SAP BI Business Objects

SAP Business Objects (SAP BI BusinessObjects) provides a complete set of Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) tools and applications which support reporting, data querying and data analysis, interactive data visualization, data management, planning, budgeting and forecasting.

SAP Business Objects solutions

SAP Business Objects Enterprise platform

SAP Business Objects Enterprise platform provides a shared infrastructure for managing the users' Business Intelligence content.
The Business Objects BI platform includes a web portal for accessing the Business Intelligence data (such as reports, analysis and cubes) and an administrative console to support such features as security, audit, data access methods, etc.

Query & Analysis

The Business Objects query and analysis tools provide an interactive information delivery and ad-hoc data analysis. Business users are able to build their own queries, design and generate reports and do an interactive data analysis without knowing the structure of a source data.

Reporting

Reporting is a process of making the data available for exploring, formatting the data and delivering it to a recipient. This group of tools include report design, data exploration, static and dynamic analysis and accessing the information through a centralized web portal.

Visualization

The interactive analysis products let users create dynamic and interactive Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations containing interactive data, dynamic charts and user friendly reports.

Enterprise Performance Management

The EPM tools and applications provided by SAP Business Objects let the business users create and analyze dashboards, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPI) and advanced models. The analysis engine provides an efficient and user-friendly OLAP reporting as well as helps prepare the prediction models, migration analysis and manage the corporate quality process.

Data Integration / Enterprise Information Management

The BusinessObjects EIM products provide physical and virtual data integration, a powerful ETL engine providing data quality and data warehouse metadata management mechanisms, which helps deliver accurate, current and reliable data.

Budgeting and Planning

Business Objects offers performance management solutions for strategic planning, forecasting, budgeting, sales and compensation planning and consolidations. The full suite of financial planning tools offer a unique integration of spreadsheets and industry-leading databases, complete with full-scale Web deployment. Business Objects provides strategic planning and what-if capabilities where managers can predict change and manage the future with confidence.

SAP BO Strategy management and Enterprise Performance Management

SAP Business Objects implements strategy management and Enterprise Performance Management mainly through the following two products: SAP Strategy Manager (SSM) and Business Objects Performance Manager (PM) and also with Cartesis for financial dashboards and scorecards and XCelsius for interactive dashboards based on rather small data volumes.
Basically, the SAP roadmap shows that SAP Strategy Management (formerly known as Pilot Works) will be the replacement for the BusinessObjects Performance Management module.

Enterprise Performance and Strategy Management applications offer the following tools, applications and methods:

  • Balanced Scorecards (BSC) - a strategic performance management tool for indicating whether the goals, vision and strategy of a smaller-scale operational activities are aligned with the organization's big-scale objectives.
    A typical Scorecard uses 4 general perspectives: Financial perspective, Customer perspective, Internal process perspective and employee perspective (also referred to as innovation and learning).
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPI) - based on a strategy map and strategic objectives, strategic performance metrics or KPIs are used to track performance and identify trends. The performance indicators are usually implementing the red-orange-green status notation and the underlying information is linked to reports containing related, more detailed information.
  • Dashboards - the whole business intelligence environment can be visualized with an intuitive interface with rich graphics capabilities to quickly create visually appealing dashboards. Dashboards are personalized which enables business users to self-assemble and customize the content to meet their expectations.
  • Initiatives view - which helps assign participants and owners to a given strategic objective and assign priorities to projects and their milestones.
  • Rules, warnings, events monitoring and suggestions help identify and react quickly on potential threats
  • The structure of an organization can be linked through scorecards and KPI's to a particular division or a single employee.

SAP Business Objects Reporting and analysis applications

SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence offers a number of different tools for reporting and analysis:

  • Crystal Reports - for advanced, pixel-perfect static reporting, provides a wide variety of scheduling and delivery options and integrates easily with .NET and Java applications.
  • Web Intelligence - powerful analysis tool which offers interactive reporting and analysis for information consumers. With Web Intelligence users can query the organization's databases using everyday business vocabulary without having to understand the technical way the information is stored. Web Intelligence is accessed through the BusinessObjects portal InfoView via an internet browser which allows users to share documents with other users.
    Web Intelligence can also be used offline as Web Intelligence Rich Client, a standalone Microsoft Windows application that lets continue to work with Web Intelligence documents offline (no InfoView connection available) and Web Intelligence is deployed without installing BusinessObjects Enterprise servers or an application server.
  • Desktop Intelligence - analysis and reporting tool which enables offline reporting and works in a client-server architecture. It has been replaced by Webintelligence and Webintelligence Rich Client
  • Voyager - OLAP analysis tool. Voyager is an application designed for business analysts which analyze data stored in OLAP data sources. It provides many sophisticated data analysis methods along with advanced charting features such as bubble, radar and scattered charts.
  • Crystal Xcelsius - interactive graphical visualization reporting tool which uses Flash technology to create rich dashboards, interactive reports and what-if analysis. It is a presentation tool that bases its source data on excel spreadsheets and visualizes the data as interactive presentations with interactive charts and what-if scenarios.