Description
The Future of Business Intelligence from SAP Is Now
SAP Solution Brief
SAP BusinessObjects Business
Intelligence Solutions
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis
When it comes to business success,
few things are more important than
access to good data. From sizing up
the competition and understanding
customer needs to driving innovation
and reducing the costs of operations,
the best decisions you make are the
ones that are based on solid data.
Yet even though organizations today find
themselves awash in data, most strug-
gle to deliver it to those who can use it
most. These include financial controllers,
sales operation managers, marketing
campaign managers, and others who
need timely access to data and insight
to support strategically aligned decisions
that ultimately improve business perfor-
mance. For the most part, however,
business intelligence (BI) remains the
domain of power users and IT experts.
Other employees who need insight into
data to do their jobs effectively must
wait hours or days for reports to be
generated on their behalf. Some BI
solutions aimed directly at these busi-
ness users attempt to change this
reality, but typically a poor user experi-
ence leads to low rates of adoption.
The result of all this is that many critical
business decisions are still made on
gut feel rather than confirmable facts.
More Insight – Now
As an SAP customer using the SAP
NetWeaver® Business Warehouse
(SAP NetWeaver BW) component
and SAP® Business Explorer (SAP BEx)
tools, you’ve taken significant strides
toward addressing this challenge. Now
with SAP BusinessObjects™ Analysis
software, edition for Microsoft Office,
you can go even further.
This new offering delivers powerful
multidimensional analysis functionality
directly to business users working with
Microsoft Office tools. In a familiar
environment, your workers can perform
analysis using intuitive drag-and-drop
features to unlock insights into untold
volumes of data, with results returned
instantaneously. This helps you enhance
business-user autonomy and improve
employee productivity while optimizing
your ROI and total cost of ownership
(TCO) for both SAP NetWeaver BW
and Microsoft Office.
Innovation Without Disruption
Designed as part of the next generation
of business intelligence for SAP soft-
ware environments, the edition of SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis for use with
Microsoft Office facilitates a smooth
transition from SAP BEx. By adopting
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, you
take the first step toward a new and
more effective BI platform – without
the technical disruptions that would
otherwise interfere with daily business
operations and impact the cost of
IT functions.
Part of what makes this smooth
transition possible is the fact that
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis comes
preintegrated to fit with your existing
SAP software landscape. The offering
is designed to minimize your implemen-
tation effort and facilitate user adoption
by working with all your existing BI
content. This includes multidimensional
data sets, such as cubes developed for
SAP NetWeaver BW and queries devel-
oped with SAP BEx. That means all your
investments in cube and query design
THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE FROM SAP IS NOW
NEXT-GENERATION DATA ANALYSIS
FOR USERS OF MICROSOFT OFFICE
SAP® BusinessObjects™
Analysis software, edition
for Microsoft Office,
empowers business users
to perform multidimensional
analysis with Microsoft
Office tools. Fitting into your
existing software environ-
ment without disruption, it
transforms data into business
intelligence via an innovative
user experience.
Power and Speed
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis enables
users to turn their everyday Microsoft
Office tools into increasingly powerful
applications for managing data and
communicating business insight. For
example, users can export or import
analysis into Microsoft PowerPoint
presentations as live elements so that
their data is updated every time they
open a presentation.
Users can also leverage an improved
software development kit that uses
the native Visual Basic programming
language to build pervasive Microsoft
Excel–based applications. This can
enable you, for instance, to build a
budgeting and planning application that
writes and reads updated budget data
to and from SAP NetWeaver BW as
are safe, and users transitioning from
SAP BEx to SAP BusinessObjects
Analysis can keep working with
familiar assets.
Another strength of SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis that
significantly facilitates its adoption
comes with its light footprint. This
helps ensure a streamlined implemen-
tation in your existing SAP software
landscape, with the option to adopt
other SAP BusinessObjects business
intelligence solutions later at your own
pace. You can minimize the effort and
risk associated with introducing new
approaches to business intelligence
while realizing immediate benefits
with SAP BusinessObjects Analysis.
