Business Requirements

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Collecting business and end-user requirements for a data warehouse is a big challenge. Chapter 4 of The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit covers this subject in great length. The ASAP methodology for SAP BW provides several templates and guidelines to collect user requirements.

For an SAP BW project perspective, SAP R/3 business subject analysts and SAP BW business content experts need to interview business executives, analysts, and end users to understand and identify their needs and how they want to benchmark business performance.

First, find out how end users do data analysis today. What methods do they use to access information? How do they process and work with the information? What is the outcome of their data analysis? Do they simply print, mail, or download in XLS on their workstations? Often, it is much easier to start with a clean slate. Define new performance measurements and metrics. Look at the business drivers and company strategic directions, and define new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Today, business performance is based on an individual business process. Is this the best way to assess overall business performance? The answer to this question is no. For example, the manufacturing process performance is measured based on whether a product is manufactured on time. However, if that product is not shipped or received by the customer at the promised time, the customer satisfaction performance indicator goes down. Here, logistics and manufacturing organizations need to work closely to define new KPIs that span manufacturing and logistics organizations and their business processes. This cross-business process KPI helps business grow.

SAP BW consists of several KPIs, and this list is growing. Take a closer look at how such KPIs are calculated. Verify if these KPI calculations meet your business rules. If they do not, either enhance such KPIs or define new ones.

Business and data warehouse analysts must understand data requirements, data sources, and granularity of data needs to meet end-user requirements. Understand how and where data analysis will be performed by the end users. This helps drive the SAP BW deployment model that is in synch with the business process model. Understanding the corporate data sensitivity issues helps define user profiles in SAP BW that address end-user data access/security concerns.


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Business Information Warehouse for SAP
Business Information Warehouse for SAP (Prima Techs SAP Book Series)
ISBN: 0761523359
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1999
Pages: 174
Authors: Naeem Hashmi

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