Description
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
SAP Thought Leadership Paper
Business Intelligence
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
For Small Enterprises
©
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© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
4 Why Small Enterprises Need
Business Intelligence
5 Overview of Business Intelligence
6 BI Challenges for Small Companies
10 Overview of SAP Crystal Solutions
11 Summary
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
3 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Initiating a business intelligence (BI) strategy can be
intimidating for small enterprises and departmental
deployments. BI is often seen as a complicated, jargon-
flled arena that requires lots of IT expertise and resources.
There is also a tension between delivering fast results
economically and doing the right thing for long-term growth
and fexibility. This paper provides smaller organizations
with a framework to evaluate and select the right BI
solution and approach that meets their requirements
today and tomorrow.
As an executive of a small enterprise, you face a
unique set of challenges in running the operations
of your company. How you respond to these chal-
lenges can be the diference between remarkable
success and a fght for survival.
Challenges you may face include:
• Ensuring growth – Proftable and sustained
growth is critical for a small enterprise. Without
it, you risk either being made irrelevant by
faster competitors or being swallowed by a
larger company. Proftable growth requires
pulling the right levers on a consistent basis, so
you need clear insights into your business. For
example, knowing which products, segments,
and customers yield higher profts will help you
allocate more resources toward them. On an
ongoing basis, you should be able to monitor
and validate if your incremental investments
are indeed delivering an expected increase in
sales and profts.
• Achieving speed – Your ability to rapidly take
advantage of a new market opportunity is one
of your biggest advantages. However, smaller
organizations often have limited resources. You
need to know what is working well, so it can be
quickly capitalized, and what is not working
well, so it can be rapidly addressed. If you know
the revenue, costs, and spend for recently intro-
duced products, you can more easily identify
poor performers and quickly shift spend away
from them. Without such insights, you may take
longer to make such decisions and continue
betting on poor performers, or you may make
incorrect decisions that are wrongly infuenced
by one data point.
• Staying focused – Unlike large companies,
small organizations sell a narrow portfolio of
products and services and usually have limited
resources. Continued success lies in getting
everyone in the team on the same page by
using the same set of assumptions based
on the same version of the truth. So, if your
engineering, sales, fnance, and marketing
organizations use the same analysis on pipe-
line, revenue, and margins, they are more likely
to share the same conclusions and be aligned
on priorities.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
4 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Why Small Enterprises Need
Business Intelligence
BI helps you to turn data from fnancial,
manufacturing, and sales systems into
useful and meaningful information.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
5 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Overview of Business Intelligence
Finally, business intelligence acts as an enabler for
proftable growth by providing you and your man-
agers with an in-depth analysis of your business,
so everyone has a fnger on the pulse of your oper-
ations and can make decisions based on facts
rather than instincts. According to research by
Oxford Economics, small and midsize enterprises
(SMEs) value business analytics most highly as a
means to drive cost-efciencies and improve prod-
uct and service development. The research also
indicates that the most proftable small companies
see BI and analytics as the most competitive
drivers.
1
Along the business intelligence continuum,
reports provide a familiar way to deliver informa-
tion. Dashboards, the next step, deliver summa-
rized results to decision makers. Data exploration
enables self-service access to the information
your business users need, with intuitive search,
exploration, and visualization functionality.
Incorporating business Intelligence (BI) with
reporting, dashboards, and self-service data
exploration allows you to better understand,
analyze, and even predict what’s occurring within
your company. BI helps you to turn data from
fnancial, manufacturing, and sales systems into
useful and meaningful information. You can then
distribute this information to those that need it,
when they need it, so every manager within your
company can make timely and better-informed
decisions.
BI provides you the speed advantage by succinctly
surfacing what is working and what is not on an
ongoing basis. It shows the impact of changing
conditions on your business, so you can correctly
prioritize and rapidly act and react. It also enables
focus by providing every manager within your
organization with the same version of the truth,
so there is alignment between strategy and opera-
tions and any disconnects are eliminated.
Data exploration enables self-service
access with intuitive search, exploration,
and visualization.