Simplicity and Higher Rates of
User Adoption
It’s a simple truism: the more compli-
cated your BI tools are, the less people
will use them. This is why SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis is designed
with simplicity and intuitiveness in
mind. With just a few clicks of the
mouse, your business users can gain
access to timely, highly relevant busi-
ness insight that can help them make
more informed decisions. Accessible
via familiar Microsoft Office tools,
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis enables
users to easily analyze any data set in
SAP NetWeaver BW across multiple
dimensions and hierarchies using
filtering and drill-down functionality.
Because specific roles within a compa-
ny tend to focus on a consistent set of
data points, you can build standard ana-
lytical reports that meet the everyday
needs of these roles. The consumer
of this data can then slice and dice the
information to reveal business insight
as needed. From a single user-friendly
analysis design panel, business users
can drag and drop data elements into
their Excel spreadsheet and use the
standard ribbons made popular by
Microsoft Office tools to perform
further analysis (see Figure).
The familiar environment and intuitive
functionality of SAP BusinessObjects
Analysis facilitate greater business-user
autonomy and help to contain training
and support costs. The end result is a
self-service data analysis solution that
puts greater power into the hands of
daily business users who need insight
now. This alleviates the business-user
training burden, eliminates dependency
on power users, and takes significant
demand off of IT engineers, who can
then refocus their energies on more
value-added activities. Ultimately, it also
leads to a high rate of user adoption.
Figure: Analysis Ribbons and Design Panel in Microsoft Excel
your central data source. In the end,
your users have more power to bring
data into their everyday work environ-
ment to improve decision making and
increase business performance.
Even for power users and IT staff
members, one of the most commonly
cited complaints about traditional
BI tools is poor performance. SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis changes this
equation thanks to tight integration with
SAP in-memory acceleration technolo-
gies such as SAP NetWeaver Business
Warehouse Accelerator and SAP
High-Performance Analytic Appliance
software. These technologies allow
immediate response times regardless
of data volume, making the user
experience for SAP BusinessObjects
Analysis far more satisfactory.
Benefits Today, Benefits Tomorrow
A significant advantage to adopting
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis is
that it lays the groundwork for ongoing
benefits as you proceed along the
business intelligence maturity curve.
What’s more, SAP NetWeaver BW –
which you already use – remains your
business intelligence foundation. Over
time, as your organization grows more
and more accustomed to SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis, you can
move at your own pace to adopt other
solutions in the SAP BusinessObjects
solution portfolio. This helps you round
out your BI capabilities so that you can
apply more and more insight to improve
day-to-day decision making.
While SAP BusinessObjects Analysis
makes your future brighter, it also deliv-
ers tangible business benefits in the
here and now. For lines of business, it
supports better business monitoring
and reveals insights that allow workers
on the front lines to make informed
decisions that align with corporate
strategy. For IT, it supports greater
user satisfaction and enterprise-wide
adoption through self-service features
that empower business users while
alleviating demand on IT staff.
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis delivers
benefits for the business as a whole as
well. It minimizes ramp-up costs by
reusing existing business intelligence
content and helps to improve the pro-
ductivity of Microsoft Office users by
embedding BI functionality directly into
the tools they use. Its light footprint,
furthermore, helps ensure a stream-
lined implementation that mitigates risk.
In the end, you’ll be able to optimize
your TCO for your business intelligence
environment while enjoying a high ROI
as your business users extract greater
value from the software and more
insight from your business data.
Find out More
To learn more about how SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis can help
your organization improve business
performance by gaining better insight
into business data, call your SAP
representative today or visit us online
at www.sap.com/solutions
/sapbusinessobjects/large/business
-intelligence/advanced-analytics
/index.epx.
In a familiar environ-
ment, your workers
can perform analysis
using intuitive drag-and-
drop features to unlock
insights into untold
volumes of data, with
results returned
instantaneously.
QUICK FACTS
www.sap.com/contactsap
50 102 275 (10/10)
©2010 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign,
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and other SAP products and services
mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or
registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.
Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects,
Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius,
and other Business Objects products and services mentioned
herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Business Objects Software Ltd. in the United States
and in other countries.
