SAP Business intelligence, or SAP BI, refers to the tools and processes that are used to evaluate the data you’ve collected through your business proceedings.
However, the process doesn’t only stop after assessing the accumulated information. Besides, it can also turn the same into actionable insight and help you make better decisions.
So, when you’re looking from a general viewpoint, SAP BI offers the same too.
Nonetheless, the benefits of SAP BI generally go far and beyond what a simple BI tool can do. Keep reading this article till the end to know more about it.
Key Benefits of SAP Business Intelligence
SAP BI, in essence, is a platform that’s primarily used by SAP systems to offer a flexible and reliable route to sharing information. Apart from analyzing, you may also share the same data with others in a real-time scenario. So, coming up with a collaborative decision will be quite easier in this aspect. In addition to this, SAP BI can also help you with the following –
1: Getting a Lot of Information.
SAP BI offers the entire collection of data to you in a simplified yet informational form. So it will be easier for you to gather the right information for your business and understand it along the way. In addition, searching for crucial information and garnering valuable insights will be much easier this way. Also, almost each and every piece of information is available in common terms related to your business industry. So, you won’t require any complex semantic knowledge.
2: Interoperability and Flexible Integration.
SAP BI, although being an independent SAP system, can operate with any other SAP tool or infrastructure. Therefore, if you can integrate it with SAP BW, you’ll get a lot of information from the HR, finance, and sales department. And as mentioned before, everything else will be available in an understandable format. If you want, you may also translate a massive amount of business data through SAP BI. It might take some time, but it’s effective in the end.
3: Distributing Data on a Much Larger Scale.
With SAP BI, you can distribute data to thousands of people at once. The scheduling, along with the publishing facility of SAP BI, enables you to distribute a large volume of content to a lot of employees and users efficiently. Even if something goes wrong, the data will get stored in a safe location. Therefore, once the connection comes back on, you can send it again. Also, the information can be shared through a number of mediums, including your email.
4: Less Work for IT.
With SAP BI, you can make almost each and every collected piece of data available for your organization. Thus, all of them will know what they have to do without making too much of a fuss. This, in turn, will reduce the demand for the IT (information technology) department of a business. In this case, all they have to do are some fundamental tasks that are required to be done on a regular basis. It can also reduce the expenses of your organization.
Business Intelligence Tools and Systems
When talking about tools, the SAP BI system is quite stocked with different options. Here, we have talked about a few of them. So, hopefully, it might be easier for you to perceive them.
1: Business Intelligence Reporting.
BI reporting is about offering insights and data to end-users in an understandable manner. The reports provided by the same tend to use visual elements and summaries to showcase different trends and their prominence within a specific time limit.
BI reporting is also quite interactive. So, if you want, you can slice tables and prompt the data to be even more elaborate on your part. In addition, the reports can be automated, and you will be able to send them in a predetermined schedule – or generate them on the fly.
2: BI Dashboards.
Dashboard, a popular BI tool, is a place where you can see almost everything that’s happening in your business. It continually offers updated graphs, charts, and tables to track your KPIs or some other business metrics efficiently.
This way, it becomes easier for you to get an overview of your performance and prepare your business proceedings accordingly. There are some interactive features also available here that can help you customize whatever information you want to view and assess.
Once you are done checking the metrics, you can also share them with your organization and start a collaborative feature accordingly. Further manual analysis can be done here too.
3: Querying.
The querying tools are all about helping users to ask questions about the business’s immediate status through various intuitive interfaces. Thanks to modern querying tools, it’s become a lot easier for anyone to submit a query and get an answer in return.
For example, if you are worried about your regular sales, you can ask something like, ‘what’s the number of watches we sold today?’ It, sequentially, can help you find out more regarding your current market performance and create an urge to improve on it.
4: Data Visualization.
It basically proffers the ability to visualize the data you have collected and see it in context. It can be found through charts, maps, graphs, and various other visual formats. Also, this sort of technology tends to be quite interactive to offer a better understanding of something.
Data visualization can be used to process almost any form of data. However, it’s more popular and eminent when it comes to visualizing outliers and trends. Sometimes, different patterns or colors are also used to understand a specific part of the data and highlight it.
Data visualization is generally used throughout any business intelligence system – in different reports, to answer queries, and in various dashboards.
5: Data Preparation.
The process of data preparation usually involves compiling more than one data source to offer an easier route to data analysis. In this case, a procedure known as the extract is usually utilized in order to acquire the data. Once it’s done, the information, then, is categorized and cleansed before getting loaded into a full-fledged data warehouse.
A good BI system tends to automate most of these processes accordingly and allows you to set the measures and dimensions for them.
What is Business Intelligence Reporting?
We have touched on the topic of business intelligence before ever-so-lightly. Thus, here, we will try to elaborate more on what we have introduced before to offer a better understanding of it.
Also known as BI reporting, business intelligence reporting is the usage of data analytics tools or software to accumulate, prepare, and present information.
This, in turn, makes the data readily accessible for evaluation and consumption. Besides, it’ll also become reliable in informing and directing all of future business decisions.
What’s It Used for?
The core purpose of BI reporting is to allow people in a company to access, measure, monitor, and display data in a user-friendly manner. It usually doesn’t require any technical knowledge or something as such to understand. And if needed, you can even elaborate on the key metrics.
Also, BI reporting is highly visual and interactive. Therefore, it’ll be easier for you to gather a piece of data accordingly and elaborate it in the correct manner. It’s much more different than operational reporting, which is more theoretical and technically sound.
Benefits of BI Reporting
BI reporting is all about collecting data and making it easier for people to understand. But it’s not the only thing this feature can do. There’s a lot more to it, including the following –
- Getting reliable and better-informed data for decision-making.
- Easier and faster reporting of business output and performance.
- Competitive differentiation and advantage.
- Optimized proceeding and operational efficiency.
- Foster a perfect data culture throughout an organization.
BI reporting can also help in sharing accumulated or analyzed data throughout the corporation and beyond. Also, as the information will be stored in an SAP-based cloud system, you do not have to worry about losing anything at all.
The Bottom Line
In any case, using SAP BI can be quite difficult for first-timers. Therefore it’s better to get a hold of it by learning more regarding the same. And if you’re not confident enough, you can always go for a consulting service. They will tell you everything about the technology and aid you in implementing it within your business.
So, it’s a win-win situation for you!