1. Oxford Economics, Research on 2,100 SME executives
across several industries and 21 countries in Q2, 2013.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
6 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
BI Challenges for Small Companies
BI solutions are being widely adopted by SMEs
around the globe. Oxford Economics research
highlights that the technologies most commonly
deployed today by SMEs are business manage-
ment software (48%), mobile (46%), and BI and
analytics (44%). Smaller frms are expanding
their use of analytics: more than half of those
with sales under US$100,000 will use these tools
in three years – a jump of 43%.
3
Gartner challenges midsize organizations to
increasingly adopt such solutions, saying, “Mid-
size organizations are at a decision point. They
have to fold BI and analytics into their application
portfolios or risk losing market share to those
enterprises that are leveraging BI and analytics.”
4
It’s important that BI solutions for small enter-
prises support the following tenets. Specifcally,
they should:
• Model a “crawl, walk, run” approach
• “Fit like a glove” in an IT-constrained
environment
• Provide the richness of enterprise BI deploy-
ments at an afordable cost of ownership
Small and midsize enterprises have limited IT
resources and small IT budgets. Any initiative
that requires deep IT expertise or a big IT budget
becomes nearly impossible to fund and difcult
to successfully execute. In its research about
SMEs, Gartner says, “Their biggest challenge is
delivering IT services with a small staf and lim-
ited IT skills that do not grow in proportion to the
demands of the business. […] Many SMBs have
traditionally shied away from BI and analytics
solutions due to concerns about the complexity
and high cost of deploying and managing them,
although they can help SMBs identify their most-
proftable customers, accelerate product innova-
tion, optimize pricing, and discover the drivers of
fnancial performance.”
2
In addition, most managers at small companies
wear multiple hats, and it becomes challenging
for operational and executive staf to take on
multiple new initiatives simultaneously. As a
result, BI solutions for SMBs are purpose-built:
they are less expensive to deploy and require
minimal IT resources.
2. Gartner Research, “Agenda Overview for Small and Mid-
size Business Marketplace, 2013,” Published: 7 January 2013,
Analyst(s): Robert P. Anderson.
3. Oxford Economics, Research on 2,100 SME executives
across several industries and 21 countries in Q2, 2013.
4. Gartner Research, “Predicts 2013: Now Is the Turning
Point for Midsize Enterprises,” Published: 29 November 2012,
Analyst(s): James A. Browning, Susan Galberaith, Mike Cisek.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
7 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
providing the basis for organizational learning.
Examples include executive dashboards and
simple operational reports.
2. Walk – The objective is to build upon early
successes and expand the scope of BI such
that the organization becomes comfortable
with using various facts and insights from
the BI system for decision making. Examples
include implementing operational reporting,
operational dashboards, and ad hoc search
query and analysis.
3. Run – The objective is to achieve pervasive
use of BI – so all decisions are made on facts
rather than intuition. Companies in this phase
expand BI to mobile devices and roll out
ad hoc analysis and data visualization capabili-
ties to all department business analysts.
MODEL A “CRAWL, WALK, RUN” APPROACH:
A ROAD MAP
SAP believes that small enterprises should imple-
ment business intelligence in phases by starting
with small steps, achieving success at it, and then
building upon it. Such an approach provides for
organizational learning on small budgets, where
mistakes are not expensive. It also helps ensure
that lessons learned from initial BI deployment
build a prioritized road map for broader com-
pany-wide BI implementation.
As depicted in the fgure, the three phases of BI
deployment are:
1. Crawl – The objective is to become comfort-
able with BI technology. Focus on deploying
those aspects of BI that can have an immedi-
ate impact on daily decision making while
Figure: The Multiple Phases of Business Intelligence (BI) Deployment
Phase 1 (Crawl):
Become Comfortable with BI
• Executive dashboards
• Simple reporting
Phase 2 (Walk):
Obtain an Integrated View
of Operations
• Operational dashboards
• Operational reporting
• Search-based query
• Introduce ad hoc analysis
Phase 3 (Run):
Make BI Pervasive
• Expand ad hoc analysis
throughout
• Mobile BI
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
8 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
support or training, has enabled this transition
and democratized BI usage. Ease of use has
also played a key role in faster adoption of BI.
These capabilities enable companies to more
efectively implement a crawl, walk, run approach
within their organizations.