All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of
their respective companies. Data contained in this document serves
informational purposes only. National product speci?cations may vary.
These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials
are provided by SAP AG and its a?liated companies (“SAP Group”)
for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of
any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with
respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products
and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty
statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing
herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
Summary
SAP® BusinessObjects™ Analysis software, edition for Microsoft Office, is a next-
generation business intelligence (BI) solution that provides Microsoft Office users with
intuitive functionality for powerful multidimensional analysis. It fits without disruption into
your existing SAP software environment so you can smoothly transition from SAP Business
Explorer (SAP BEx) tools to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions.
Business Challenges
• Deliver timely business intelligence to all users enterprise-wide
• Enable business analysts to make informed decisions based on solid data
Key Features
• Content reuse – Provide users of SAP BEx with existing cubes developed for the
SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component and queries
developed with SAP BEx
• Analysis panel – Empower users to quickly filter, slice, dice, and drill down into data to
uncover business insights
• Familiar user experience – Equip users to access analytical functions with
Microsoft Office ribbons
• Application programming interface – Build pervasive, Excel-based BI applications
with more flexibility and programmatic control
• Live Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with embedded analysis – Present visuals
with up-to-date information directly refreshed from SAP NetWeaver BW
• High performance – Boost the power of Microsoft Excel to uncover insights immediately
regardless of data volume through in-memory acceleration
Business Bene?ts
• Quick ramp-up thanks to a light footprint and reuse of existing data sets
• Higher productivity by embedding analysis into familiar Microsoft Office tools
• Improved decision making and lower business risk by delivering business intelligence
to end users to provide business insight on a daily basis
• Lower training and IT support costs due to intuitive functionality and increased
business-user autonomy
• Rapid ROI and lower total cost of ownership with analysis tools that leverage your
existing SAP and Microsoft Office software
For More Information
Call your SAP representative, or visit
www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/business-intelligence
/advanced-analytics/index.epx.
doc_383073388.pdf
The Future of Business Intelligence from SAP Is Now
SAP Solution Brief
SAP BusinessObjects Business
Intelligence Solutions
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis
When it comes to business success,
few things are more important than
access to good data. From sizing up
the competition and understanding
customer needs to driving innovation
and reducing the costs of operations,
the best decisions you make are the
ones that are based on solid data.
Yet even though organizations today find
themselves awash in data, most strug-
gle to deliver it to those who can use it
most. These include financial controllers,
sales operation managers, marketing
campaign managers, and others who
need timely access to data and insight
to support strategically aligned decisions
that ultimately improve business perfor-
mance. For the most part, however,
business intelligence (BI) remains the
domain of power users and IT experts.
Other employees who need insight into
data to do their jobs effectively must
wait hours or days for reports to be
generated on their behalf. Some BI
solutions aimed directly at these busi-
ness users attempt to change this
reality, but typically a poor user experi-
ence leads to low rates of adoption.
The result of all this is that many critical
business decisions are still made on
gut feel rather than confirmable facts.
More Insight – Now
As an SAP customer using the SAP
NetWeaver® Business Warehouse
(SAP NetWeaver BW) component
and SAP® Business Explorer (SAP BEx)
tools, you’ve taken significant strides
toward addressing this challenge. Now
with SAP BusinessObjects™ Analysis
software, edition for Microsoft Office,
you can go even further.
This new offering delivers powerful
multidimensional analysis functionality
directly to business users working with
Microsoft Office tools. In a familiar
environment, your workers can perform
analysis using intuitive drag-and-drop
features to unlock insights into untold
volumes of data, with results returned
instantaneously. This helps you enhance
business-user autonomy and improve
employee productivity while optimizing
your ROI and total cost of ownership
(TCO) for both SAP NetWeaver BW
and Microsoft Office.
Innovation Without Disruption
Designed as part of the next generation
of business intelligence for SAP soft-
ware environments, the edition of SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis for use with
Microsoft Office facilitates a smooth
transition from SAP BEx. By adopting
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, you
take the first step toward a new and
more effective BI platform – without
the technical disruptions that would
otherwise interfere with daily business
operations and impact the cost of
IT functions.
