SAP Business Warehouse Room for Improvement

JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Security/GRC Manager at Tata Consultancy

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.

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Vinay Lohakare - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Technical Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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.

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SB
Assistant Professor at a university with 201-500 employees

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.

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Buyer's Guide
SAP Business Warehouse
February 2024
Learn what your peers think about SAP Business Warehouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2024.
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SC
IT Manager at GIC Re

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.

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Rodolfo Bermúdez Neubauer  - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Manager at Intellego BI

Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users. Simplifying feature discovery could prevent clients from seeking alternative solutions unnecessarily.

Additionally, I would like to see the reintroduction of Business Explorer capabilities in SAP Business Warehouse. These features provided ad-hoc reporting capabilities that are currently missing in the latest versions. Having this functionality directly within BW would enhance reporting options for users.

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AS
Mechanical Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JS
Group BI Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data.

I would like to see a more comprehensive package in the future. SAP did that, but when you go to BW on HANA, and then you want to go to BW4HANA, that's basically two migrations. BW4HANA does offer everything that we're lacking in BW on HANA, but two million migrations in five years isn't really salable to the business.

The solution is also very pricey. 

I think that there should definitely be more integration. Whatever they make available in BW4, they should make it available in BW on HANA. But SAP has clearly stated that they are not doing any development on this. They are concentrating on BW4 and the DWC.

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SD
Founder & CEO at imfine.club

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.

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SY
Consultant at Astra Industrial Group

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.

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Kumar Madhur - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Project Manager at HCL Technologies

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.

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SC
IT Manager at GIC Re

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.

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SriniDhanaraj - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data at Gauri Ltd

SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations.

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MB
SAP technical consultant at N

They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading.

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Buyer's Guide
SAP Business Warehouse
February 2024
Learn what your peers think about SAP Business Warehouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2024.
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.