COM T. Friedman, F. Buytendijk, D. Prior

Transcription

1 T. Friedman, F. Buytendijk, D. Prior Research Note 14 May 2003 Commentary SAP BW: Real-World Experiences and Best Practices SAP customers will be driven to deploy Business Information Warehouse as part of their business intelligence architecture. The benefits and challenges experienced to date are references for what BW project teams can expect. SAP positions its Business Information Warehouse (BW) product as a business intelligence (BI) platform with data warehousing capabilities. It takes data from SAP transactional modules and non-sap data, integrates the data, and provides query and reporting capabilities to users. There are approximately 5,000 BW installations worldwide; an estimated 4,000 of those are in production with some or all components of BW. SAP has been successful in creating the perception that R/3 users need BW. By 2005, more than 70 percent of SAP's R/3 installed base will implement BW to meet some portion of their operationally focused decision-support needs (0.8 probability). With the availability of BW v.3.1 and a growing number of BW sites in production, market references are increasing and best practices are surfacing. In more than 150 recent Gartner interactions with BW users, including a focused survey, a number of key trends have emerged. The Decision to Implement BW In slightly more than 50 percent of the BW implementations studied, enterprises selected BW without significantly evaluating alternative approaches to data warehousing. In many cases, management chose BW without a formal selection process, primarily because the enterprise had a mysap license or an all- SAP strategy. Top management often feels that it is not necessary to evaluate alternatives, and dictates the direction to the data warehouse team. Best Practices: Although choosing BW may seem logical if the enterprise has significant investment in R/3, enterprises should evaluate alternatives. In many cases, there may be a mature data warehouse, which should not be replaced. Furthermore, BW can be used to leverage, rather than replace, certain BI tools to which users are accustomed. There may also be other enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages in the enterprise that offer an alternative or capabilities that can coexist with and complement BW. Enterprises should plan to implement BW as part of an overall data warehouse strategy (see "ERP Data Warehouse Implementation Strategies"). Gartner 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Business Content Enterprises consider the integration with SAP R/3 the connectors and standard "business content" (predefined loading mechanism, data structures, queries, reports and metrics) to be a significant differentiator and value-added characteristic, compared to custom-built data warehouses. Of the implementations studied, more than 60 percent viewed this as the single biggest strength of BW. Although many enterprises consider a BW implementation to be IT-intensive and difficult, the business content provides efficiency and can reduce implementation time, compared to a completely custom data warehouse effort. The notion of having a "packaged data warehouse" is appealing (see "BI Vendors Expand Offerings, but Success Is Not Assured"). However, BW typically is not deployed by simply unwrapping the package. Although nearly all of the BW users surveyed stated that they like to use the R/3 connectors, more than 85 percent tend to customize the InfoCubes (the star-schema data structure on which BW is based), and customize or create their own reports to reflect the uniqueness of their business. BW implementation teams experience greater success through modifying existing reports, as it is easier than writing new ones. Best Practices: Enterprises considering BW should factor into their project plans adequate time for setup and customization (for example, modifying InfoCubes and customizing or creating new reports). We estimate that making such modifications, on average, leads to an additional 25 percent implementation time, compared with simply deploying the standard reports. Building new InfoCubes based on existing data flows and dimensions takes anywhere from several days to a few weeks, depending on the complexity. Depth and Breadth of BW Usage One of the most-frequently mentioned challenges that BW users cite is lack of flexibility. Setting up data structures requires good planning and a good view of the requirements, because it is not easy to make changes without considerable IT support. As in the case of any data warehouse effort, enterprises that shortcut the implementation will typically experience twice the average costs for post-implementation remediation of problems caused by poor design. The architecture of having InfoCubes that are premodeled during implementation makes BW most suited to deal with basic management reporting, usually 60 percent or more of the BI requirements of a typical enterprise. This provides tactical value and is how most enterprises use it emphasizing standard reporting together with some drill down, exception reporting and "slice-and-dice" capabilities. Typically, 20 percent or less of the use is for ad hoc querying and exploratory analysis; in many cases, these styles of BI are accomplished completely outside of BW. In addition, some enterprises don t use BW for reporting, but use it as a staging area to collect SAP data for export to a custom data warehouse. These enterprises must clearly understand the licensing requirements for the BW Open Hub as it relates to BW v.3.0 and above (see "SAP Plans to Mine More Revenue From Its Installed Base"). Most of the return on investment for standard management reporting resides in broad deployments, serving many managers and other constituents of management information. However, the average number of BW users is relatively low: Approximately 55 percent of enterprises surveyed reported having fewer than 50 users, and less than 7 percent reported having more than 1,000 users. Our client interactions did not show a correlation between the time BW has been in production and the number of users. For example, enterprises using BW since 2001 do not have more users than 14 May