MAKE BI “FIT LIKE A GLOVE” IN AN
IT-CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENT
SMEs have limited IT budgets and resources,
so users should be able to access trusted data
without creating a backlog for IT or outside con-
sultants. To further reduce costs, the solution
should also take advantage of virtualization.
Your BI solution should enable:
• Self-service for business users – To reduce
cost of ownership, the right BI solution should
ensure that users can fnd the information they
need with intuitive, self-service tools. However,
many BI solutions require an understanding of
advanced queries, take hours of training to get
started, and may require IT’s help to locate and
expose data sources. The ideal solution pro-
vides a simple, intuitive way for easily locating
and exploring BI content and interactive data
presented in consistent business terms.
• Distribution and control – Small companies
should be able to use their BI system to create
and run production reports, such as a sales
report showing monthly sales and commissions
sorted by salesperson and then by customer.
The report distribution should be controlled so
that each sales or production manager can see
only the data for his or her scope of work, such
as sales force, product, or warehouse location.
The report might be e-mailed or interactively
viewed through a Web browser or mobile device.
Implementing a Crawl, Walk, Run Approach
In order to implement a crawl, walk, run approach,
your solution must encompass the following
characteristics:
• A single-solution framework that grows with
you – A single BI product should be able to take
you through all three phases (crawl, walk, and
run) so all the components ft together and you
do not have to buy diferent products for difer-
ent capabilities. If you selected reporting-only
or dashboard-only solutions in the early phases
of BI, at a later time you will be forced to buy
multiple products and build multiple skill sets –
an expensive proposition for a small company.
The right product ofers a common semantic
layer, so a single representation of data can be
created and accessed by dashboards, reports,
and query tools. This reduces administration
efort and cost of ownership.
• Adjacent BI capabilities – When evaluating BI
solutions, it’s also important to consider your
company’s growth trajectory and changing
needs. As you grow, you start looking at adjacent
BI solutions to make better data-driven deci-
sions or improve user productivity by taking over
manual data crunching work-through solutions
such as business planning and budgeting. They
not only leverage BI at their core but also are
often used by the same people who use BI.
Familiarity with user interface and constructs of
their BI application will help them easily adopt
the new budgeting and planning solutions.
• Fast adoption and ease of use – In the past,
technical specialists primarily used BI tools, but
that has changed. A suite of BI products with a
consistent look and feel across all components
and built-in templates, that allow business ana-
lysts to access data directly without needing IT
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
9 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
• Quick integration with a wide variety of
sources – Information also resides outside the
core business system in spreadsheets, e-mail
systems, or other databases. Although SMEs
can run analytics against individual systems
for an initial view, eventually data from several
sources – including social media and the cloud –
is needed to portray the total picture. A BI solu-
tion should make it easy for small organizations
to incorporate data from multiple sources into
their reports while hiding the complexity of
accessing such information. In addition, not
every employee should have access to every
report or data source – so security and control
are also a key part of the BI environment.
• Mobile-ready content and interface – BI should
deliver reports and dashboards to smartphones
and tablet computers, with content formatted
to match the form and functionality of these
devices. It should support mobile-friendly
capabilities, such as allow users to hover over
a display to obtain summary results, and drill
down for additional details.
• Performance without expensive hardware
(using a separate transaction and reporting
environment) – Ideally, to optimize database
performance and scalability, you want to run
database tasks on your database server while
reporting is run on separate servers. However,
many reporting solutions require you to pur-
chase additional licenses for such separation.
Your BI solutions should enable you to imple-
ment reporting on a separate server, without
needing to buy an additional license. Such
functionality helps improve performance and
scalability of both the database and reporting
solution.
• Support for virtualized environments – Many
software companies developed their pricing and
licensing models prior to the advent of virtualiza-
tion, a cost-saving technology that allows multi-
ple “virtual” servers to run on a single physical
server. Thus, they often use complicated licens-
ing rules to govern what you can and cannot do
in a virtualized environment. The outcome often
is not favorable and reduces the value of virtual-
ization. For example, adding processors to virtual
servers may require purchasing more licenses.
The same challenges come into play when
deploying reporting for extranets. The BI solution
should allow you to support virtualization and
extranets cost-efectively.
