SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence

SAP is publishing its set of products, method, documentation and preconfiguration, to allow customers better and easily evaluate, implement, enhance and use its software. Usually Best Practices (BP) can be used in projects across all project phases. Basic information about BP can be found at address: help.sap.com/bestpractices. Moreover there is BP related to BW as well. You can find them structured under Cross-Industry Packages -> Business Intelligence down to the link provided above. There are two flavors of those BP:

•    SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence (based on SAP BusinessObjects)
•    SAP Best Practices for Business Warehousing (based on SAP NetWeaver)

- update 18.3.2013 – as links were changed, here’s new ones:

• SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence (based on SAP BusinessObjects)
• Unfortunately no BW or NetWeaver based version available anymore, refer to service.sap.com/bestpractices

In rest of my today’s post I focus only at BW part of this BP. Current the newest version is 3.70 published on March 2009. Two language versions are available: German apart of English. BP is comprised of four sections:

•    BW specific information – documents and accelerator for BW projects (BW overview, brochures, functions in details, BW projects plans, roles on BW projects, Sizing, Multi-Dimensional Modeling, archiving, authorizations, web reports enabling, translating BW objects, reporting user guide, …)

•    Business Blueprint – so called Solution Scope document provides overview of scenario-based business processes covered by BP.

•    Preconfigured Scenarios – for several areas like: Financials (Financial Accounting Analysis, Controlling Analysis, CO-PA Analysis, Cost Center Planning, Reporting Financials), CRM (Sales Analysis, Cross-Functional Analysis: Financial and Sales Data, Booking Billing Backlog Analysis, Sales Planning, Scheduling Agreements Analysis, CRM Analytics), SCM (Purchasing Analysis, Manufacturing Analysis, Inventory Analysis, Demand Planning Analysis, Resource and Operation Data Analysis), PLM (Project System - Controlling and Dates), Human Capital Management (Cross-Application Time Sheet, Time Management - Time and Labor, Personnel Development – Qualifications, Travel Management - Travel Expenses, …).

•    Demo & Evaluation - SAP Tutor Player files with some of above mentioned scenarios.

•    BW Accelerator – technical information plus building blocks about BW Accelerator Index and Server.

 

Usually BP comes with two DVDs: documentation and configuration. BW BP are shipped with documentation DVD; but no configuration DVD.