SAP Business Objects’ New Business Warehouse Version

One use of BI is for what’s called enterprise performance management (EPM). This combines the analytic and reporting capabilities of BI with corporate’s monitoring, book-closing, budgeting, and planning functions to deliver ongoing fine-tuning of business performance. It’s typically used in large enterprises with lots of subsidiaries and business units.

SAP recently came out with a new version of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, their EPM product. This version is available as an alternative to the existing version for the Microsoft platform. It is built directly on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform (BW, ABAP Application Server).  Whereas in the version for the Microsoft platform, Microsoft SQL Server was the only database supported, the version for SAP NetWeaver works with any relational database that SAP NetWeaver supports. What’s the value-add?

features include support for “self-service” financial reporting, intercompany reconciliation, legal consolidation, and collaboration. …

The SAP tests monitored by Winter Corp. show that:

• The new version of SAP BPC scales almost linearly with the amount of CPU power used for realistic planning, budgeting, and combined scenarios involving 50 to 500 users at maximum load.
• Response times were quite predictable in all cases, allowing users to “plan around” wait times after requests to generate reports.
• Performance was adequate in all cases, involving 1-9 minute waits after requests to generate reports.
• Handling “mixed” processes and transaction loads during the combined scenario caused little if any slowdown in performance in all cases, indicating that SAP BPC is tuned effectively for a wide range of user planning/budgeting/financial use cases. “

The real message, as far as I’m concerned, is that a wide range of users of SAP can now drive faster book closings for more rapid course changes. There’s a tipping point in any such software: either you can get everyone together to report weekly, monthly, or quarterly results in a day, or the whole process tends to drag out for several days. It sounds as if, even when the organization is highly complex, real-world businesses can get reporting, reconciliation, checking against plan, report summarization for corporate, and follow-on tweaks to budgets done within a day. That’s not instantaneous, like a dashboard; but it’s also comprehensive, unlike a dashboard.

The remaining questions are the price – is this worth the hardware and software needed to scale – and the nature of the user’s SAP implementation – does SAP handle the accounting already? If the answers to those two questions are satisfactory, this is definitely worth looking at.