ENTERPRISE REPORTING,QUERY, AND ANALYSISWITH SAP NetWeaverBusiness Intelligence and Collaboration for Information Workers

As the role of business intelligence expands, your organizationmust more closely align its business users actions with corporategoals. Business intelligence can help you do just that. Businessintelligence helps you outpace the competition because you gaininsight into opportunities faster, streamline decision making,improve relationships with business partners, and boost opera-tional efficiencies.

Problems arise when business users demand more insights, details, and current data, but lack the time and technical skills to learn how to access the information they need. When thathappens, your users require support from an overworked IT department. Advanced users tend to develop their own, non-standard solutions. Other users simply ignore existing businessintelligence solutions because they are too complex, technical,and seemingly irrelevant to their specific jobs. Such challengesoften result in unreliable, untimely data, causing high IT supportcosts and hindering decision makers from taking fast action.

Because their jobs, business needs, skills, and roles differ, usersrequire diverse tools and data preferably without IT involve-ment. To ensure that every task supports organizational goalsand metrics, users need immediate access to uniform, reliabledata.

Sales executives, for example, demand simple, intuitive access tographical data that lets them compare sales forecasts with recentactual sales. They also need access to individual sales documents,which may reside in separate IT systems. Field-marketing expertsmust analyze sales by region and channel, and they must revisesales forecasts. Account executives must know about pendingshipment delays to key customers. Suppliers require high-qualityand formatted weekly forecast reports.

As your organization seeks to

exploit the benefits of business

intelligence, you must extend

these advantages to more

users. You must also consoli-

date your IT landscape and

align information workers with

a consistent source of data.

With the SAP NetWeaver plat-

form, you can provide timely

and relevant information to all

users from executives to

operational users inside and

outside your organization.

SAP Solution BriefSAP NetWeaver

Despite these needs, significant challenges may hinder you fromdeploying a business intelligence solution. Users may lack theskills to use such traditionally difficult software, and you mayrun a myriad of disparate business intelligence tools. The resultcan be a high total cost of ownership (TCO) and applicationsthat are disconnected from your existing business environment.

The SAP NetWeaver platform helps you deliver comprehensive,integrated business intelligence and analysis tools to all yourusers. They can utilize dashboards, portals, and formatted reports,and they can distribute data via e-mail to different users all of which helps them initiate queries and perform enterprise reporting and in-depth analysis.

Business Intelligence for All

SAP NetWeaver lets you deliver business intelligence to all usersat all organizational levels inside and outside your enterprise so you keep your entire workforce informed and aligned withcorporate strategy. You have easy access to a range of analysis from summary reports to operational details includingsupport for the following types of users:

Cost-center managers, who closely track the status of budgets Sales executives, who develop action plans based on pipeline

opportunities

Financial controllers, who navigate from profit-and-loss state-ments directly into underlying operational sales transactiondocuments

The highly scalable SAP NetWeaver platform supports a largenumber of parallel users. Its comprehensive security frameworkensures that you reveal applicable, personalized information tothe appropriate users only. It supports multiple languages andUnicode.

SAP NetWeaver provides powerful business intelligence tools, including enterprise dashboards, formatted reporting, informa-tion broadcasting, and integration with Microsoft Outlook.

Enterprise dashboards have intuitive graphical layouts so userscan easily digest information. They also feature geographicalmaps, graphics, and alerts with full drill-down capabilities. Deployed via the SAP NetWeaver Portal component, dashboardscan be personalized to meet individual needs.

Formatted reporting makes it easy to provide business intelli-gence. Native, high-quality, and formatted reports supportmenu-driven operational reporting. Users can drill down intoSAP and non-SAP transactional applications, and they can alsopersonalize the reports. Novices and experts alike can create reports within a thin-client environment and display reports via the Web or as Adobe PDF documents.

SAP NetWeaver makes it easy to distribute business intelligencewith information broadcasting. You can easily schedule or infor-mally distribute and share offline reports and live information.You can distribute data via e-mail and target distribution to role-based portals. You can also securely deliver personalized reports to wide audiences based on user profiles, job roles, andsuch parameters as geographic location.

SAP NetWeaver is integrated with Microsoft Outlook so users can subscribe to and view reports while working in the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment. This greatlyenhances convenience and increases productivity.

Data Analysis

Query and analysis tools help the following types of users mineand analyze data:

Financial analysts, who perform root-cause analyses to determine the reasons for profitability declines

Marketing-campaign managers, who forecast returns onadvertisement spending

Assortment planners, who define product mixes for upcoming retail seasons

Query and analysis tools integrate fully with reporting and planning tools, so you can extend a consistent informationsource to your data analysts and data miners. An acceleratorboosts performance so users can easily and quickly browsethrough massive volumes of granular and historic information.

