What is BW

SAP Business Warehouse

SAP BW is SAP's Data Warehouse solution. It has come to existence specially to gather, analyse different kinds of data from R/3 systems and other business applications.

Sometimes SAP BW is also called as SAP Business Information Warehouse.

Data Analytics is like an ECG/health report of a business. And SAP BW is the data factory to generate analytics reports, which in turn help business to take key decisions.

SAP BW is core component of mySAP.com.

It also supports easy integration with other SAP solutions like, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - My favourite.

SAP BW helps easily extract, load and transform data with pre-configured models and reports. SAP BW also helps to automate these process on daily, weekly or monthly basis as per the business needs and can make life much easier. SAP BW is one of the best ETL (Extraction, Transform and Load) tool I had ever worked.

SAP BW can extract data from:

• SAP R/3

• Microsoft Excel

• Data Services (Oracle, SQL..)

SAP BW has its own stand alone server, OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) for reporting activities and hence the system does impact the actual SAP R/3 systems in any way.

For any queries on SAP BW, please post a question in the below forum. Happy to answer them all.

Benefits of SAP BW

SAP BW comes with inbuilt business content which fits into any specific business.

For instance, if you would like to implement a solution for Sales and Marketing, SAP BW provides business content to support your reporting solutions with its inbuilt data models.

Data sources like 2LIS_VA_HDR, 2LIS_VD_HDR have all the required dimensions and measures which meets the sales and marketing module of any Industry.

Like the data sources, BW also comes with many other objects like Info Objects, Data Store Objects, Info cubes, Open hub, Multi provider and Composite Providers.

All these are the data storage containers.

SAP BW comes with planning and execution application that help to you to act instantly to improve the performance of your business processes.

Flavours of BW

• SAP BW 3.x

• SAP BW 7.x

SAP BW 3.x is the basic version which had limited functionalities and is going to be obsolete in no time.

SAP BW 7.5 is the latest version of BW with all the advanced features.