Forrester notes, “The knowledge workers will
signifcantly beneft from a new generation of
self-service – lean and agile – BI solutions that
would allow these workers to fulfll most of their
information requirements while requiring mini-
mal IT support.”
5
RICH ENTERPRISE DEPLOYMENT AT AN
AFFORDABLE COST OF OWNERSHIP
BI solutions developed for enterprises often
contain rich functionality that is not provided in
their SME versions. However, such features are
equally relevant to small enterprises and should
be included within the core product packaging
for an SME solution. Functionality that is relevant
to both large and small enterprises includes:
5. “Self-Service: An Essential Capability Of BI,” A Forrester
Consulting thought leadership paper commissioned by SAP
AG, April 2011.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
10 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Overview of SAP® Crystal Solutions
• Flexible licensing for virtualization and extranet
deployments
• Application programming interfaces (APIs) for
both .NET and Java, for integration into custom
applications
• Reports processed on a separate server
• Integration into the environment business
professionals already use with:
– SharePoint portal integration kit
– SAP BusinessObjects™ Live Ofce software
to integrate reporting and dashboards
into Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and
Microsoft PowerPoint documents
– Support for Microsoft Windows Server and
Microsoft SQL Server
– Support for Microsoft Active Directory single
sign-on
Additionally, SAP Crystal solutions leverage the
same technology as SAP BusinessObjects BI
platform and SAP BusinessObjects BI software,
Edge edition. Content you create with SAP
Crystal solutions can be migrated to these plat-
forms, so you expand functionality and scale
while protecting your BI investments.
SAP® Crystal solutions provide essential
reporting, dashboard, and data discovery and
visualization functions. Highlights include:
• A single data model that presents a consistent
view of data in business terms for reports, dash-
boards, and data visualization and exploration
with SAP Crystal Server software; this helps
reduce administration and cost of ownership
while ofering business users confdence that
their data is accurate
• Data discovery with native support for mobile
devices from SAP BusinessObjects Explorer®
software, giving your business users immediate
answers to ad hoc business questions; SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer provides the simplic-
ity of search with the power of business intelli-
gence so that anyone can tap, swipe, and zoom
to fnd and explore relevant data
• Production reporting with SAP Crystal Reports®
software for picture-perfect, interactive reports
• Drillable dashboards to monitor performance
with SAP Crystal Dashboard Design software
• Data visualization and analysis with SAP Lumira™
software; SAP Lumira gives data analysts the
power to combine, transform, and analyze data
in an interactive, visual way
• Consistent functionality across all supported
browsers
Smaller frms are expanding their use of analytics:
more than half of those with sales under US$100,000
will use these tools in three years ? a jump of 43%.
Oxford Economics
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
11 / 11
Summary
A well-executed business intelligence deployment
is a source of competitive advantage for small and
midsize enterprises. BI helps SMEs identify their
most proftable customers, accelerate product
innovation, optimize pricing, and discover the
drivers of fnancial performance.
Since SMEs have limited IT resources and small
IT budgets, any initiative that requires deep IT
expertise or a big IT budget becomes nearly
impossible to fund and very difcult to success-
fully execute. However, with a BI solution that is
specifcally designed for small organizations, the
possibilities are unlimited. Such a solution needs
to model a crawl, walk, run approach; ft like a
glove in an IT-constrained environment; and pro-
vide the richness of enterprise BI deployments
at an afordable cost of ownership. SAP Crystal
solutions – essential BI solutions that include
reporting, dashboard, and data discovery and
visualization for small companies – is designed
to address all these needs.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about how you can meet the challenges
of reporting and dashboard creation, please use these
resources:
• SAP Crystal solutions (home page and evaluation
download)
• SAP Crystal Server community site (SAP Community
Network resources and knowledge center)
“The knowledge workers will
signifcantly beneft from a new
generation of self-service ? lean
and agile ? BI solutions that would
allow these workers to fulfll most
of their information requirements
while requiring minimal IT support.”
Forrester Consulting
CMP24023 (13/08) © 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP af liate company. All rights reserved.
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be changed without prior notice.