Part of what makes this smooth
transition possible is the fact that
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis comes
preintegrated to fit with your existing
SAP software landscape. The offering
is designed to minimize your implemen-
tation effort and facilitate user adoption
by working with all your existing BI
content. This includes multidimensional
data sets, such as cubes developed for
SAP NetWeaver BW and queries devel-
oped with SAP BEx. That means all your
investments in cube and query design
THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE FROM SAP IS NOW
NEXT-GENERATION DATA ANALYSIS
FOR USERS OF MICROSOFT OFFICE
SAP® BusinessObjects™
Analysis software, edition
for Microsoft Office,
empowers business users
to perform multidimensional
analysis with Microsoft
Office tools. Fitting into your
existing software environ-
ment without disruption, it
transforms data into business
intelligence via an innovative
user experience.
Power and Speed
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis enables
users to turn their everyday Microsoft
Office tools into increasingly powerful
applications for managing data and
communicating business insight. For
example, users can export or import
analysis into Microsoft PowerPoint
presentations as live elements so that
their data is updated every time they
open a presentation.
Users can also leverage an improved
software development kit that uses
the native Visual Basic programming
language to build pervasive Microsoft
Excel–based applications. This can
enable you, for instance, to build a
budgeting and planning application that
writes and reads updated budget data
to and from SAP NetWeaver BW as
are safe, and users transitioning from
SAP BEx to SAP BusinessObjects
Analysis can keep working with
familiar assets.
Another strength of SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis that
significantly facilitates its adoption
comes with its light footprint. This
helps ensure a streamlined implemen-
tation in your existing SAP software
landscape, with the option to adopt
other SAP BusinessObjects business
intelligence solutions later at your own
pace. You can minimize the effort and
risk associated with introducing new
approaches to business intelligence
while realizing immediate benefits
with SAP BusinessObjects Analysis.
Simplicity and Higher Rates of
User Adoption
It’s a simple truism: the more compli-
cated your BI tools are, the less people
will use them. This is why SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis is designed
with simplicity and intuitiveness in
mind. With just a few clicks of the
mouse, your business users can gain
access to timely, highly relevant busi-
ness insight that can help them make
more informed decisions. Accessible
via familiar Microsoft Office tools,
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis enables
users to easily analyze any data set in
SAP NetWeaver BW across multiple
dimensions and hierarchies using
filtering and drill-down functionality.
Because specific roles within a compa-
ny tend to focus on a consistent set of
data points, you can build standard ana-
lytical reports that meet the everyday
needs of these roles. The consumer
of this data can then slice and dice the
information to reveal business insight
as needed. From a single user-friendly
analysis design panel, business users
can drag and drop data elements into
their Excel spreadsheet and use the
standard ribbons made popular by
Microsoft Office tools to perform
further analysis (see Figure).
The familiar environment and intuitive
functionality of SAP BusinessObjects
Analysis facilitate greater business-user
autonomy and help to contain training
and support costs. The end result is a
self-service data analysis solution that
puts greater power into the hands of
daily business users who need insight
now. This alleviates the business-user
training burden, eliminates dependency
on power users, and takes significant
demand off of IT engineers, who can
then refocus their energies on more
value-added activities. Ultimately, it also
leads to a high rate of user adoption.
Figure: Analysis Ribbons and Design Panel in Microsoft Excel
your central data source. In the end,
your users have more power to bring
data into their everyday work environ-
ment to improve decision making and
increase business performance.
Even for power users and IT staff
members, one of the most commonly
cited complaints about traditional
BI tools is poor performance. SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis changes this
equation thanks to tight integration with
SAP in-memory acceleration technolo-
gies such as SAP NetWeaver Business
Warehouse Accelerator and SAP
High-Performance Analytic Appliance
software. These technologies allow
immediate response times regardless
of data volume, making the user
experience for SAP BusinessObjects
Analysis far more satisfactory.
