SAP takes business intelligence to its logical conclusion

Having integrated business intelligence (BI) into its product suite well ahead of the usage curve six years ago, global enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions giant, SAP, will this year take both the theory and practice of BI to their logical conclusion as enablers of regulatory compliance and business planning.

"Data warehousing developed as a natural, organic extension of SAP's sophisticated ERP capability," says Mohamed Asmal, newly appointed BI solution manager at SAP Africa. "Analysis is also an inherent part of ERP - and SAP got there very early, too.

"What truly differentiates us from competitors, however, is that SAP ERP systems are designed from the ground up with business drivers in mind. Whether our products are dealing with HR or finance or materials management, they incorporate business best practice and therefore collect and deliver strategic business information.

"Until recently, however, organisations have been focused on stabilising operations using IT in general and ERP in particular - rather than using ERP as an analytical, predictive tool. But now Sarbanes-Oxley and King II are confronting organisations with complex regulatory and governance requirements. So they're having to move away from different applications reporting on different areas to solutions that will give them one view of their business. BI, which is a central repository of information, has been recognised as the way to go.

"As always, though, there's been a stumbling block. Effective implementation of BI has been hampered by its apparent reliance on historical information. In theory, it's difficult to see trends if you've only got a few months of information. In other words, the return on investment in BI has always seemed a long way off.

"SAP addresses the problem in two ways, thereby enabling businesses to finally realise the full potential of BI - and to do so quickly and affordably.

"Firstly, our systems have had BI facilities for so long that those of our customers with, for example, mySAP ERP, already have the information needed for business warehousing. It's just a matter of switching on the warehousing and analytical capacity in their systems.

"Secondly, for businesses that don't have SAP, a simple combination of our NetWeaver and BI products enables you to extract the information you need pretty much as you operate.

"And for SAP customers who still have SAP R/3, getting BI benefits is just a matter of an upgrade."

In other words, by making BI an organic part of all its products, SAP has slashed the cost and trouble of implementing BI and elevated it to its correct place in an organisation's executive toolset.

Traditionally, it takes a lot of time and money to have a third-party design a data warehouse. You have to decide what data to pull across to the warehouse, define the data fields or information cubes the data will go into and create a data extraction model. And then, analysing the data you do finally extract and load into the warehouse is a complex design issue in itself.

By contrast, in mySAP ERP, for instance, information cubes are pre-defined, both within the ERP systems and the SAP BI suite. Business content is therefore automatically pushed to the correct places in the business warehouse and business-focused, strategy-based analysis is automatic. Usable intelligence is produced from the moment the system is switched on.

"You get a full corporate health check, covering governance, fraud management, risk management and reporting on financial statistics," Asmal says.

"We're also the only solution providers to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) and BI. So, you automatically get the analytics, forecasting, churn and segmentation management that enable you to determine your customers' behaviour and how closely you match their needs."