With the growing network of processes and systems, the need for efficient management support systems is also increasing. However for this it is not enough to place a company strategically and give guidelines for its further development. Instead it is essential to have real time analysis and graphical visualization of the key performance indicators. In SAP BW automatic assimilation and analysis of information is possible. BW gives a holistic view of the company by considering both the financial data and non- financial assets of the company. As corporate planning is often not done in one common planning tool (e.g. turnover plan in a sales system and cost center plan in excel) studying interdependencies and coordination among them has become even more tedious. Thus the strategic management system must establish a planning process through all levels of planning in the company to make the data available for all responsible persons in one system. With SAP BW it is possible to upload data of different planning tools, manipulate planning data and write back changed data to the operational system. SAP BW can also be used as early warning system to inform the responsible persons about critical indicators on the basis of already defined thresholds of these indicators.

SAP BW has the usual data warehouse layers accompanied by administrative services through the Administrative Workbench. It allows exchange of data and metadata with other systems and tools in the case of SAP-specific interfaces like Staging BAPI and the OLAP BAPI and supports other industry standard interfaces allowing easy access to data and metadata maintained in SAP. Also, the metadata objects that are available in SAP BW are used to build Operational data stores, data warehouses and info marts. Thus, the services provided by SAP with SAP BW makes it a major tool for complete corporate information and strategy management.

We hope you have enjoyed reading this tutorial. If you are interested in learning more, check out the online SAP training courses offered by Michael Management Corporation