Date: 14 Aug 08

Study Material on Business Warehouse / BI

 ASAP methodoligy means nothing but standard process for implementation of SAP, It consists of 5 phases. 1. Project preperation - consists of identifying team members and developing strategy as how to go. 2. Business Blue print - consists of identifying the client current process, reqeirement and how SAP provides solution. Consists of detailed documentaion

3. Realization -The purpose of this phase is to implement all the business and process requirements based on the Business Blueprint. 4 Final Preparation - The purpose of this phase is to complete testing, end-user training, 5 Go Live and Support

BI(Business Intelligence)

BI

Modelling Eg: ERWIN

Extraction Eg: Informatica

Reports Eg: COGNOS

 Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors that affect your business. It is imperative that you have an in depth knowledge about factors such as your customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment, and internal operations to make effective and good quality business decisions. Business intelligence enables you to make these kinds of decisions.

 The ultimate objective of business intelligence is to improve the timeliness and quality of information. Timely and good quality information is like having a crystal ball that can give you an indication of what's the best course to take. Business intelligence reveals to you:  The position your firm as in comparison to its competitors  Changes in customer behaviour and spending patterns  The capabilities of your firm  Market conditions, future trends, demographic and economic information  What the other firms in the market are doing

You can then deduce from the information gathered what adjustments need to be made.

Businesses realize that in this very competitive, fast pace, and always changing business environment the only thing that will help them gain a competitive advantage over their competitors is how quickly they respond and adapt to change. Business intelligence enables them to use information gathered to proactively respond to changes. For example Bill Gates the co-founder of Microsoft was able to anticipate the changes occurring in the technology industry and as a result he was able to develop the first operating software that could be universally used on computers.

 Benefits of BI  BI provides many benefits to companies utilizing it. It can eliminate a lot of the guesswork within an organization, enhance communication among departments while coordinating activities, and enable companies to respond quickly to changes in financial conditions, customer preferences, and supply chain operations. BI improves the overall performance of the company using it.

 Information is regarded as the most important resource a company has. So when a company can make decisions based on timely accurate information it improves the performance of that company. BI also expedites decision making because businesses realize that information can be used to achieve a competitive advantage so when a business obtains key information they quickly use it before a competitor obtains the same information. It also maximizes the customer experience because when you are able to properly cater to the wants or needs of a customer you enhance the customer's experience.

 Factors Influencing Business Intelligence  Customers are the most critical aspect to a company's success. Without them a company cannot exist. So it is very important that you have information on their likes and dislikes. You must quickly adapt to their changing demands. Business Intelligence enables you to gather information on the trends in the marketplace and come up with innovative products or services in anticipation of customer's changing demands.

 Competitors can be a huge hurdle on your way to success. Their objectives are the same as yours and that is to maximize profits and customer satisfaction. In order to be successful you must stay one step ahead of your competitors. In business you don't want to play the catch up game because you would have lost valuable market share. Business Intelligence tells you what actions your competitors are taking, so you can make better informed decisions.

 Business Partners must possess the same strategic information you have so that there is no miscommunication that can lead to inefficiencies. For example it is common now for businesses to allow their suppliers to see their inventory levels, performance metrics, and other supply chain data in order to collaborate to improve supply chain management. With business intelligence you and your business partners can share the same information.

 Internal Operations are the day to day activities that go on in your business. You need an in depth knowledge about the internal workings of your business from top to bottom. If you make an arbitrary decision without knowing how your entire organization works it could have negative affects on your business. BI gives you information on how your entire organization works.

factors that influence the design of a data warehouse and the structure that data records are stored

 BW consists among other things of components for data management (Administrator Workbench), for the definition of queries by means of an OLAP processor (Business Explorer, BEx) and for the control of loading processes. It is possible to split SAP BW in three well defined layers:  Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) layer - responsible for extracting data from a specific source, applying transformation rules, and loading it into SAP BW system.  Data warehouse area - responsible for storing the information in a multidimensional structure.  Reporting - responsible for accessing the information in data warehouse area and presenting it in a friendly way to the end user

 BW is a very common warehouse solution in companies which use also SAP R/3. This is because BW contains predefined R/3 extractors, related OLAP cubes, authorization roles, query views and reports integrated in the so called Business Content. Thereby a shorter development of DWH solutions is supposed to be possible. BW is now part of a suite of SAP applications called NetWeaver. Other components of NetWeaver include SAP Enterprise Portal (EP), Web Application Server (WAS) and Master Data Management (MDM)

 OLTP(On-line Transaction Processing) Operational systems for collecting and managing the base data in an organization, such as sales order processing, inventory, accounts payable, etc. Usually offer little or no analytical capabilities

OLAP is an acronym for online analytical processing. It is an approach to quickly provide the answer to complex database queries. It is used in business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, data mining and similar areas. Some people have suggested that an alternative and perhaps more descriptive term to describe the concept of OLAP is Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information, or FASMI.

