How to build a cheap and flexible BI reporting tool for SAP

We all know the importance of Business Intelligence and its effect on business agility and corporate performance. Companies running SAP have invested in large BI/ BW implementations and yet a very large percentage of users still run reports in department silos using Excel, Access or whatever tools they can get their hands on.

Usually, the reason for that is twofold:

1.       The BW/BI system does not contain all of the data sets needed.

2.       IT turnaround time is not fast enough to keep up with business demands.

If your company has not yet implemented a BI/BW system, is it due to lack of funding? If so, then this blog post is for you..

Growing up a boy scout I learned to be resourceful, to always be ready with a sense of “savoir faire” to do the most with what I had. For companies to succeed today, they have to do the most with the least amount of resources available. A new breed of MacGyvers or Toilet paper entrepreneurs is needed.

But for these to exist, IT needs to allow the business unit application development (BUAD) team to flourish. Gartner has already published a best practice on BUAD which you can read here.

Great, it all sounds good in theory but how does one achieve that and what does all of it have to do with building a cheap BI alternative? Well my friends, if you take a moment to look around your organization will notice that like the majority of companies who run SAP, you also run Microsoft SQL server.

What I am proposing is not an in depth step by step guide to SAP reporting and Business Intelligence but merely a starting point, and one of many approaches to building a cost effective BI solution using the tools you already possess and are familiar with.

Think of it as cooking a new meal using left overs - if you’ve ever watched one of the countless cooking shows you will know what I am referring to.

So far, we have gotten our hands on a SQL server. Hopefully that was easy enough. The next challenge is how to connect our SAP instance to the SQL server database.

Thankfully, Winshuttle Query allows extracts from SAP ERP to SQL server directly from tables, Infosets or Logical databases.  Now that we have a SQL server and a way to download the SAP data we want into it, we're 90% of the way there.

Next, we will need to define and setup the semantics; after all as business users we do not want to be bogged down with accessing SQL and writing code.

This is where SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) comes into play. SSRS is already part of SQL server and it even integrates with SharePoint and Excel.

From SSRS we can leverage the SAP data in SQL to design Dashboards, spatial reports with Bing or Google maps etc. and expose them directly in Excel, SharePoint or an online portal.

Let me also be clear on one thing, even though I am saying this would be a cheap BI system, don’t be fooled in the capabilities and performance you can derive from it. With SQL 2012, Microsoft introduced the In-Memory Column Store to dramatically improve query response up to 100 times faster than previous versions. Forrester Research touts that "It comes with the latest versions of PowerPivot and PowerViewer, which are among the top products addressing key BI trends such as data exploration and discovery, enablement of business users and data visualization.”

I propose to use Microsoft Excel and the Winshuttle Query add-in for transactional live SAP data and leverage the power of SQL for BI tasks. This hybrid model will facilitate self-service business intelligence to lead to agility, as well as ensure compliance.

Let’s recap what we need to get our almost free BI system up and running in 5 steps:

If there is enough interest in the subject, perhaps in a subsequent post I can show you how to build a query report with SSRS.