Chapter 3: Comparing SAP BW with Data Warehouse Solutions Provided by Other Vendors | Business Information Warehouse for SAP (Prima Techs SAP Book Series)

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Cultural Impact of ERP Data Warehousing

Organizations that have implemented an ERP application or are in the process of implementing an ERP packaged application have found that these applications force a change in traditional business organization. In a traditional organization, for example, a vice president of finance owns financial applications and has full control over how financial applications are to be managed and configured. The vice president of manufacturing is the sole owner of manufacturing applications and data. The only link between financial and manufacturing applications is via flat-file data feed exchanged via batch processes. This practice creates stovepipe IT cultures with very little knowledge of enterprise integrated business processes.

Today, the key to a successful business is business process integration. Due to heavy emphasis on integrated business functions, ERP packages force organizations to share information and integrate business processes. For this very reason, when an ERP system is implemented, the vice president of finance is now forced to work closely with the vice president of manufacturing, and vice versa. Both lose full control on their part of the business, and they lose full control of their own application functions. Now they have to work as a team or as partners, each thinking how any change in business rule or data content in his or her area will affect other areas. ERP solutions require changes in corporate culture to force and create team-centric organizations to eliminate stovepipe culture.

Data Warehouse and OLTP Teams

ERP data warehousing adds additional cultural changes in the Information Technology (IT) organization. Culturally speaking, there are two breeds of people in the IT business: those who build and manage OLTP applications, and those who build and manage data warehouses. Traditionally, these two types have not worked together. The only interface between these two camps has been limited to flat file design and actual data extracts. ERP data warehousing is forcing the OLTP and data warehousing groups to work together for the first time. This involves drastic cultural changes between the traditional OLTP and data warehousing people and between the ERP OLTP and ERP data warehousing people.

Caution

SAP R/3 application developers and solution implementers need to understand data warehousing concepts to design SAP BW data objects and analytical applications. Without data warehousing knowledge, the SAP R/3 application developer and consultant will implement SAP BW very much like data marts or functional reporting systems mimicking SAP R/3 OLTP reporting systems.

Data Warehouse Industry Analysts and Consulting Services Providers

Initially, SAP struggled in the data warehousing industry to position SAP BW as a viable business intelligence solution. The main reason was the company name itself. Even today, when people talk about SAP, right away people think of R/3. When SAP started to discuss its SAP BW products with industry data warehouse analysts, it took a long time before industry analysts started to write about SAP BW. This is because SAP analysts were not quite "data-warehouse-aware," and at the same time, data warehouse analysts were not "ERP-aware." For this very reason, most SAP BW knowledge still remains within the SAP-oriented culture.

Today, several consulting firms offer SAP BW services. Most consultants in such organizations have an SAP R/3 background. They will definitely help jump-start your BW project from an R/3 infrastructure perspective. But make sure that they include non-SAP R/3 data warehousing experts on the team; these experts will leverage SAP BW capabilities to deliver corporate-wide business intelligence architecture and solutions instead of functional reporting data marts.

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