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Author's profile photo Alexander Peter

What is the IT Scenario ‘Enterprise Data Warehousing’ about?

One of the major challenges Business Intelligence (BI) customers face today is the integration of different source systems in one Enterprise Data Warehouse landscape. Not only different heterogeneous technical platforms must be interfaced, but also different master and transaction data semantics must be consolidated. In addition, an Enterprise Data Warehouse must provide flexible structures and layers in order to adapt quickly to new business challenges (such as changed objectives, mergers, acquisitions, etc.) Beyond these designtime aspects, Enterprise Data Warehousing should facilitate the administration and monitoring of all processes (such as load processes, distribution of data etc.) and proactively help coping possible performance issues – especially regarding increasingly sophisticated data volume requirements.

The IT scenario Enterprise data warehousing (EDW) enables customers to create and operate a data warehouse in an enterprise-wide environment. It combines strategic analyses and operational reporting, enables the business to report real-time, integrates heterogeneous systems and facilitates designtime as well as runtime of BI models and processes.
EDW covers all steps an administrator requires to set up a highly flexible, reliable, robust and scalable BI solution and easily administrate it.

Scenario Variants:

  • Modeling the enterprise data warehouse
    Describes processes like data modeling, data acquisition, data cleansing/transformation, data distribution and meta data & document management.
  • Running the enterprise data warehouse
    Describes processes like controlling the data flow, administration and monitoring, performance optimization (including BI accelerator), information lifecycle management and user management (authorizations).

Here is a list of the most important new capabilities; for further information, please refer to the IT scenario overview:

  • BI accelerator
    Boosts query performance by orders of magnitude and cuts off administration costs
  • Admin Cockpit
    Provides overview on BI processes (data load and queries) at one glance
  • New data flow
    New data flow design capabilities such as transformation and DTP supply additional flexibility and performance
  • New analysis authorization concept
    The new authorizations concept provides additional flexibility and improves transparency
  • Real-time data acquisition
    Enables operational reporting by providing information in real-time

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      3 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Alejandro Jimenez
      Alejandro Jimenez
      The scenario you describe here is certainly the ideal for every organization, but in the real world we (the SAP service partners and SAP self) need to justify the return of the technical investment required to make this scenario a real thing. The cost of big hardware environments, consulting services, support resources and others need to be matched with the benefits in "better decisions", process optimizations, and other "not so easy to count in money" criteria.

      With the experience you or your team has cummulated, ¿can we know examples of real ROIs some organizations had obtained?

      Author's profile photo Alexander Peter
      Alexander Peter
      Blog Post Author
      This is a very interesting point. In addition to more general considerations (what is the ROI of an EDW?), SAP has focused on some key topics to get some basic consideratios concerning ROI. For example, the BI accelerator. This highly innovative technology leads to both highly satisfied end users (at least with respect to performance) and significant reduction of administration costs. For one specific customer case, we have evaluated savings of around $3,000,000 for initial hardware investments (BIA against high-end database server) and savings of yearly operation costs of about $800,000.
      Author's profile photo Arun Varadarajan
      Arun Varadarajan
      When we say EDW , the mindset is more towards modelling the business and not esentially model the business around the tool. This often leads to a lot of customization on what the tool has to give leading to a higher implementation cost which skews the ROI. Any company that stuck to the template and nothing else with no customization?