EXPERT RESPONSE
BW is the information backbone engine for SAP and the mySAP landscape. Traditional R/3 reporting does a good job of generating tactical (operational reports). But in the past few years SAP has growingly introduced the business information warehouse as the defacto reporting framework for the mySAP suite of solutions. Some reasons for introducing SAP BW:
a) An information warehouse that enables analytical reporting
b) In a typical SAP user community more than 70% of the users would be "read-only" or reporting users. It is unnecessary to provide SAP transaction system reporting to the 70%.
c) Ability to create reports on the fly providing much more flexibility to information insight.
BW is clearly the fastest growing SAP technology in terms of user adoption. In the last few years alone, over 3000 installations of BW have been reported. SAP has thrown in a very creative licensing strategy that provides attractive incentives to migrate to mySAP BW.
The key components of BW that have gained momentum:
1) Strategic & tactical information analytics
2) Portal integration for extended and easier information consumption
3) Pre-delivered best business practices (Business content) for expedited implementations.
4) BW-BPS for planning and feedback into SAP transaction system
mySAP BW is the information engine for the new dimension suite of products like APO (demand planning), CRM (campaigns, trade and promotion management, customer churn analysis) and SRM (vendor scorecarding).
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