The reporting, analysis, and interpretation of business data is of central importance to a company in guaranteeing its competitive edge, optimizing processes, and enabling it to react quickly and in line with the market.  As a core component of SAP NetWeaver, the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) provides data warehousing functionality, a business intelligence platform, and a suite of business intelligence tools that enable businesses to attain these goals. Relevant business information from productive SAP applications and all external data sources can be integrated, transformed, and consolidated in SAP BW with the toolset provided. SAP BW provides flexible reporting and analysis tools to support you in evaluating and interpreting data, as well as facilitating its distribution. Businesses are able to make well-founded decisions and determine target-orientated activities on the basis of this analysis.

You can create your own list of Matchcodes for a specific field instead of searching through the entire list of Matchcode values every time you enter the field. To find out more, see Advanced Topics & Tips: Creating a Personal Matchcode List.

Network Design is a planning application for making tactical and strategic supply chain decisions. With this tool, strategic logistics planners and supply chain managers can model and redesign the supply chain by performing cost evaluations of locations, what-if analysis of current territorial divisions, transportation network analysis, and positioning of locations such as distribution centers. Functionality ranges from the determination of optimal sourcing or shipping patterns to the evaluation of proposed supply chain network changes such as the closing or opening of locations. Key functions include what-if analysis for finding the best network solution and for evaluating the benefits of any changes. Another important function is the option to perform simulations with different demand and supply patterns or with different cost or capacity constraints. The tool also enables planners to determine how much capacity is necessary to create an optimal network for the forecasted demand situation.

n 1972, five systems analysts began working nights and weekends to create standard software with realtime data processing. Twenty-five years later their vision is a reality: SAP is the world’s market and technology leader in business application software.

On April 1, 1972 five former IBM employees founded SAP as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung (“Systems Analysis and Program Development”) in Mannheim, Germany. Their vision was to develop and market standard enterprise software which would integrate all business processes. The idea came to them through their work as systems consultants for IBM when they noticed that client after client was developing the same, or very similar, computer programs. The second part of their vision was that data should be processed interactively in realtime, and the computer screen should become the focal point of data processing.

SAP Business Intelligence (SAP BI) provides a complete view of the company. The solution, which is part of SAP NetWeaver, provides the tools needed to make the right decisions, optimize processes, and measure strategic success: data from all enterprise sources are merged effectively and can be comprehensively analyzed, business-critical factors can be monitored using external and internal benchmarks, the most important KPIs can be passed on to all the relevant forces in a company in real time, strategies can be rapidly adapted to changed market conditions, and the results of analyses can be graphically represented in a wide variety of formats, such as grids, graphs, and maps