Business Intelligence 

 
Purpose
The reporting, analysis, and interpretation of business data is of central importance to a company
when it comes to guaranteeing a competitive edge, optimizing processes, and being able to react
quickly and in line with the market. With Business Intelligence (BI), SAP NetWeaver provides data
warehousing functionality, a business intelligence platform, and a suite of business intelligence tools
which an enterprise can use to attain these goals. Relevant business information from productive SAP
applications and external data sources can be integrated, transformed, and consolidated in BI with the
toolset provided. BI provides flexible reporting, analysis, and planning tools to support you in
evaluating and interpreting data, and tools for distributing information. Businesses can make well-
founded decisions and identify target-orientated activities on the basis of the analyzed data.

What Is Business Intelligence?  

The Purpose of Business Intelligence
During all business activities, companies create data. In all departments of the company, employees
at all levels use this data as a basis for making decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) collates and
prepares the large set of enterprise data. By analyzing the data using BI tools, you can gain insights
that support the decision-making process within your company. BI makes it possible to quickly create
reports about business processes and their results and to analyze and interpret data about
customers, suppliers, and internal activities. Dynamic planning is also possible. Business Intelligence
therefore helps optimize business processes and enables you to act quickly and in line with the
market, creating decisive competitive advantages for your company.
Key Areas of Business Intelligence
A complete Business Intelligence solution is subdivided into various areas. SAP NetWeaver
Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) provides comprehensive tools, functions, and processes
for all these areas:
A data warehouse integrates, stores, and manages company data from all sources.
If you have an integrated view on the relevant data in the data warehouse, you can start the analysis
and planning steps. To obtain decisive insights for improving your business processes from the data,
SAP NetWeaver BI provides methods for multidimensional analysis. Business key figures, such as
sales quantities or revenue, can be analyzed using different reference objects, such as Product,
Customer or Time. Methods for pattern recognition in the dataset (data mining) are also available.
SAP NetWeaver BI also allows you to perform planning based on the data in the data warehouse.
Tools for accessing and for visualization allow you to display the insights you have gained and to
analyze and plan the data at different levels of detail and in various working environments (Web,
Microsoft Excel).
By publishing content from BI, you can flexibly broadcast the information to all employees involved
in your company's decision-making processes, for example by e-mail or using an enterprise portal.
Performance and security also play an important role when it comes to providing the information
that is relevant for decision-making to the right employees at the right time.
Preconfigured information models in the form of BI Content make it possible to efficiently and cost-
effectively introduce SAP NetWeaver BI.
The following sections give an overview of the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver BI in these areas. You
can find out more about the tools, functions, and processes provided by SAP NetWeaver BI using the
links to more detailed information in the documentation.
 
Integration, Storage and Management of Data  
Comprehensive, meaningful data analyses are only possible if the datasets are bundled into a
business query and integrated. These datasets can have different formats and sources. The data
warehouse is therefore the basis for a business intelligence solution.
Enterprise data is collected centrally in the Enterprise Data Warehouse of SAP NetWeaver BI. The
data is usually extracted from different sources and loaded into SAP NetWeaver BI. SAP NetWeaver
BI supports SAP and non-SAP sources. Technical cleanup steps are then performed and business
rules are applied in order to consolidate the data for evaluations. The consolidated data is stored in
the Enterprise Data Warehouse. This entire process is called extraction, transformation and
loading (ETL).
Data can be stored in different layers of the data warehouse architecture with different granularities,
depending on your requirements.  The data flow describes the path taken by the data through the
data warehouse layers until it is ready for evaluation.
Data administration in the Enterprise Data Warehouse includes controlling the processes that
transfer the data to the Enterprise Data Warehouse and broadcast the data within the Enterprise Data
Warehouse as well as convert strategies for optimal data retention and history keeping (limiting the
data volume). This is also called Information Lifecycle Management.
With extraction to downstream systems, you can make the data consolidated in the Enterprise
Data Warehouse available to further BI systems or further applications in your system landscape.
A metadata concept permits you to document the data in SAP NetWeaver BI using definitions or
information in structured and unstructured form.
The Data Warehousing Workbench is the central work environment that provides the tools for
performing tasks in the SAP NetWeaver BI Enterprise Data Warehouse

Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL)  

SAP NetWeaver BI offers flexible ways of integrating data from various sources. Depending on the
data warehousing strategy for your application scenario, you can extract the data from the source and
load it into the SAP NetWeaver BI system, or directly access the data in the source, without storing it
physically in the Enterprise Data Warehouse. In this case the data is integrated virtually into the
Enterprise Data Warehouse. Sources for the Enterprise Data Warehouse can be operational,
relational datasets (for example in SAP systems), files or older systems. Transformations permit you
to perform a technical cleanup and to consolidate the data from a business point of view.