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doc_866995735.pdf
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
SAP Thought Leadership Paper
Business Intelligence
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
For Small Enterprises
©
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2 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
4 Why Small Enterprises Need
Business Intelligence
5 Overview of Business Intelligence
6 BI Challenges for Small Companies
10 Overview of SAP Crystal Solutions
11 Summary
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
3 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Initiating a business intelligence (BI) strategy can be
intimidating for small enterprises and departmental
deployments. BI is often seen as a complicated, jargon-
flled arena that requires lots of IT expertise and resources.
There is also a tension between delivering fast results
economically and doing the right thing for long-term growth
and fexibility. This paper provides smaller organizations
with a framework to evaluate and select the right BI
solution and approach that meets their requirements
today and tomorrow.
As an executive of a small enterprise, you face a
unique set of challenges in running the operations
of your company. How you respond to these chal-
lenges can be the diference between remarkable
success and a fght for survival.
Challenges you may face include:
• Ensuring growth – Proftable and sustained
growth is critical for a small enterprise. Without
it, you risk either being made irrelevant by
faster competitors or being swallowed by a
larger company. Proftable growth requires
pulling the right levers on a consistent basis, so
you need clear insights into your business. For
example, knowing which products, segments,
and customers yield higher profts will help you
allocate more resources toward them. On an
ongoing basis, you should be able to monitor
and validate if your incremental investments
are indeed delivering an expected increase in
sales and profts.
• Achieving speed – Your ability to rapidly take
advantage of a new market opportunity is one
of your biggest advantages. However, smaller
organizations often have limited resources. You
need to know what is working well, so it can be
quickly capitalized, and what is not working
well, so it can be rapidly addressed. If you know
the revenue, costs, and spend for recently intro-
duced products, you can more easily identify
poor performers and quickly shift spend away
from them. Without such insights, you may take
longer to make such decisions and continue
betting on poor performers, or you may make
incorrect decisions that are wrongly infuenced
by one data point.
• Staying focused – Unlike large companies,
small organizations sell a narrow portfolio of
products and services and usually have limited
resources. Continued success lies in getting
everyone in the team on the same page by
using the same set of assumptions based
on the same version of the truth. So, if your
engineering, sales, fnance, and marketing
organizations use the same analysis on pipe-
line, revenue, and margins, they are more likely
to share the same conclusions and be aligned
on priorities.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
4 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Why Small Enterprises Need
Business Intelligence
BI helps you to turn data from fnancial,
manufacturing, and sales systems into
useful and meaningful information.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
5 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Overview of Business Intelligence
Finally, business intelligence acts as an enabler for
proftable growth by providing you and your man-
agers with an in-depth analysis of your business,
so everyone has a fnger on the pulse of your oper-
ations and can make decisions based on facts
rather than instincts. According to research by
Oxford Economics, small and midsize enterprises
(SMEs) value business analytics most highly as a
means to drive cost-efciencies and improve prod-
uct and service development. The research also
indicates that the most proftable small companies
see BI and analytics as the most competitive
drivers.
1
Along the business intelligence continuum,
reports provide a familiar way to deliver informa-
tion. Dashboards, the next step, deliver summa-
rized results to decision makers. Data exploration
enables self-service access to the information
your business users need, with intuitive search,
exploration, and visualization functionality.
Incorporating business Intelligence (BI) with
reporting, dashboards, and self-service data
exploration allows you to better understand,
analyze, and even predict what’s occurring within
your company. BI helps you to turn data from
fnancial, manufacturing, and sales systems into
useful and meaningful information. You can then
distribute this information to those that need it,
when they need it, so every manager within your
company can make timely and better-informed
decisions.
BI provides you the speed advantage by succinctly
surfacing what is working and what is not on an
ongoing basis. It shows the impact of changing
conditions on your business, so you can correctly
prioritize and rapidly act and react. It also enables
focus by providing every manager within your
organization with the same version of the truth,
so there is alignment between strategy and opera-
tions and any disconnects are eliminated.
Data exploration enables self-service
access with intuitive search, exploration,
and visualization.
