In this post we will discuss the Fujitsu presentation of the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. Trying to be impartial, being an employee of Fujitsu myself, we will review the functional benefits of implementing this application, which can be either standalone or on top of SAP Business Information 7.0
So what is it?
Lets call it SAP BOE from now on. Although SAP BI in itself can be a powerful application for analytics it can be cumbersome for the 'casual users', which includes the executive level in a company. SAP BOE aims to address this gap by making access to those 'sweet spots' of information much easier, more intuitive and faster (Google like speed is touted). Eliminating the need to request particular reports from a BI team or IT significantly increases the effectiveness of the user, which at the executive level is vital. Not that the executive level are the sole users - power users will still likely use SAP Business Explorer but senior management would also benefit from exposure to SAP BOE.
What are the key features and benefits?
The most obvious feature is a simple search with a google like ranking of the results, along with a 'stats' link to take you to the analytics features of the product. Being a relative newcomer to BI and BO, but experienced in Enterprise Portal, the most important feature (for me) of such a tool is ease of use and an ability to change the queries on the fly without a need for in depth training or client software. BOE achieves this well and top level management would need minimal assistance in getting to grips with it. Summarising, the benefits and features are (in no order or being exhaustive):
- Simple, easy to use interface. This is not like SAP Business Explorer which can be complicated for your average user.
- Can change perpectives easily - bar chart to pie chart in a single click
- Can add new dimensions easily within the analysis results e.g add customer geographics data to further refine a root cause anaylsis. These come as drop downs on the selection criteria in the statistics. Handy.
- On the fly manipulation of the statistics to suit needs - top X results, co-relate to another data set etc (hence the tagline 'explore your business at the speed of thought')
- Actions are available - email result as URL link, bookmark, export data.
- SAP BOE sits on top of SAP Business Objects (latest is XI3.1 SP2) so it can be either be standalone to external data sources (not all though, so be careful here), implemented on top of SAP BI 7.0 or (and this would need further technical checks) - SAP BI and external sources at the same time. This last item is very important as it can address relating a legacy data source with new SAP BI data - see my post from Walt Disney Corporation for more on this.
Are there any functional & technical limitations?
This would need further consideration, but from the demo it would be necessary for the user to have some form of analytics knowledge - exposure to business warehouse applications, accountancy knowledge or some form of SAP BO training would be needed to prevent over analysis. This would be primarily to prevent too much granularity of the results or misleading results. e.g. the user needs to know which dimensions to add to make an analysis pertinent.
You can only have one 'Universe' (see BO technical for that one!) for one BOE implementation. Put simply this means you can have one BOE per data source, but (and this is important), if you can link SAP BI and one (or more) external data sources together in SAP BO XI 3.1 SP2, this can be serviced by one Universe. Confused? Imagine a Universe as an umbrella - you need to get everything under it in order to stay dry (or in this case to analyse its data).
Does it have a future?
Undoubtedly any application that can make a key stakeholders working life easier is hard to ignore. Many products have come about promising to abstract the underyling applications and use semantics etc but fall at the last fence when it comes to the client presentation. BOE has been well thought out and although the technical members of a company will be groaning about another level of integration, it is good news for those with the casting vote in a company - the key stakeholders, or 'the boss'.
See Fujitsu services regarding packages for SAP BOE
Chris Enstock
August 4th 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment