SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Reviews

• Easy interface for business users
• Advanced functionality in BI
• It connects any data sources with SAP Business Objects tool

There are many tools that help the organization like SAP Lumira, SAP Business Explorer, SAP Design Studio and Dashboard to give you the summary and detailed analysis. With some of these tools, the technical dependency is much lower.

The Events feature needs to be improved, and I have already suggested this in the SAP Ideas portal. It is related to BOBJ.

I've been using it for the last seven years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The stability is again dependent on your sizing activity. If you don't have enough hardware and use it a lot, the tool will crash.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

10/10 - technical support is brilliant.

It's dependent to the client requirement. As I said earlier if sizing is done properly then you will not face any issues. If not, you may face issues if your utilization is high and resources are low.

I performed multiple implementations and upgrade projects for the BOBJ and BODS tool.

It depends how the customer is utilising the solution.

Business users can learn it very fast because it is easy to operate.

It has got a broad range of options for SMBs and enterprise level companies.

1. Dashboard Design (xcelcius) - this feature is a great tool to visualize information especially for enterprise dashboards in a board room and it can do what if analyses simply. The possibility of creating a specific dashboard format is unlimited.
2. Web Intelligence - this feature is the most mature feature of Business Objects, and it has the capabilities of ad hoc reporting, pixel perfect reporting, formatted style, as well as complex and advanced calculations. It can also publicize reports to help with distribution
3. Explorer - the best of breed for self service and visualization before SAP Lumira came in. The ease of use is unrivalled by the other features of Business Objects.

My company uses this to monitor revenue and its achievement for every product, salesman, period and department. We also implement for financial statement purpose such as profit loss statement, balance sheet statement and opex report.

Our sister company also use SAP Business Objects to monitor all the sales activities, stock, aging stock, and forecast.

At the end of the day, Business Objects reduces the manual process of gathering and creating reports into a much simpler and easier ways via self-service and dashboard management.

1. Annotation in the BI Launch pad. Previously there was the Discussion board function, but it was not good and no one used it. If SAP could create a functionality like annotation just like when we open in SAP BI Mobile application, it would be a great boost of functionality and collaboration feature.
2. Clear roadmap, they need to simplify the tools and features
3. Speedometer/Gauge in SAP Lumira
4. Integration of Lumira with SAP BI Platform on a non-Windows OS
5. Ability to Visualize in a browser SAP Lumira when it is uploaded into BI Platform

It was straightforward.

In-house development since I’m in a consulting company

The dynamic scheduling and the user interactive features (input controls, drill down and drill up features) as well as the ability to export the reports to Excel or PDF are some of the best features.

Web Intelligence has allowed our company to move to a self-service delivery model by allowing our internal clients to access, run and schedule reports dynamically without intervention of the BI team.

The dynamic scheduling capabilities, the performance and ability to handle large data sets when connected via BICS to a BW warehouse needs a lot of work. The BW safety belt severely limits the performance of data through the DSL Bridge which makes Web Intelligence appear slow and unable to handle large data sets.

I have used SAP Business Objects for 4 years. I have used both the BICS direct connection to a SAP BW warehouse, as well as connecting to a Universe.

No issues with deployment that I, as a functional user, was aware of.

Stability seems to be an ongoing issue with the tool and as much as that could be attributed to the tool, it can also be attributed to the configuration including the BICS connection, the DSL Bridge, and the tomcat server that it is installed on.

I joined after it was implemented.

1. Dynamic Visibility

2. Query Prompt Selector

3. Query Refresh Selector

1.5 Years

No

No

No

Very Good

Excellent

No

Straightforward

Excellent. Through the vendor SAP India.

A very creative tool to present the data in graphical and pictorial form, so as to make better decision for the growth of the organization.

The ad-hoc reporting in a web environment is great.

We have integration with 30 different systems now. Business users manual data-entry load has decreased, and data between different systems are consistent in almost-real time.

We can develop time-based, visualized analyses with our BI platform, and four years ago, business users had to prepare their complex records in Excel every time they needed data reports. Now they only need to refresh reports. On the other hand, business users were only able to query data four years ago, but now their visions are changing and they are now performing data mining and forecast analyses.

Data mining and more visualized reports are the next steps.

I've used it for four years.

We had to deal with data quality problems.

It has inadequate data analysis and data profiling, which has increased testing and user acceptance duration.

BO Web Intelligence, v4.0 is more unstable than XI v3.x. We’ll upgrade to v4.1 in Q3.

There were issues in v4.0 SP1 but we are now using SP5 and it has improved.

No, we did not.

Setup was straightforward, but the customization and implementation process was complex.

We started with a vendor-partner, but now we have in-house team and still get consultancy advice from the partner.

• Cognos
• Microsoft SSIS 
• SSRS

First, perform an analysis of your business users' requirements.

The data quality and your data warehouse models are the most important parts of a BI project. Design the model from both business requirements and source data. Make sure you involve business users from the beginning and explain the advantages of business intelligence to the data life-cycle well. Assign a short and attractive name to the web site and/or tool that users can remember easily and will like.

• Universe Designer
• Web Intelligence
• InfoView

Able to quickly create and publish reports using WebI. Eliminated most printed reports, they are now emailed or consumed online via InfoView. Has given users the ability to run reports on their own and get the information they need without having to ask IS.

Compatibility of Crystal Reports within BOE, especially when using universes and prompts – the prompts are turned into static values, not generated on-the-fly.

Scheduling functions. We have to maintain separate lists and custom apps of report schedules so that we know what’s scheduled when, and who is getting what reports. If a person leaves and is on distribution lists, we have to manually go through and remove/replace them. There is also no easy way to bulk re-schedule reports.