Extraction and Loading

Extraction processes and transfer processes in the initial layer of SAP NetWeaver BI as well as direct
access to data are possible using various interfaces, depending on the origin and format of the
data. In this way, SAP NetWeaver BI allows the integration of SAP data and non-SAP data.
 ●      BI Service API (BI Service Application Programming Interface)
The BI service API allows data from SAP systems in standardized form to be extracted and
accessed directly. These can be SAP application systems or SAP NetWeaver BI systems. The
data request is controlled from the SAP NetWeaver BI system.
 ●      File Interface
The file interface permits the extraction from and direct access to files, such as csv files. The
data request is controlled from the SAP NetWeaver BI system.
 ●      Web Services
Web services permit you to send data to the SAP NetWeaver BI system under external control.
 ●      UD Connect (Universal Data Connect)
UD Connect permits the extraction from and direct access to relational data. The data request
is controlled from the SAP NetWeaver BI system.
 ●      DB Connect (Database Connect)
 DB Connect permits the extraction from and direct access to data located in tables or views of a
database management system. The data request is controlled from the SAP NetWeaver BI
system.
 ●      Staging BAPIs (Staging Business Application Programming Interfaces)
Staging BAPIs are open interfaces which third party tools can use to extract data from older
systems. The data transfer can be triggered by a request from the SAP NetWeaver BI system
or by a third party tool.
Transformation
With transformations, data loaded within the SAP NetWeaver BI system using the specified
interfaces is transferred from a source format to a target format in the data warehouse layers. The
transformation permits you to consolidate, clean up and integrate the data and thus to synchronize it
technically and semantically, permitting it to be evaluated. This is done using rules that permit any
degree of complexity when transforming the data. The functionality includes a 1:1 assignment of the
data, the use of complex functions in formulas, as well as the custom programming of transformation
rules. For example, you can define formulas that use the functions of the transformation library for the
transformation. Basic functions (such as and, if, less than, greater than), different functions for
character chains (such as displaying values in uppercase), date functions (such as calculating the
quarter from the date), mathematical functions (such as division, exponential functions) are offered for
defining formulas.

Availability Requirements for Data in SAP NetWeaver BI

It might be necessary to have data which is more up-do-date or less up-to-date, depending on the
business issue.
For example, if you want to check the sales strategy for a product group each month, you need the
sales data for this time span. Historic, aggregated data is taken into consideration. The scheduler is
an SAP NetWeaver BI tool that loads the data at regular intervals, for example every night, using a job
that is scheduled in the background. In this way, no additional load is put on the operational
system. We recommend that you use standard data acquisition, that is, schedule regular data
transfers, to support your strategic decision-making procedure.
If you need data for the tactical decision-making procedure, then data that is mostly up-to-date and
granular is usually taken into consideration, for example, if you analyze error quotas in production in
order to optimally configure the production machines. The data can be staged in the SAP NetWeaver
BI system based on its availability and loaded in minute intervals. A permanently active job of SAP
background processing is used here; this job is controlled by a special process, a daemon.  This
procedure of data staging is called real-time data acquisition.
By loading the data into a data warehouse, the performance of the source system is not affected
during the data analysis. The load processes, however, require administrative time and effort. If you
need data that is very up-to-date and the users only need to access a small dataset sporadically or
only a few users run queries on the dataset at the same time, you can read the data directly from the
source during analysis and reporting. In this case the data is not archived in the SAP NetWeaver BI
system. Data staging is virtual. You use the VirtualProvider here. This procedure is called direct
access.
Data Storage and Data Flow  
SAP NetWeaver BI offers a number of options for data storage. These include the implementation of a
data warehouse or an operational data store as well as the creation of the data stores used for the
analysis.

