SAP Business Intelligence Quick Start Guide

Actionable business insights from the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform

Vinay Singh

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781789346206
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789341348
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

Designing and deploying solutions using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform 4.2.

Key Features

• Get up and running with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform
• Perform effective data analysis and visualization for actionable insights
• Enhance your BI strategy by creating different types of reports and dashboards using SAP BusinessObjects

Book Description

The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform is a powerful reporting and analysis tool. This book is the ideal introduction to the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform, introducing you to its data visualization, visual analytics, reporting, and dashboarding capabilities.

The book starts with an overview of the BI platform and various data sources for reporting. Then, we move on to looking at data visualization, analysis, reporting, and analytics using BusinessObjects Business Intelligence tools. You will learn about the features associated with reporting, scheduling, and distribution and learn how to deploy the platform. Toward the end, you will learn about the strategies and factors that should be considered during deployment.

By the end, you will be confident working with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform to deliver better insights for more effective decision making.

What you will learn

• Work with various tools to create interactive data visualization and analysis
• Query, report, and analyze with SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence
• Create a report in SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise
• Visualize and manipulate data using an SAP Lumira Storyboard
• Deep dive into the workings of the SAP predictive analytics tool
• Deploy and configure SAP BO Intelligence platform 4.2

Who this book is for

This book is for Business Intelligence professionals and existing SAP ecosystem users who want to perform effective Business Intelligence using SAP BusinessObjects.

Section 1: Introduction to SAP Business Intelligence

This section serves as an introduction to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.2, where we will set the tone for the book. It contains one chapter, covering an overview of the BI platform and various data sources for reporting purposes. This section contains only one chapter which is Chapter 1, Overview of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.2.

Overview of SAP BusinessObject Business Intelligence 4.2

This book will take you through the concepts related to SAP Business Intelligence (BI) and the tools associated with the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform 4.2. While we start with basic concepts and understanding the platform, and gradually progress to deeper insights into the various tools offered by the platform. The book offers a good overview of all the tools with examples of how to use the functionalities offered by each tool.

This chapter provides a high-level overview of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2. We will walk through SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 and its benefits, identifying the components of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 and enterprise data sources for BI reporting tools. We will learn about the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform and different BI tools that are available to use in a business scenario. We will learn how to create a Business Explorer (BEx) query to directly access SAP BW as data source. We will use these data sources, connections, and business layers in upcoming chapters.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• BI and its benefits
• Components of SAP BusinessObjects 4.2
• Enterprise data sources for BI reporting tools
• Creating a BEx query to directly access SAP BW as data source
• Local data sources

BI and its benefits

BI is a strategic and reporting tool with sets of methodologies and processes for transforming data into meaningful insights, such as sales reports, slice and dice finance reports, and predictive analysis, to support decision making.

Some of the benefits are as follows:

• Decreased query and reporting time
• Identifying and track key performance metrics against their direct competitors and the overall market
• It is fast at providing reports, performing analysis, and planning
• It helps you make better business decisions
• It directly helps to reduce costs, which leads to higher revenue for an organization

The SAP BusinessObjects BI platform provides an enterprise BI with systems that are scalable, flexible, and adaptive. They have a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows us to deploy and standardize SAP BusinessObjects BI implementations. SAP offers both a suite of reporting tools with a full spectrum of features and a new cloud solution as a so-called software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. In this book, we will discuss the traditional SAP BusinessObjects tools and the new predictive analytics tools. With SAP BI, you can get insights in the following areas:

• Data discovery: With SAP BusinessObjects you can discover, analyze, and share. It can do the following:
  • Mash up data from multiple sources
  • Create visualizations
  • Combine visualizations to tell a story
• Applications and dashboards: It enables you to build engaging experience in the following ways:
  • It allows you to create dynamic and customizable applications and dashboards
  • You can engage in sophisticated planning and predictive applications out-of-the-box
  • It's capable of delivering engaging information to users where they need it
• Reporting: You can distribute formatted information:
  • Securely distribute information across the organization
  • Create interactive reports
  • Create personalized reports via email

Components of SAP BusinessObjects 4.2

SAP BusinessObject BI platform 4.2 is a reporting and analytics platform that targets business users. It is an innovation platform that simplifies, enhances, and extends the capabilities of BI. It consists of a number of reporting applications with which a user can discover data, create applications and dashboards, and perform analytics to derive business insights. The platform ensures increased responsiveness, reduced costs and workload, and helps organizations to make better decisions.

We need to understand the various tools available in SAP BusinessObject 4.2 to perform reporting. There are multiple management tools, platform services, and client tools in SAP BusinessObjects 4.2 that support the entire range of user reporting, queries, analysis, and performance management.

Some of the salient features of the SAP BI platform are as follows:

• BI content management allows the secure storage of BI content
• It provides a software development kit, which can be used by the API to extend the solution or for making the process automated
• It is possible to distribute personalized BI content to a large audience in an automated manner
• It gives the ability to scale up and scale out to suit growing demand
• It provides services to the audit trail for compliance or capacity planning

The following diagram shows the overview of the architecture of SAP BusinessObjects BI:

The following are ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Introduction to SAP Business Intelligence
• Overview of SAP BusinessObject Business Intelligence 4.2
• Section 2: Data Visualization, Analysis, and Reporting
• SAP BusinessObject Analysis
• SAP BusinessObject Design Studio
• SAP BusinessObject Web Intelligence
• SAP BusinessObject Crystal Reports
• SAP BusinessObject SAP Lumira
• SAP BusinessObject Predictive Analytics 2.0
• Section 3: BI Platform Features and Deployment
• BI Platform Features
• BI Platform Deployment
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