Report documentation must be manually maintained. Can’t EASILY find all reports using field X.

WebI needs a report template function so that basic re-used elements and formatting don’t have to be re-created with every report. Also need to be able to do more with custom SQL and merged dimensions.

SAP patch methodology is horrific, it was much better pre-SAP. As it is now, if you are on 6.1 and report a bug and it gets fixed in 6.2 you update and confirm it’s fixed. Then, a new release comes out and you update but because its cut-off date was prior to the date 6.2 fix, the fix isn’t included! Imagine trying to manage a system if you are waiting for multiple fixes. You can (we did!) end up with a system where major issues were finally fixed but other major problems not fixed and when the outstanding issues were finally resolved, the other previously addressed problems weren’t included in the newer update! It’s a maintenance and tracking headache.

Approximately nine years -

BusinessObjects Enterprise 3.1 SP6 (CMC, LCM, WebI, CR, Universe Designer, Business View Manager, InfoView)

(previously used XI R2)

Original XI R2 install was done by consultants, the install was a disaster and non-functional and we had to completely start over. Tech support walked us through doing it ourselves and we’ve managed it since. Biggest issue of the upgrade to 3.1 was functionality change in WebI merged dimensions, all reports using them broke and had to be re-written. Looked at upgrading to 4.0 over a year ago and installed in a sandbox, but the product did not function out of the box. It required massive reconfiguration of the default settings to run bare bones and there was no upgrade path to multi-source universes. As a result, we haven’t upgraded yet.

Rarely and was always due to bugs in new SP or FP. Current patch level is very stable.

In a word, bad. Account reps constantly change and it’s impossible to find out who your current rep is. Phone calls and emails are not returned. At one point we were interested in buying additional licenses, but no one could/would help us. The licensing renewal process is severely lacking. They sent renewal emails to the wrong people, these are non-IS line staff not even on our account, and we have no idea how they even got their contact information. They refused to accept the PO that our accounting system generated, wanting one specially designed for them. Our purchasing agent, literally took a black sharpie and wrote all over the PO to meet their requirements. Who is the customer? Do they really want to make that sale? It doesn’t seem like it. Maybe we are too small for them to bother with?

First level support is horrible. I avoid opening cases because of the bad experiences. I would typically find myself explaining very basic product functionality to the support personnel and in the end the response is always that they will consult their resources and get back to you. After going around in circles for days or weeks, the stock response is “it’s working as designed,” yet they can’t explain why. If you are lucky enough to get to higher level support (which is rare), they are very knowledgeable and able to quickly help get to the bottom of issues and find real solutions.

No previous solution was used.

Initially a vendor, recommended by BO. They had the product installed multiple times on the server, it was a mess and had to be completely blown away and reinstalled. Since then, we’ve done it in-house.

• The "View where used" option is very useful when looking to see where work flows, data flows etc.. have been used throughout the project
• Migration from one version to another because it's simple
• Being able to query the metadata has been very useful

• The Business Object tool from SAP has provided the business with reports both in graphical and table (spreadsheet) form
• Provided an easy way to send out reports on a schedule
• ETL has been able to be implemented thanks to the many components available in the Data Services tool.

• Better community support
• More support resources should be available
• They need to make it possible to rename data stores once they are created.

I've used Business Objects together with Data Services for 10 months.

No issues encountered.

The amount of resources used has caused the system to fail from time to time. To resolve the issues, it is necessary to perform server and service restarts.

No issues encountered.

5/10.

5/10.

When I came to work for the company they already had this solution. However, we did an upgrade to a more current version.

The wizard is pretty straightforward. The configuration and connections were also aided by a wizard.

A mix of both, before moving forward with the upgrade the vendor gave us suggestions on what we needed to do after looking at our current system. They were helpful in that initial stage of the upgrade, but the actual upgrade was done by an in-house team.

Make sure you understand the needs of the business and to evaluate different products before committing to a specific one.

1. SAP BO/BI

• Enterprise scalability
• Security
• Ease of use
• Semantic layer

2. Tableau

• Visualization
• Data discovery
• Turnaround time

3. IBM Cognos

• Enterprise scalability
• Security
• In-memory feature

4. MS BI - Flexibility

5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade

6. QlikView

• Data visualization
• Turnaround time.

7. OBIEE

• Enterprise security
• Semantic model

1. SAP BO/BI

• Visualization

2. Tableau

• Scalability

3. IBM Cognos

• Ease of use

4. MS BI

• Visualization
• Ease of use

5. Pentaho

• Ease of use
• Semantic layer

6. QlikView

• Scalability

7. OBIEE

• Visualization
• Database connectivities

• I have used SAP for almost 12 years
• Tableau – Rate 6/10 overall but 9/10 for visualization. I have used it for three years
• IBM Cognos - Rate 7/10 and I have used it for three years
• MS BI - Rate 5/10 and I have used it for two years
• Pentaho - Rate 5/10 and I have used it for over five years
• QlikView- Rate 7/10 and I have used it for two years
• OBIEE – Rate 7/10 and I have used it for five years

• SAP BO/BI - Below average
• Tableau - Good
• IBM Cognos - Average
• MS BI - Average
• Pentaho - Average
• QlikView - Above average
• OBIEE - Average

• SAP BO/BI - Below average
• Tableau - Good
• IBM Cognos - Average
• MS BI - Average
• Pentaho - Average
• QlikView - Above average
• OBIEE - Average

There is no perfect solution or one size fits all. Be clear on the requirements that you are trying to meet with the tools and solutions and do a POC and thorough evaluation. Also most of the time a single vendor works better than using best of the breed solution.