History

Before SAP BW became the de facto choice for SAP Reporting and Analysis, many organisations chose to implement "best of breed" data warehouses to enable reporting on data from SAP R/3 and other enterprise applications. In part this is due to the fact that when BW first became available in 1998, there was a lot of resistance against "packaged data warehouses". It also has to be said that the product wasn't all it is now and earlier versions of BW weren't particularly "open" and were often just loaded with data from SAP R/3. As the product has developed over the years into the mature, stable version that we have now, more and more organisations have replaced their data warehouses with SAP BW and achieved considerable benefits and cost savings.

What is the business case for replacing your current data warehouse with SAP BI?

Many organisations already have the necessary SAP licenses (mySAP or Professional User License) and are therefore entitled to use SAP BI and Planning products.

You will be able to reduce the size of your support and development team. Because of the diverse skillsets that are needed for best of breed data warehousing (database administration, database modelling, SQL programming, ETL skills, front end reporting tool), Bluefin have seen the average team size halve when replacing an existing data warehouse with SAP BI. This is because development times tend to be much faster because the ready made Business Content, and because fewer skillsets are needed and most are already available in house for existing SAP customers (e.g. Basis, ABAP).

Integration costs are much lower if your strategy is broadly SAP centric.

What's involved?

The task can at first seem daunting. How on earth could you ever replace a system that has been developed over a number of years, has hundreds of users and thousands of reports.

Through experience gained over many similar engagements, Bluefin have developed a structured approach to data warehouse replacement.

We look at all aspects of your current system, data sources, data manipulation, reporting and analysis and interfaces. We can do this thanks to the broad ranges of skills that we have in house in our BI team.  We then "reverse engineer" your existing data warehouse and turn this into a BW data model.

What are the typical issues?

Some of the typical issues to be expected are:

• Data compability and quality issues
  
• The need to load historical data and merge it with data from SAP R/3
• Often there will be no centralised repository of reports, making it hard to understand the scale of the problem and complexity of reports
  
• Many reports will have fallen out of use and no longer have an owner
  
• Data reconciliation and testing is time consuming but essential
• User resistance to BW as a tool
• BW may not be able to replicate some of the functionality currently available
• Decomissioning the old data warehouse

How can Bluefin help?

Bluefin will be able to help you assess the challenges in replacing your existing data warehouse, and give you an idea of the benefits that you will receive.

Then we'll be able to make the vision become reality, using our team of specialists.

For more information please contact us on (0)870 233 0404.