Summary/Description

Are you a business manager and looking for a new way to get on top of all the information and reports you receive or prepare every day? Are you a business analyst and would appreciate a tool that help you to crunch large volumes of spreadsheets along with other unstructured data to find a reason why your company’s sales had slumped lately? Are you a business executive and want to be able to monitor how your business is operating, whether you are in office or not, and using your mobile or tablet? If yes, then you can find your answer in SAP BusinessObjects suite. But aside from this software, you may also need to learn other business essentials which may be known by experts like the best llc service in pennsylvania.

Learning Objectives

By reading this article you will learn:

• What is Business Intelligence?
• What is SAP BusinessObjects and what are the main reporting modules under SAP?
• Learn about SAP BusinessObjects architecture
• How to start learning SAP BusinessObjects?

Business intelligence and data analytics are recognized by Gartner as the top trending CIO’s priority in 2016. This is simply because data is the most valuable asset for any organization and without business intelligence tools no one can access these information properly. The main goal of business intelligence tools is to enable business users, to make intelligent, fact-based decisions by availing the right information for the right people at the right time and in the right format.

Figure 1 – Business intelligence is availing the right information in the right time in the right format to the right people

In another words, Analytical solutions is a set of technologies, applications and solutions that are used to support the collection, analysis and presentation of information in a way that can be understood by end business users. Each business user will have his / her own level of interest in information and so he / she will need specific format to present these information. For example, an executive may be interested to see only summarized or high-level information and he will not be interested to dig into details. While, on the other hand, analytical users will need a way to discover and explore information. Furthermore, operational people will be more interested in getting the information that can help them to perform their daily jobs. Several vendors, such as IBM, Oracle or SAP, provide different sets of those analytical solutions. The aim of the article at hand is to shed more light on one of the leading application in the analytical solutions arena, SAP BusinessObjects suite.

Overview on SAP BusinessObjects

BusinessObjects is an enterprise software company specializing in business intelligence, and it was acquired by SAP in 2007. Since then, SAP has worked to integrate BusinessObjects into its main offerings, leading to today’s position of BusinessObjects as a flagship for SAP analytical solutions suite.

As any other analytical suite, SAP BusinessObjects has different enterprise applications to support the common functionalities of an analytical solution, which are explained below in more detail.

Figure 2 – SAP Analytics Solutions

SAP recognized that business users are different, and so SAP availed different type of modules as listed below:

Reporting: reporting tools is about sharing information with either internal or external users. Reports are primarily text and table based, and periodically include visual components. For this, BO suite has two key products, Web Intelligence (i.e. WebI) and Crystal Reports. More details about the different features and usage scenario between both tools, are explained below.

Dashboards and Apps: In contrary to reporting, dashboards are more directed towards visual components; to serve its function of supporting “at-a-glance” monitoring and decision making. You can think of dashboards similar to a vehicle’s dashboard that shows the driver, at a glance, the vehicle’s speed, fuel level and warnings. And for these scenarios, BO suite introduce several tools, some of which need professional designer to build, like Design Studio, and Dashboards applications, while the other is more focused towards “self-service” scenarios, such as Lumira and Explorer[1]. Each tool are explained below in more details.

Data Discovery: Tools used for data discovery is aiming at spotting trends and identifying outliers in sets of data. It is about “story-telling” using data, more than anything else. And since everyone may see a different story in the figures, BO tools in this category are concentrating in the self-service scenarios, such as Lumira, Analysis for OLAP, and Explorer¹.

SAP BusinessObjects architecture

SAP BusinessObjects is one of the most matured BI tools in the market. This is also very clear when we have a look on SAP BusinessObjects architecture. In the following figure 3, data sources establish the first layer in our architecture.  Data can been extracted from different sources such as relational database management systems (RDBMS), other SAP products (e.g.  SAP Business Warehouse (BW) or SAP HANA), and finally from external sources like TEXT, Excel, CSV and web services.

A key feature in SAP BusinessObjects is the introduction of the Semantic Layer. The semantic layer, or the universe, is a view of the organization’s data. And because universes are based on business terminology that is familiar and shared throughout the organization, they shield users from the technical complexities of the databases where your corporate information is stored.

The semantic layer, or the Information Design Tool (IDT), is broken down in different focus area as shown below in diagram:

Figure 3 – SAP BusinessObjects architecture

Data Federation Engine: Data Federation Engine allow data access from multiple data sources at the same time. Data federation Engine provides the virtual data access from these sources, which means that the data will physically remain stored in their data sources and there are no changes or business logic applied to that data at their source.

Data Foundation: Data Foundation contains the universe structure of tables and joins. Once connected to a data source, the user can extract relevant tables from the data source and insert the appropriate join. Data foundation can be based on one or more relational connections. For a single-source universe, user can start with one connection identifying the database source. In case of multiple data sources, user need to create a multisource-enabled data foundation.

Business Layer: Business layer is based on Data Foundation. The business layer is mapped to tables and columns in data foundation and contains a collection of classes and objects that represent what end user needs.

Query and calculation engine: Query and calculation engine works at the query run-time. This engine will enhance the query reading performance and will also do some calculation on dataset if defined by business logic.

Web services: BO web services, like live office, along with BO web applications, like the Central Management Console (CMC), constitute the conceptual web tier for the BI platform. Both are deployed on a Java web application server. Web Services provides functionalities such as session authentication, user privilege management, scheduling, search, administration, reporting, and query management.

