Why Third Party Reporting for SAP?
The offering from SAP was developed with their fourth generation language Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP). ABAP and the interface were utilized for structuring queries to answer reporting requests. This increased the need for specialized employees trained in ABAP. When they were not available, and they often were not, organizations turned to consultants. This created an industry of specialized programmers developing sophisticated code that became the antithesis of most organizations’ relatively simple reporting demands. This resulted in business unable to obtain the capability to get information in a timely and cost effective matter. SAP responded with efforts that led to the design and delivery of SAP Business Information Warehouse, commonly referred to as SAP BW. This is a separate but integrated system providing information, reporting and analysis capabilities on SAP. This solution has delivered on many of the key reporting requirements for business, but has not evolved to fully address the business drivers for achieving enterprise wide dynamic reporting platform.
SAP it is a pain to retrieve data from directly. SAP makes heavy use of internal structures in stead of tables. It takes a lot of effort to locate the data you want to report on. 1KEY SAP Connector takes a lot of work out of your hands and puts the data ready to use on a separate server creating and MIS server on which 1KEY can sit on top it.
This also benefits the performance of your production server(s). When you use DW solution you gain much functionality by adding 1KEY BI, for instance: printing web reports with BW is a disaster, where as 1KEY BI uses PDF conversion so everything looks Ok. Reporting tools from 1KEY BI are more user-friendly than the BEx tool from BW and offer a lot more run time analytical options.
Posted on July 10th, 2008 by Vikram Kole
Filed under: Business Intelligence, Emerging Trends
Leave a Reply