Benefits Today, Benefits Tomorrow
A significant advantage to adopting
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis is
that it lays the groundwork for ongoing
benefits as you proceed along the
business intelligence maturity curve.
What’s more, SAP NetWeaver BW –
which you already use – remains your
business intelligence foundation. Over
time, as your organization grows more
and more accustomed to SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis, you can
move at your own pace to adopt other
solutions in the SAP BusinessObjects
solution portfolio. This helps you round
out your BI capabilities so that you can
apply more and more insight to improve
day-to-day decision making.
While SAP BusinessObjects Analysis
makes your future brighter, it also deliv-
ers tangible business benefits in the
here and now. For lines of business, it
supports better business monitoring
and reveals insights that allow workers
on the front lines to make informed
decisions that align with corporate
strategy. For IT, it supports greater
user satisfaction and enterprise-wide
adoption through self-service features
that empower business users while
alleviating demand on IT staff.
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis delivers
benefits for the business as a whole as
well. It minimizes ramp-up costs by
reusing existing business intelligence
content and helps to improve the pro-
ductivity of Microsoft Office users by
embedding BI functionality directly into
the tools they use. Its light footprint,
furthermore, helps ensure a stream-
lined implementation that mitigates risk.
In the end, you’ll be able to optimize
your TCO for your business intelligence
environment while enjoying a high ROI
as your business users extract greater
value from the software and more
insight from your business data.
Find out More
To learn more about how SAP
BusinessObjects Analysis can help
your organization improve business
performance by gaining better insight
into business data, call your SAP
representative today or visit us online
at www.sap.com/solutions
/sapbusinessobjects/large/business
-intelligence/advanced-analytics
/index.epx.
In a familiar environ-
ment, your workers
can perform analysis
using intuitive drag-and-
drop features to unlock
insights into untold
volumes of data, with
results returned
instantaneously.
QUICK FACTS
www.sap.com/contactsap
50 102 275 (10/10)
©2010 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign,
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and other SAP products and services
mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or
registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.
Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects,
Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius,
and other Business Objects products and services mentioned
herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Business Objects Software Ltd. in the United States
and in other countries.
All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of
their respective companies. Data contained in this document serves
informational purposes only. National product speci?cations may vary.
These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials
are provided by SAP AG and its a?liated companies (“SAP Group”)
for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of
any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with
respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products
and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty
statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing
herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
Summary
SAP® BusinessObjects™ Analysis software, edition for Microsoft Office, is a next-
generation business intelligence (BI) solution that provides Microsoft Office users with
intuitive functionality for powerful multidimensional analysis. It fits without disruption into
your existing SAP software environment so you can smoothly transition from SAP Business
Explorer (SAP BEx) tools to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions.
Business Challenges
• Deliver timely business intelligence to all users enterprise-wide
• Enable business analysts to make informed decisions based on solid data
Key Features
• Content reuse – Provide users of SAP BEx with existing cubes developed for the
SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component and queries
developed with SAP BEx
• Analysis panel – Empower users to quickly filter, slice, dice, and drill down into data to
uncover business insights
• Familiar user experience – Equip users to access analytical functions with
Microsoft Office ribbons
• Application programming interface – Build pervasive, Excel-based BI applications
with more flexibility and programmatic control
• Live Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with embedded analysis – Present visuals
with up-to-date information directly refreshed from SAP NetWeaver BW
• High performance – Boost the power of Microsoft Excel to uncover insights immediately
regardless of data volume through in-memory acceleration
Business Bene?ts
• Quick ramp-up thanks to a light footprint and reuse of existing data sets
• Higher productivity by embedding analysis into familiar Microsoft Office tools
• Improved decision making and lower business risk by delivering business intelligence
to end users to provide business insight on a daily basis
• Lower training and IT support costs due to intuitive functionality and increased
business-user autonomy
• Rapid ROI and lower total cost of ownership with analysis tools that leverage your
existing SAP and Microsoft Office software
For More Information
Call your SAP representative, or visit
www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/business-intelligence
/advanced-analytics/index.epx.
doc_383073388.pdf