 The Multi-Dimensional Model (MDM) Comprehensibility for the business analyst is reached by organizing entities and attributes that are arranged in a parent-child relationship (1:N), into groups.These groups are called dimensions and the members of the dimensions dimension attributes, or attributes.

 The strong entities define the dimensions For the business analyst the attributes of a dimension represent a specific business view on the facts (or key figures or KPIs), which are derived from the intersection entities.

NORMALIZATION
The process of reducing a complex data structure into its simplest, most stable structure. In general, the process entails the removal of redundant attributes, keys, and relationships from a conceptual data model. The process of converting complex data structures into simple, stable data structures.

The basic process of mapping an ERM to the Star schema is shown on the following graphic

The key elements of a Star schema are:

Central fact table with dimension tables shooting off from it

 Fact tables typically store atomic and aggregate transaction information, such as quantitative amounts of goods sold. They are called facts.

 Facts are numeric values of a normally additive nature.

 fact tables contain foreign keys to the most atomic dimension attribute of each dimension table.

 Foreign keys tie the fact table rows to specific rows in each of the associated dimension tables.

STAR SCHEMA

ERM
1) 2) 3) 4) STRONG ENTITY WEAK ENTITIES FACTS INTERSECTION ENTITY

MDM
1)CHARACTERISTICS 2) ATTRIBUTES 3) KEY FIGURES OR FACTS 4) FACT TABLE

 Extended Star Schema: Many of the problems associated with the basic star schema are resolved with the BW extended star schema. With the extended star schema, attributes are removed from the dimensions and placed outside the InfoCube in master data tables.

Extended Star Schema

The graphic shows a multi-dimensional BI data model

 Reporting systems of all kinds are common in todays enterprise environment. Many of these systems, however, are unable to provide the kind of information that you need to help you make complex decisions. Data warehouses, such as the SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), provide the kind of decision-support system that is needed in todays business environment.

Flat file source system

OLTP System

BI Content is delivered as an add-on to SAP BI. The naming is SAP NW 2004s BI Content Add-On 3. This will be referred to as Business Content. Purpose:  Business Content is a pre-configured set of role and task-related information models that are based on consistent metadata in SAP Business Intelligence. Business Content provides selected roles within a company with the information they need to carry out their tasks. This information model includes integral roles, workbooks, queries, InfoSources, InfoCubes, ODS objects, key figures, characteristics, update rules, and extractors for SAP applications.

Business Content can:  Be used in particular industries without being modified  Be modified, meaning you can work with it to any degree of detail  Serve as a template or an example for customer-defined Business Content.

 Implementation Consideration On one hand the comprehensive Business Content for SAP Business Intelligence enables a quick and cost-effective implementation. On the other hand, it provides a model that is based on experience gained from other implementations which can be used as a guideline during implementation.

 Features of Business content SAP Business Intelligence delivers pre-configured objects under the collective term Business Content. These objects speed up the implementation of SAP Business Intelligence because they deliver complete solutions for business information needs. Business Content includes:  Extractor programs for SAP systems  DataSources  InfoObjects  InfoSources  Data targets (InfoCubes and ODS objects)  Variables  Queries  Workbooks  Crystal Reports  Web templates  Roles

Business Explorer (BEx) Analyser

The distinct new features of SAP BW 7.0

Renamed ODS as DataStore Unification of Transfer and Update Rules Push Of XML data into BI system (into PSA) without Service API or Delta Queue Introduction of BI accelerator that significantly improves the performance Load through PSA has become a must

 Search functionality has improved, you can search any object In BW 7.0 we create Transformation Rule that replaces both transfer and update rule that exists in BW 3.5 We dont create infosource in BW 7.0. The data transfer process gets automatically created as soon as we create transformation. So data is directly fetched from data source by using data transfer process. We can assign it to multiple datasources also.

Advantages of using data warehouse There are many advantages to using a data warehouse, some of them are:  Enhances end-user access to a wide variety of data.  Increases data consistency.  Increases productivity and decreases computing costs.  Is able to combine data from different sources, in one place.  It provides an infrastructure that could support changes to data and replication of the changed data back into the operational systems.

Concerns in using data warehouse  Extracting, cleaning and loading data could be time consuming.  Data warehousing project scope might increase.  Problems with compatibility with systems already in place e.g. transaction processing system.  Providing training to end-users, who end up not using the data warehouse.  Security could develop into a serious issue, especially if the data warehouse is web accessible.

Any Questions !!!

THANKS !!