3 enterprises that have only recently implemented BW. To a large extent, this may be a cultural, rather than a technology, issue that the enterprise is not willing or ready to share information broadly. Best Practices: To gain the largest business benefit from BW, enterprises should concentrate on standard management reporting and should look for opportunities to broadly leverage these management reports across the enterprise, not only within a small group of users. BW Front-End Considerations With BW v.3.0b, SAP enhanced the functionality of the Business Explorer Excel add-in (Bex Analyzer) to enable Web reporting (Bex Web). Most of the enterprises surveyed use Bex Analyzer and Bex Web; they do not turn to third-party BI tools, such as arcplan, Business Objects, Cognos or Crystal Decisions. Although third-party BI tools are generally superior in functionality, Bex Analyzer and Bex Web are considered to be sufficient when the focus is primarily on standard reporting, rather than on interactive analysis. Slightly more than 25 percent of the surveyed enterprises have implemented third-party BI tools to access BW. Many enterprises plan to implement a third-party BI tool, but not immediately. They feel that Bex is enough, or shy away from investing in the third-party tool as long as their requirements do not outgrow the Bex capabilities. The Business Explorer front ends are loved and hated. Users that are used to ABAP reporting (hardcoded reports created with SAP s application development tools) and users that like to use Excel as the front end (typically finance users) tend to like Bex Analyzer. Users that are comfortable with BI tools tend to emphasize the inflexibility of Bex Analyzer and Bex Web. Some enterprises that deploy third-party BI tools for accessing BW have complained about the performance; some have even abandoned that approach. Other enterprises with the same tools report no performance problems. A logical explanation is that the third-party BI tool is being used for heavy-duty production reporting, rather than its intended use for flexible data access. However, working through the OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO), Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) or other BWsupported APIs adds overhead that can contribute to performance issues. For improved performance, some enterprises prefer to load the BW metadata into the metadata layer of the third-party BI tool and directly access the InfoCubes. However, this means that BW metadata and BI tool metadata must be kept in synch. Synchronization problems could lead to support issues between SAP and the third-party vendor. Best Practices: Enterprises requiring ad hoc query capability in addition to management reporting should evaluate Bex Analyzer and Bex Web against popular third-party BI tools. Evaluating Crystal Decisions is logical, because SAP ships many standard reports created with Crystal Reports. However, there are additional license fees to upgrade to a full license of Crystal's Enterprise Edition. When specific analytical capabilities such as user-driven planning models and specialized data mining are needed, enterprises should consider an appropriate additional BI platform (see "BI Magic Quadrants: Excitement in a Flat Market"). Integration of any third-party tools with BW must be rigorously tested. Non-SAP Data Most enterprises (more than 80 percent of those surveyed) are bringing non-sap data into BW, but they rarely use a specialized extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool to accomplish this (fewer than 10 percent of implementations). This does not imply that the built-in ETL capabilities of BW are worldclass or that no third-party ETL tool is necessary. Most enterprises solve the complexity issues in loading non-sap data by building complex logic into the interfaces from source systems, sending relatively clean 14 May

4 and properly structured flat files to BW for loading. This enables direct leverage of the BW loading mechanisms, but moves the burden of resolving data quality and data integration problems to the interfaces from the source systems. Best Practices: Enterprises should carefully evaluate the ETL capabilities of BW and seriously consider an ETL tool when the complexity of integration and transformation requirements for non-sap data is high. If the majority of data required for BI activities is not from SAP, then enterprises should consider data warehouse alternatives and possibly use BW to stage SAP data en route to a non-bw corporate data warehouse (see "ERP Data Warehouse Implementation Strategies"). Skills, Staffing and Support Similar to other BI platforms, and despite its positioning as a packaged offering, BW is not easily deployed by the user community with the help of some external consultants. A BW implementation is highly IT-centric and requires a significant skill set and direct end-user participation. The surveyed enterprises reported dedicated teams of up to 15 individuals, with an average team size between four and five full-time resources. Skills critical to implement BW successfully include deep knowledge of SAP BASIS, ABAP programming, ETL (for dealing with non-sap data), and general BI and data warehousing competence. One enterprise observed that its BW implementation needed even more BASIS skills than its R/3 implementation. Enterprises that see BW as an implementation of "just another SAP module" typically struggle or fail, due to lack of specific data warehousing skills. Many enterprises have noted challenges in finding external consultants with extensive BW experience. Although SAP offers training on BW, local offices seem to lack deep BW knowledge. This puts an additional burden on the experts at SAP headquarters, leading to some enterprises expressing frustration over a perceived lack of responsiveness in resolving issues. Best Practices: Enterprises should not underestimate the effort and skill set required for successful BW implementation. In addition to having solid SAP and BW-specific knowledge, general data warehousing skills are critical. Versions and Stability With v.3.0a, v.3.0b and, most recently, v.3.1 Business Content, SAP has made significant functional improvements relative to v.2.0 and v.2.1 Business Content. BW customer implementations are spread across all available versions, with the majority on v.3.x releases (about 60 percent of survey respondents) and a large percentage still on 2.x (approximately 40 percent of survey respondents). Many enterprises complain about the stability of v.3.0. Feedback from Gartner clients indicates that patches are issued roughly every four weeks. BW users find this to be a significant challenge, because implementing these patches requires substantial coordination and testing of the entire system. This is another reason that staffing levels in many BW implementations are still high. Reportedly, the stability of v.3.1 (which contains new business content and all bug fixes) is better. However, it is too early to assess the stability of v.3.1 because a limited number of enterprises have moved to this newest version (only about 6 percent of enterprises surveyed). Best Practices: Enterprises must recognize that the x.0 releases of BW, as with any major new software release, are "raw" (that is, there are stability challenges). Until SAP demonstrates that major releases of the product are stable, enterprises should not implement x.0 versions, but should wait for a significant amount of bug fixes or an x.1 release. 14 May

5 Bottom Line: The number of SAP customers deploying Business Information Warehouse is quickly increasing, driven by SAP's strategy of making BW a "required" component of the mysap infrastructure. Many enterprises recognize the value offered by BW's tight integration with R/3 and extensive predefined business content. However, BW implementations are rarely painless, particularly in large enterprises. Enterprises that implement BW must be aware of shortcomings in the SAP-provided query and reporting tools, the need to customize business content to meet requirements, and challenges in administration of the BW environment. Enterprises with a mature business intelligence architecture should integrate BW in the most-effective way possible, rather than simply replace existing data warehouse components. 14 May