With Web-based interactive tools, you can perform multi-dimensional and drill-down analyses. Prebuilt for novices andexperts, the analyses help you gain insight across organizationalboundaries.

You can create ad hoc queries using a Web-based interface or Microsoft Excel for special explorations or quick investigations.Wizards, drag-and-drop functionality, and an intuitive interfacethat requires no coding help you create queries dynamically.

The Web interface seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Excel so you can move easily and quickly between applications. Or youcan perform these multidimensional and drill-down analyses using the familiar Microsoft Excel environment. The MicrosoftExcelbased interface supports full navigation, including drag-and-drop functionality and hierarchical searches. You can easilymodify or enhance queries with more sophisticated analyses and calculations.

SAP NetWeaver provides data-mining and forecasting functionsfor more advanced statistical analysis and pattern discovery. Youcan use such statistical methods as decision trees, classification,and clustering.

And because planning and business intelligence are tightly integrated, you can use the Web interface or Microsoft Excel to enhance queries with planning. You can perform both simple simulations and complex collaborative budgeting andforecasting.

Secure Collaboration

Because SAP NetWeaver provides a portal and collaborationtools, you can personalize and secure users access to timely andconsistent data. Many different types of users can share informa-tion and collaborate to support a business process, including:

Customers, who use the Web to track and revise orders andcheck shipments and billing histories

Regional sales managers, who review weekly sales data andshare their experience and insight with each other to optimizeproduct mixes

Marketing executives, who access daily news feeds, collateral,and current key metrics to support campaigns

SAP NetWeaver Portal, which you can personalize to meet specific user needs, offers collaboration tools and provides accessto unstructured information. Collaboration fosters secure infor-mation sharing, cooperation across departmental and enterpriseboundaries, the coordination of issue resolutions, and peer net-works. Personalized, role-based information helps increase userproductivity, protects the security of corporate data, and allowsyou to track and analyze user access to information.

With knowledge-management technology, you spend less timeseeking information because classification and search function-alities simplify access to reports and published analyses. You canlocate queries in personalized folders and perform searches bykey words. Support for unstructured information lets you accessdaily news feeds, share documents, attach notes and documentsto reports, and search across repositories.

SAP NetWeaver also supports embedded analytical applications.Analytical services are a key part of enterprise services architec-ture, a business-driven software architecture pioneered by SAP.Support for business-process analytics lets you quickly analyzeand manage customers orders. Call-center agents can handlecustomer relationships intelligently with insight derived fromcustomer-contact channels. Analytical services help you inno-vate your supply chain. You can, for example, make changesamong your suppliers after identifying currency fluctuations.

Why Enterprise Reporting and Analysis with

SAP NetWeaver?

SAP NetWeaver delivers significant business intelligence benefitsto your business. You understand what is occurring in your organization, why it is happening, and what will transpire in the future. Your users can securely access consistent and timely information, collaborate with each other, and increase their productivity. You reduce the need for IT support, cut TCO, discover new business opportunities, and mitigate existing busi-ness challenges. IT and business users rapidly prototype and deploy composite business applications with rich analytical content and that helps you use business intelligence to makequick decisions and act fast.

Learn More

To learn more about how SAP NetWeaver can help you drive business intelligence across and beyond your enterprise, call your SAP representative today or visit us on the Web atwww.sap.com/netweaver.

SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, a visual, model-driven tool,provides an environment for modeling and deploying applica-tions. With its embedded Adobe Flex technology, it combines therichness and responsiveness of desktop applications with thebroad reach of Web applications. It helps business analysts and ITdevelopers compose visually rich applications that use analyticaland enterprise services. Developers can design custom compos-ite applications with high analytical content to deliver timelybusiness insights within business processes and applications.

Infrastructure for Custom Development

If you require custom development, SAP NetWeaver lets youbuild analytical applications that access, manipulate, and displaymultidimensional, online analytical processing (OLAP), tabular,and relational data. A Java-based development environment thatincludes a comprehensive object library helps you streamline the custom development of rich analytical applications.

Support for Heterogeneous Environments

An open adapter framework supports access to any type of SAP or non-SAP software system. You can, for example, combinedata from various systems within one report, dashboard, or analytical application. You can access such finance, purchasing,sales, inventory, and other data from your data warehouse or directly from an operational system or other data source.

As an open platform, SAP NetWeaver seamlessly integrates witha wide range of third-party software tools, flexibility that ensuresyou retain the value of existing IT investments. It also reduces retraining needs for users who are familiar with such third-partyapplications, which connect securely through standard inter-faces to SAP NetWeaver functionality.

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