Front end / Presentation layer: BO front end, or the presentation layer, consist of the different BO applications and clients, through which the end user perform the reporting, querying and data management activities. These applications can either be access via the web-based BO portal (i.e. BI launch pad) like Web Intelligence or via a desktop-based clients, like Web Intelligent Rich client, Dashboards, or Crystal Reports.

SAP BusinessObjects Products

BO products, or tools, can be grouped into two main categories, admin tools and reports designing tools.

Reports admin tools:

SAP BusinessObjects Analytical Solutions Business Intelligence (BI) platform

The SAP BusinessObjects (BO) Business Intelligence (BI) platform is a flexible, scalable information infrastructure that helps you more easily discover and share insights for better business decisions. The integrated, unified infrastructure enables scalability from one to many tools and interfaces on premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach. It forms the basis upon which other capabilities are built, like Reporting, Dashboards, and Data discovery & visualization.

BI launch pad (formerly known as InfoView)

Web application portal for BI consumers and designers instal­led with the BI platform. Used to access Crystal reports, Web Intelligence documents, and other BI artifacts and organize them to suit user preferences.

Figure 4 – BI launch pad

Reports designing tools:

Information Design Tool (IDT) (formerly known as Universe Designer)

BO universes are created using Information Design Tool (IDT) by a universe designer who is familiar with the organization’s databases. The universe designer then makes the universes available via BI launch pad, the BusinessObjects portal. The reports or dashboards can be created based this universe.

The terms you need to be familiar with in order to understand how universe functions are (Figure 5 – Universe sample):

• Class: Classes are logical groupings of related objects. Classes are same as folders in windows operating system.
• Object: Objects are elements in a universe that map to a specific set of data in a relational database. Each object in a BusinessObjects universe is defined with a business term that is commonly used in the organization, such as Country, Year, Revenue, Customer name, Customer address, and so on. Objects can be a direct database table column mapping with different naming, so for example we may have a “Store Name” object which is corresponding to “STORE_NAME” column in the data foundation layer. On the other hands, objects can be calculated which is mean that it is not physically exists in the database but it is calculated somehow from database columns in the data foundation layer. For example if we may have “First Name” object which is calculated from “FULL_NAME” database column by extracting the first name using some sort of availed functions. Objects can be dimensions [data that can be used to analysis data by like state, city or time for example], measure [aggregated figures like balance amounts, counts and percentages] and attributes / details objects [detailed information that can’t be used to to aggregate data by because it is a detailed level information like address, mobile number or colour code]
• Predefined query filter: Predefined query filters are used to restrict the data returned by an object used in a query.

Figure 5 – Universe sample

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Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports is desktop-based reporting application that allow users to create reports simply by dragging and dropping the fields into the report. It has the ability to connect to almost any database or flat file as a data source. Crystal Reports are most useful in scenarios where the final layout or the design of the report is the most important factor (e.g. the organization’s financial statements). These type of tools is also categorized as pixel perfect reporting tools due to their capability of producing reports with high layout precision. A typical crystal report is displayed in Figure 6 – SAP Crystal Reports

Figure 6 – SAP Crystal Reports

Web Intelligence

Web Intelligence (also known as Webi) is a tool for analyzing the organization’s business information. With Web Intelligence, a user’s can query the organization’s databases using everyday business terms, and using an easy-to-use interface. Users can create ad-hoc reporting or analytical reports, and share them with colleagues throughout the enterprise.

Figure 7 – BO Web Intelligence

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Dashboards (formerly known as Xcelsius)

Dashboards is data visualization software that allows you to create and export interactive dashboards. These dashboards contain various components, such as gauges, charts, graphs, and buttons that are connected to data sources. These components display the data in a compact and visual manner, which can then help the dashboard consumer see trends and make informed business decisions. SAP Dashboards is not self-service enabled tool and it needs technical experts to design and build dashboards for end business users based on a set of pre-defined requirements. The main technologies used behind this tool is Flash and HTML5. This is one of the reasons that SAP stopped investing in this tool and recommended to use Design Studio instead.

Figure 8 – SAP Dashboards

Design Studio

Similar to Dashboards, Design Studio can be also used to create analysis applications and dashboards. Yet, it is mainly targeted towards browsers and mobile devices. It allows the creation of applications easily and intuitively without the need for native HTML and iPad UI programming skills. It started with a full support of connecting to SAP data sources like SAP BW and SAP HANA. They started to support to create design studio dashboards based on SAP Universes in late releases. It is also announced by SAP (end 2016) that they are going to release SAP Lumira 2.x which is a merge between SAP Lumira 1.x and SAP Design Studio 1.x tools.

Figure 9 – Design Studio

SAP Lumira

SAP Lumira delivers beautiful analytics, enabling user to easily visualize and create stories about data.

Data enters the application as a dataset (a set of columns, hierarchies, and filters) that can be used to build a document. A dataset is created by acquiring data, enhancing it with measures, hierarchies, calculations, and customized columns, and then choosing charts to visualize the data. Visualization can be used to create stories that provide a graphical narrative to describe data. For example, user can group charts on a story page to create a presentation-style dashboard and then add images and text annotations.

SAP Lumira is available as a desktop-based, web-based, or as a mobile application. They can be used with SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform or using cloud (SAP Lumira for teams).

Figure 10 – SAP Lumira

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Disclaimer

SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries.

[1] As per SAP long term strategy (link), Explorer and Analysis for OLAP will ultimately be replaced by Lumira.