Architecture
A multi-layer architecture serves to integrate data from heterogeneous sources, transform,
consolidate, clean up and store this data, and stage it efficiently for analysis and interpretation
purposes. The data can be stored with varying granularity in the layers.
The following figure shows the steps involved in the data warehousing concept of SAP NetWeaver BI:

 ●      Persistent Staging Area

After being extracted from a source system, data is transferred to the entry layer of the
Enterprise Data Warehouse, the persistent staging area (PSA).The data from the source
system is stored unchanged in this layer. It provides the backup status at a granular level and
can offer further information at a later time in order to ensure a quick restart if an error occurs.
 ●      Data Warehouse
The way in which data is transferred from the PSA to the next layer incorporates quality-
assuring measures and the clean up required for a uniform, integrated view of the data. The
results of these first transformations and cleanups are stored in the data warehouse layer. It
offers integrated, granular, historic, stable data that has not yet been modified for a concrete
purpose and can therefore be seen as neutral. The data warehouse forms the foundation and
the central data basis for further (compressed) data retentions for analysis purposes (data
marts). Without a central data warehouse, the enhancement and operation of data marts often
cannot be properly designed.
 ●      Architected Data Marts
The data warehouse layer provides the mainly multidimensional analysis structures. These are
also called architected data marts. Data marts should not necessarily be equated with added or
aggregated; highly granular structures that are only oriented to the requirements of the
evaluation can also be found here.
 ●      Operational Data Store
An operational data store supports the operational data analysis. In an operational data store,
the data is processed continually or in short intervals, and is read for operative analysis. In an
operational data store, the mostly uncompressed datasets therefore are quite up-to-date, which
optimally supports operative analyses.
Data Store
Various structures and objects that can be used, depending on your requirements, are available for
the physical store when modeling the layers.
In the persistent staging area (PSA), the structure of the source data is represented
by DataSources. The data of a business unit (for example, customer master data or item data of an
order) for a DataSource is stored in a transparent, flat database table, the PSA table. The data
storage in the persistent staging area is short- to medium-term. Since it provides the backup status for
the subsequent data stores, queries are not possible on this level and this data cannot be archived.
Whereas a DataSource consists of a set of fields, the data stores in the data flow are defined
by InfoObjects. The fields of the DataSource must be assigned using transformations in the SAP
NetWeaver BI system to the InfoObjects. InfoObjects are thus the smallest (metadata) units within
BI. Using InfoObjects, information is mapped in a structured form. This is required for building data
stores. They are divided into key figures, characteristics and units.
 ●      Key figures provide the transaction data, that is, the values to be analyzed. They can be
quantities, amounts, or numbers of items, for example sales volumes or sales figures.
 ●      Characteristics are sorting keys, such as product, customer group, fiscal year, period, or
region. They specify classification options for the dataset and are therefore reference objects
for the key figures. Characteristics can contain master data in the form of attributes, texts or
hierarchies. Master data is data that remains unchanged over a long period of time. The
master data of a cost center, for example, contains the name (text), the person responsible
(attribute), and the relevant hierarchy area (hierarchy).
 ●      Units such as currencies or units of measure define the context of the values of the key
figures.
Consistency on the metadata level is ensured by you consistently using identical InfoObjects to define
the data stores in the different layers.
DataStore objects permit complete granular (document level) and historic storage of the data. As for
DataSources, the data is stored in flat database tables. A DataStore object consists of a key (for
example, document number, item) and a data area. The data area can contain both key figures (for
example, order quantity) and characteristics (for example, order status). In addition to aggregating the
data, you can also overwrite the data contents, for example to map the status changes of the
order. This is particularly important with document-related structures.
Modeling of a multidimensional store is implemented using InfoCubes. An InfoCube is a set of
relational tables that are compiled according to an enhanced star schema. There is a (large) fact table
(containing many rows) that contains the key figures of the InfoCube as well as multiple (smaller)
surrounding dimension tables containing the characteristics of the InfoCube. The characteristics
represent the keys for the key figures. Storage of the data in an InfoCube is additive. For queries on
an InfoCube, the facts and key figures are automatically aggregated (summation, minimum or
maximum) if necessary. The dimensions combine characteristics that logically belong together, such
as a customer dimension consisting of the customer number, customer group and the steps of the
customer hierarchy, or a product dimension consisting of the product number, product group and
brand. The characteristics refer to the master data (texts or attributes of the characteristic). The facts
are the key figures to be evaluated, such as revenue or sales volume. The fact table and the
dimensions are linked with one another using abstract identifying numbers (dimension IDs). As a
result, the key figures of the InfoCube relate to the characteristics of the dimension. This type of
modeling is optimized for efficient data analysis. The following figure shows the structure of an
InfoCube:

Integration
The following figure shows where BI is positioned within SAP NetWeaver. In addition, the subareas
covered by the BI documentation are listed. These are described in detail below.
Integration with Other SAP NetWeaver Components
BEx Information Broadcasting allows you to publish precalculated documents or online links
containing business intelligence content to the portal. The Business Explorer portal role illustrates the
various options that are available when you are working with BI content in the portal.