SAP SCM: Applications and Modeling for Supply Chain Management (with BW Primer)

Chapter 11. BW Primer Part II

Not Just a Data Warehouse: Reengineering ERP

We began our discussion of BW and its place in SAP SCM and APO in Chapter 6 with an examination of it as the master data analytical object foundation of the APO tool. This is one manifestation of BW and an important one, but BW is much more than that. BW is SAP’s wider data warehouse and reporting/analytics solution. We have seen that it comes off the shelf in a data mart form with SAP SCM as well as in an individual enterprise data warehouse package, separate from any other tool. In fact, BW is also available as a data mart in two other SAP products: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM). As of 2003, BW was reported to be in 6,500 deployments worldwide, positioning it as a leading data warehouse and analytical solution product.

BW is applied to support all SCM planning functions of APO with a data warehouse archive and advanced analytics and reporting tools that incorporate Microsoft Excel.

Figure 11.1. BW in the Supply Chain Context

As a data warehouse, BW has a number of benefits for organizations with other SAP products in use for either transactional management, such as R/3, or decision support, such as APO. SAP-provided data extractors are widely available to port data into BW without cumbersome, custom interface development. Furthermore, as a combined data warehouse ...