1. Oxford Economics, Research on 2,100 SME executives
across several industries and 21 countries in Q2, 2013.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
6 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
BI Challenges for Small Companies
BI solutions are being widely adopted by SMEs
around the globe. Oxford Economics research
highlights that the technologies most commonly
deployed today by SMEs are business manage-
ment software (48%), mobile (46%), and BI and
analytics (44%). Smaller frms are expanding
their use of analytics: more than half of those
with sales under US$100,000 will use these tools
in three years – a jump of 43%.
3
Gartner challenges midsize organizations to
increasingly adopt such solutions, saying, “Mid-
size organizations are at a decision point. They
have to fold BI and analytics into their application
portfolios or risk losing market share to those
enterprises that are leveraging BI and analytics.”
4
It’s important that BI solutions for small enter-
prises support the following tenets. Specifcally,
they should:
• Model a “crawl, walk, run” approach
• “Fit like a glove” in an IT-constrained
environment
• Provide the richness of enterprise BI deploy-
ments at an afordable cost of ownership
Small and midsize enterprises have limited IT
resources and small IT budgets. Any initiative
that requires deep IT expertise or a big IT budget
becomes nearly impossible to fund and difcult
to successfully execute. In its research about
SMEs, Gartner says, “Their biggest challenge is
delivering IT services with a small staf and lim-
ited IT skills that do not grow in proportion to the
demands of the business. […] Many SMBs have
traditionally shied away from BI and analytics
solutions due to concerns about the complexity
and high cost of deploying and managing them,
although they can help SMBs identify their most-
proftable customers, accelerate product innova-
tion, optimize pricing, and discover the drivers of
fnancial performance.”
2
In addition, most managers at small companies
wear multiple hats, and it becomes challenging
for operational and executive staf to take on
multiple new initiatives simultaneously. As a
result, BI solutions for SMBs are purpose-built:
they are less expensive to deploy and require
minimal IT resources.
2. Gartner Research, “Agenda Overview for Small and Mid-
size Business Marketplace, 2013,” Published: 7 January 2013,
Analyst(s): Robert P. Anderson.
3. Oxford Economics, Research on 2,100 SME executives
across several industries and 21 countries in Q2, 2013.
4. Gartner Research, “Predicts 2013: Now Is the Turning
Point for Midsize Enterprises,” Published: 29 November 2012,
Analyst(s): James A. Browning, Susan Galberaith, Mike Cisek.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
7 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
providing the basis for organizational learning.
Examples include executive dashboards and
simple operational reports.
2. Walk – The objective is to build upon early
successes and expand the scope of BI such
that the organization becomes comfortable
with using various facts and insights from
the BI system for decision making. Examples
include implementing operational reporting,
operational dashboards, and ad hoc search
query and analysis.
3. Run – The objective is to achieve pervasive
use of BI – so all decisions are made on facts
rather than intuition. Companies in this phase
expand BI to mobile devices and roll out
ad hoc analysis and data visualization capabili-
ties to all department business analysts.
MODEL A “CRAWL, WALK, RUN” APPROACH:
A ROAD MAP
SAP believes that small enterprises should imple-
ment business intelligence in phases by starting
with small steps, achieving success at it, and then
building upon it. Such an approach provides for
organizational learning on small budgets, where
mistakes are not expensive. It also helps ensure
that lessons learned from initial BI deployment
build a prioritized road map for broader com-
pany-wide BI implementation.
As depicted in the fgure, the three phases of BI
deployment are:
1. Crawl – The objective is to become comfort-
able with BI technology. Focus on deploying
those aspects of BI that can have an immedi-
ate impact on daily decision making while
Figure: The Multiple Phases of Business Intelligence (BI) Deployment
Phase 1 (Crawl):
Become Comfortable with BI
• Executive dashboards
• Simple reporting
Phase 2 (Walk):
Obtain an Integrated View
of Operations
• Operational dashboards
• Operational reporting
• Search-based query
• Introduce ad hoc analysis
Phase 3 (Run):
Make BI Pervasive
• Expand ad hoc analysis
throughout
• Mobile BI
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
8 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
support or training, has enabled this transition
and democratized BI usage. Ease of use has
also played a key role in faster adoption of BI.
These capabilities enable companies to more
efectively implement a crawl, walk, run approach
within their organizations.
