Analysis of BW support navigation facilities integrated to BW 3.0
OLAP BAPI: SAP BW 3.0 comes with the OLAP BAPI Interface (OBI) which provides functions that can be used by third party reporting tools to access BW Info cubes. It provides an open interface to access any information that is available through OLAP engine.
Integrating with XML: OLAP BAPI serves as the basis for the SAP implementation of XML for analysis. It is an XML API based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) designed for standardized access to an analytical data provider over the web. The XML interface introduced with SAP BW 3.0 release accepts XML data streams compliant with the SOAP. Unlike all other SAP BW interfaces in XML interface the actual data transfer is initiated by the source system.
Open Hub Services: The Open Hub Service allows controlled distribution of consistent data from any SAP BW InfoProvider to flat files, database tables and other applications with full support for delta management, selections, projections and aggregation. Open Hub Services have InfoSpokes as their core metadata objects. With the SAP 3.0 release InfoSpokes have become generally available.
Content Management Framework: The SAP Web Content Management Server stores unstructured information that users can go through and use efficiently. Integration with the SAP BW content management framework provides an integrated view on structured and unstructured information to the end user.
Conclusion
With the growing network of processes and systems, the need for efficient management support systems is also increasing. However for this it is not enough to place a company strategically and give guidelines for its further development. Instead it is essential to have real time analysis and graphical visualization of the key performance indicators. In SAP BW automatic assimilation and analysis of information is possible. BW gives a holistic view of the company by considering both the financial data and non- financial assets of the company. As corporate planning is often not done in one common planning tool (e.g. turnover plan in a sales system and cost center plan in excel) studying interdependencies and coordination among them has become even more tedious. Thus the strategic management system must establish a planning process through all levels of planning in the company to make the data available for all responsible persons in one system. With SAP BW it is possible to upload data of different planning tools, manipulate planning data and write back changed data to the operational system. SAP BW can also be used as early warning system to inform the responsible persons about critical indicators on the basis of already defined thresholds of these indicators.
Outlook
SAP BW has the usual data warehouse layers accompanied by administrative services through the Administrative Workbench. It allows exchange of data and metadata with other systems and tools in the case of SAP-specific interfaces like Staging BAPI and the OLAP BAPI and supports other industry standard interfaces allowing easy access to data and metadata maintained in SAP. Also, the metadata objects that are available in SAP BW are used to build Operational data stores, data warehouses and info marts. Thus, the services provided by SAP with SAP BW makes it a major tool for complete corporate information and strategy management.
