BI is a strategic and reporting tool with sets of methodologies and processes for transforming data into meaningful insights, such as sales reports, slice and dice finance reports, and predictive analysis, to support decision making.

Some of the benefits are as follows:

• Decreased query and reporting time
• Identifying and track key performance metrics against their direct competitors and the overall market
• It is fast at providing reports, performing analysis, and planning
• It helps you make better business decisions
• It directly helps to reduce costs, which leads to higher revenue for an organization

The SAP BusinessObjects BI platform provides an enterprise BI with systems that are scalable, flexible, and adaptive. They have a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows us to deploy and standardize SAP BusinessObjects BI implementations. SAP offers both...

SAP BusinessObject BI platform 4.2 is a reporting and analytics platform that targets business users. It is an innovation platform that simplifies, enhances, and extends the capabilities of BI. It consists of a number of reporting applications with which a user can discover data, create applications and dashboards, and perform analytics to derive business insights. The platform ensures increased responsiveness, reduced costs and workload, and helps organizations to make better decisions.

We need to understand the various tools available in SAP BusinessObject 4.2 to perform reporting. There are multiple management tools, platform services, and client tools in SAP BusinessObjects 4.2 that support the entire range of user reporting, queries, analysis, and performance management.

Some of the salient features of the SAP BI platform are as follows...

There are many data source options for SAP BusinessObjects 4.2. You can get data for reporting from nearly all possible real-world sources. In the following diagram, there is a typical scenario for data sources for SAP BusinessObjects 4.2:

In this book, we will focus on the following important data sources:

• SAP HANA
• SAP Business Warehouse (BW)
• SAP BusinessObjects Universe
• Files

A semantic layer in SAP BusinessObjects BI enables the following:

• A single user experience across all data
• Consistency
• Ease of consumption by applications and tools
• Business user, who is self-sufficient

You can again use the sample data from eFashion that we have downloaded earlier. We will refer the dataset from eFashion, you can choose cube of your own that is available in your system:

1. Start BEx Query Designer and connect to the SAP BW system when asked to provide login credentials.
2. Create a new BEx Query using the Info Provider eFashion cube. Move the characteristic store (technical name = EF_STORE) to the Rows section.
3. Use the basic key figures, amount sold (EFAMTSOLD) and quantity sold (QTY_SOLD), in the Columns section.
4. Save the query in the role folder.
5. Execute the query in the BEx Web Analyzer to view the data and see if it is correct.
6. Make the necessary changes in the BEx query definition to enable users of your report.
7. To select the data related to specific countries states (EF_STATE). Save the query and...

Files, although normally not the optimal choice, can be used to directly feed the reporting tools and Universes. Most reporting tools can directly access file sources, such as CSV and XLS file types. In addition, Universes can get data from files and then feed the reporting tool indirectly.

We have seen many customers use this option in combination with other data sources (such as DW, SAP HANA). A typical use cases is reading the actual sales figures from data mart, whereas the target values are read from spreadsheets.

With this chapter, we laid the foundations for the book. The intention was to quickly go through the basic concepts and refresh users who are already familiar with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2. By now, we should have learned the basics of BusinessObjects 4.2 and the different tools available to use in a business scenario. We also learned how to access various data sources with and without a SAP BusinessObject Universe. We will use these data sources, connections, and business layers in the upcoming chapters.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to create a basic workbook with SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Microsoft Office, followed by creating a presentation using BusinessObjects Analysis for Microsoft PowerPoint.