experienced consultants, especially in Brazil. While it's not hard to maintain, it's hard to find people that could help you with it.
Founder & CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Sep 17, 2021
SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools. There is some complexity to the setup. It would be helpful if the setup could be simplified. I would like to see more MLOps capabilities included.
SAP BusinessObjects Consultant at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Consultant
Feb 20, 2020
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.
Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy
Real User
Feb 16, 2020
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.
Group IT Manager at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Feb 5, 2020
On the existing release, I'm unsure about improvements. For sure the functionality is available in the new release. I don't know what competitors' systems of data warehousing provide. I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users. I'd like to see the flexibility to create reports. Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution. I'm considering migrating to the BW/4HANA solution because the language in terms of settings is very similar to the one I am currently using. We are starting to configure the BW old version solution so I don't need to invest in data analysis in order to understand the difference or to connect to a different data warehouse with this system. Additional features that could be included would be for SAP to provide different layers of solutions. One for data warehousing, another for different end solutions on the data warehouse.
It would be helpful if we could interface with BW itself, instead of piggybacking on Excel. If it could have its own interface where you can build dashboards and reports and where high-level power users can start building things, that would be helpful. Right now, only developers can build reports on BW. They need to begin to open it up to power users. The solution needs a broad-based interface. More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful.
Head of BI and Analytics at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Nov 28, 2019
The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics. It needs to have a better interface. The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases.
IT Controlling Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oct 21, 2019
The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive. I know this is already available, but what I would have wanted to see in the next release is the Time-Dependent Hierarchies. I would like to have the interface improved and made to be more intuitive.
Reporting, analysis and interpretation of business data are crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly and in line with market needs. SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) provides tools and functions that enable companies to attain these goals. In SAP BW, you can integrate, transform, and consolidate relevant business information from productive SAP applications and external data sources. SAP...
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehouse, I would to see added features that simplify the product very well now. They are coming up with a terminology called SAP BDC where they are consolidating their tools, SAP Data Sphere for integration and SAP BW for the ETL and warehousing parts, and SAP Analytics Cloud. They are packaging these three features and calling it Business Data Cloud; they are fully coming on the cloud. We have to wait and watch; they have been speaking about BW/4HANA for quite some time now, but the customers or clients I work with are not finding great interest and it was seen as a candidate for evaluation. I have seen people looking at the latest technologies who are already on cloud who started building from scratch on cloud, such as Snowflake or Databricks, which can process very huge amounts of data and also address unstructured data, where SAP lags behind in cases where there is a need to bring in unstructured data. I have worked with SAP Data Intelligence, which earlier used to be called SAP Data Hub. The unstructured data is not greatly handled in SAP at this point in time.
Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and bought a different tool. The job ran overnight. If I run the report at 5 PM on Friday, I won't get Friday’s data. I would get only the data of what was done up until Thursday. I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old. Though the responses are good, I cannot use them effectively for making decisions.
They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading.
SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.
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.
SAP Business Warehouse has a few areas for improvement. One is that it takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed. I also find the performance reporting function of SAP Business Warehouse challenging, so that's another area for improvement. What I want to see in SAP Business Warehouse in the future is for it to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Power BI. I also found Microsoft Power BI more flexible and quicker to learn than SAP Business Warehouse. Making some developments on Microsoft Power BI also requires less effort and no technical expertise. In contrast, SAP Business Warehouse requires some technical expertise, so I want that improved in the future.
The solution should be more open to the cloud. The only thing that's lacking is the cloud-centricity of it for Azure or any other cloud solution.
The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance. In a future release, we would like to have the capability of running big data solutions and integration with the other databases, like Hadoop.
What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid. SAP has released BW/4HANA, and the database has changed. Still, in the next release of SAP Business Warehouse, I'd like to see the capability to run big data solutions and integration with other databases, such as Hadoop, which is currently not there.
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.
What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup.
SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations.
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.
It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore. It's a product that needs experience and needs knowledgeable users. You don't typically find experienced consultants, especially in Brazil. While it's not hard to maintain, it's hard to find people that could help you with it.
SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools. There is some complexity to the setup. It would be helpful if the setup could be simplified. I would like to see more MLOps capabilities included.
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.
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.
On the existing release, I'm unsure about improvements. For sure the functionality is available in the new release. I don't know what competitors' systems of data warehousing provide. I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users. I'd like to see the flexibility to create reports. Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution. I'm considering migrating to the BW/4HANA solution because the language in terms of settings is very similar to the one I am currently using. We are starting to configure the BW old version solution so I don't need to invest in data analysis in order to understand the difference or to connect to a different data warehouse with this system. Additional features that could be included would be for SAP to provide different layers of solutions. One for data warehousing, another for different end solutions on the data warehouse.
It would be helpful if we could interface with BW itself, instead of piggybacking on Excel. If it could have its own interface where you can build dashboards and reports and where high-level power users can start building things, that would be helpful. Right now, only developers can build reports on BW. They need to begin to open it up to power users. The solution needs a broad-based interface. More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful.
The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics. It needs to have a better interface. The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases.
The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive. I know this is already available, but what I would have wanted to see in the next release is the Time-Dependent Hierarchies. I would like to have the interface improved and made to be more intuitive.