MAKE BI “FIT LIKE A GLOVE” IN AN
IT-CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENT
SMEs have limited IT budgets and resources,
so users should be able to access trusted data
without creating a backlog for IT or outside con-
sultants. To further reduce costs, the solution
should also take advantage of virtualization.
Your BI solution should enable:
• Self-service for business users – To reduce
cost of ownership, the right BI solution should
ensure that users can fnd the information they
need with intuitive, self-service tools. However,
many BI solutions require an understanding of
advanced queries, take hours of training to get
started, and may require IT’s help to locate and
expose data sources. The ideal solution pro-
vides a simple, intuitive way for easily locating
and exploring BI content and interactive data
presented in consistent business terms.
• Distribution and control – Small companies
should be able to use their BI system to create
and run production reports, such as a sales
report showing monthly sales and commissions
sorted by salesperson and then by customer.
The report distribution should be controlled so
that each sales or production manager can see
only the data for his or her scope of work, such
as sales force, product, or warehouse location.
The report might be e-mailed or interactively
viewed through a Web browser or mobile device.
Implementing a Crawl, Walk, Run Approach
In order to implement a crawl, walk, run approach,
your solution must encompass the following
characteristics:
• A single-solution framework that grows with
you – A single BI product should be able to take
you through all three phases (crawl, walk, and
run) so all the components ft together and you
do not have to buy diferent products for difer-
ent capabilities. If you selected reporting-only
or dashboard-only solutions in the early phases
of BI, at a later time you will be forced to buy
multiple products and build multiple skill sets –
an expensive proposition for a small company.
The right product ofers a common semantic
layer, so a single representation of data can be
created and accessed by dashboards, reports,
and query tools. This reduces administration
efort and cost of ownership.
• Adjacent BI capabilities – When evaluating BI
solutions, it’s also important to consider your
company’s growth trajectory and changing
needs. As you grow, you start looking at adjacent
BI solutions to make better data-driven deci-
sions or improve user productivity by taking over
manual data crunching work-through solutions
such as business planning and budgeting. They
not only leverage BI at their core but also are
often used by the same people who use BI.
Familiarity with user interface and constructs of
their BI application will help them easily adopt
the new budgeting and planning solutions.
• Fast adoption and ease of use – In the past,
technical specialists primarily used BI tools, but
that has changed. A suite of BI products with a
consistent look and feel across all components
and built-in templates, that allow business ana-
lysts to access data directly without needing IT
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
9 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
• Quick integration with a wide variety of
sources – Information also resides outside the
core business system in spreadsheets, e-mail
systems, or other databases. Although SMEs
can run analytics against individual systems
for an initial view, eventually data from several
sources – including social media and the cloud –
is needed to portray the total picture. A BI solu-
tion should make it easy for small organizations
to incorporate data from multiple sources into
their reports while hiding the complexity of
accessing such information. In addition, not
every employee should have access to every
report or data source – so security and control
are also a key part of the BI environment.
• Mobile-ready content and interface – BI should
deliver reports and dashboards to smartphones
and tablet computers, with content formatted
to match the form and functionality of these
devices. It should support mobile-friendly
capabilities, such as allow users to hover over
a display to obtain summary results, and drill
down for additional details.
• Performance without expensive hardware
(using a separate transaction and reporting
environment) – Ideally, to optimize database
performance and scalability, you want to run
database tasks on your database server while
reporting is run on separate servers. However,
many reporting solutions require you to pur-
chase additional licenses for such separation.
Your BI solutions should enable you to imple-
ment reporting on a separate server, without
needing to buy an additional license. Such
functionality helps improve performance and
scalability of both the database and reporting
solution.
• Support for virtualized environments – Many
software companies developed their pricing and
licensing models prior to the advent of virtualiza-
tion, a cost-saving technology that allows multi-
ple “virtual” servers to run on a single physical
server. Thus, they often use complicated licens-
ing rules to govern what you can and cannot do
in a virtualized environment. The outcome often
is not favorable and reduces the value of virtual-
ization. For example, adding processors to virtual
servers may require purchasing more licenses.
The same challenges come into play when
deploying reporting for extranets. The BI solution
should allow you to support virtualization and
extranets cost-efectively.
