SAP BI or business intelligence provides toolkit for businesses to get better control over their data by acquiring, retrieving and analyzing it for their benefits. It allows companies to predict the outcome and do extensive planning. SAP business intelligence is all about business being able to take right decisions at the right time.
Business intelligence is a component of SAP Netweaver sub-area information integration, this contains components like BI information management, knowledge management and master data management. The Netweaver information integration follows step by step process to provide structured and non-structured information to the management for reporting and analysis and business intelligence within SAP BW completes this process by integrating the data and producing analyzed and relevant information in user desired or pre-defined formats in real time.
The SAP BI framework relies on BW for data extraction and transformation. BW use extraction transformation layer to extract data from SAP or non-SAP sources which is then loaded in BW, this data is further processed to make it readable for SAP applications which is called transformation and saved in infoproviders. BI uses the information saved in these infoproviders to generate interactive reports. Reporting, planning and analysis part of SAP BW is handled by BI tools.
SAP BI or business intelligence can produce graphical representations for easy understanding and can handle ad hoc queries and distribute its responses to web-client, mobile devices, E-mail and desktop. SAP BI provides tools like queries, reporting and multi-dimensional analysis, it allows access to detailed data as well as summarized data and allows sharing of data through a web browser. Users can generate their own reporting environments, SAP BI can represent the data analysis in variety of formats like grids, graphs, maps etc.
SAP business intelligence use BEx tools to present reports and design format for easy understanding these are BEx analyzer, BEx query designer, BEx web analyzer, BEx WAD, BEx report designer and BEx broadcaster and information broadcasting. Out of these BEx query designer, BEx WAD and BEx report designer are designing tools which can be assigned to specific users. These tools design formats which can be used by end users but they cannot change the design, the designs can be accessed by BEx analyzer or web analyzer.
Another tool provided in SAP business intelligence is BEx browser. This is graphical tool used to launch queries and workbook and categorize them to roles, favorites and folders. BEx browser provides single interface to internet URL's, windows applications, access documents and SAP R/3 transactions, user can create shortcuts to access all of these and create folders to organize the content.
BEx Analyzer is the primary reporting tool of SAP BI and has full integration with Microsoft Excel. BEx analyzer combines power of OLAP and all the functionalities of Excel to give the user facility of adding calculations, notes, chart and graphics on one sheet as well as add various reports into a workbook to create bunch of reports. The SAP BI solution provide electronic and secure analysis of data and plausible solution for companies to counter competition and delays in updated information.