Forrester notes, “The knowledge workers will
signifcantly beneft from a new generation of
self-service – lean and agile – BI solutions that
would allow these workers to fulfll most of their
information requirements while requiring mini-
mal IT support.”
5
RICH ENTERPRISE DEPLOYMENT AT AN
AFFORDABLE COST OF OWNERSHIP
BI solutions developed for enterprises often
contain rich functionality that is not provided in
their SME versions. However, such features are
equally relevant to small enterprises and should
be included within the core product packaging
for an SME solution. Functionality that is relevant
to both large and small enterprises includes:
5. “Self-Service: An Essential Capability Of BI,” A Forrester
Consulting thought leadership paper commissioned by SAP
AG, April 2011.
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
10 / 11
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
Overview of SAP® Crystal Solutions
• Flexible licensing for virtualization and extranet
deployments
• Application programming interfaces (APIs) for
both .NET and Java, for integration into custom
applications
• Reports processed on a separate server
• Integration into the environment business
professionals already use with:
– SharePoint portal integration kit
– SAP BusinessObjects™ Live Ofce software
to integrate reporting and dashboards
into Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and
Microsoft PowerPoint documents
– Support for Microsoft Windows Server and
Microsoft SQL Server
– Support for Microsoft Active Directory single
sign-on
Additionally, SAP Crystal solutions leverage the
same technology as SAP BusinessObjects BI
platform and SAP BusinessObjects BI software,
Edge edition. Content you create with SAP
Crystal solutions can be migrated to these plat-
forms, so you expand functionality and scale
while protecting your BI investments.
SAP® Crystal solutions provide essential
reporting, dashboard, and data discovery and
visualization functions. Highlights include:
• A single data model that presents a consistent
view of data in business terms for reports, dash-
boards, and data visualization and exploration
with SAP Crystal Server software; this helps
reduce administration and cost of ownership
while ofering business users confdence that
their data is accurate
• Data discovery with native support for mobile
devices from SAP BusinessObjects Explorer®
software, giving your business users immediate
answers to ad hoc business questions; SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer provides the simplic-
ity of search with the power of business intelli-
gence so that anyone can tap, swipe, and zoom
to fnd and explore relevant data
• Production reporting with SAP Crystal Reports®
software for picture-perfect, interactive reports
• Drillable dashboards to monitor performance
with SAP Crystal Dashboard Design software
• Data visualization and analysis with SAP Lumira™
software; SAP Lumira gives data analysts the
power to combine, transform, and analyze data
in an interactive, visual way
• Consistent functionality across all supported
browsers
Smaller frms are expanding their use of analytics:
more than half of those with sales under US$100,000
will use these tools in three years ? a jump of 43%.
Oxford Economics
Meeting the Challenges of Business Intelligence
11 / 11
Summary
A well-executed business intelligence deployment
is a source of competitive advantage for small and
midsize enterprises. BI helps SMEs identify their
most proftable customers, accelerate product
innovation, optimize pricing, and discover the
drivers of fnancial performance.
Since SMEs have limited IT resources and small
IT budgets, any initiative that requires deep IT
expertise or a big IT budget becomes nearly
impossible to fund and very difcult to success-
fully execute. However, with a BI solution that is
specifcally designed for small organizations, the
possibilities are unlimited. Such a solution needs
to model a crawl, walk, run approach; ft like a
glove in an IT-constrained environment; and pro-
vide the richness of enterprise BI deployments
at an afordable cost of ownership. SAP Crystal
solutions – essential BI solutions that include
reporting, dashboard, and data discovery and
visualization for small companies – is designed
to address all these needs.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about how you can meet the challenges
of reporting and dashboard creation, please use these
resources:
• SAP Crystal solutions (home page and evaluation
download)
• SAP Crystal Server community site (SAP Community
Network resources and knowledge center)
“The knowledge workers will
signifcantly beneft from a new
generation of self-service ? lean
and agile ? BI solutions that would
allow these workers to fulfll most
of their information requirements
while requiring minimal IT support.”
Forrester Consulting
CMP24023 (13/08) © 2013 SAP AG or an SAP afliate company. All rights reserved.
© 2013 SAP AG or an SAP af liate company. All rights reserved.
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