The Power of BW - My Experience

[former_member186399]

I would like to Share one of my experience where I felt BW can do wonders and can bring value to the customer. The below views are my personal view.

During one of the BW training session to the end user, I got a very strange question to answer. In my presentation I had covered all the major reports and all the navigational functionality of the reports.  Users were all happy and for the first time users it was a block buster movie. But this question was different from the normal lots. The question was “How can I know the reason why my Orders gave gone down for a particular customer and how these reports are going to help me to increase my efficiency". (My immediate thoughts was:  Do you expect the report to tell you that, you should be knowing it anyway  :razz: )

It took me some time to absorb the question and I had only one submission to make and that was these report can tell you where you are now , whether you are in track or not , but these report cannot answer why you are here.

After a few months I got a requirement of a new report on COPQ (Cost of poor quality). The specification was huge one and it covered all the aspects of
business wherever there was a possibility of incurring cost of poor quality. After a lot of deliberation & discussion a workable specification was finalized with business . It was impossible to capture all of parameters through the system. As the famous words of Albert Einstein goes “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.

As the specification was cutting across different modules it had to be done in BW. This was the time I realized that BW analytics can do wonders. I could relate to the question that was previously asked to me on how reports can increase efficiency. During the development of this report I learnt BW can not only provide you with the analysis of what has happened but also can provide you with the indication of what has gone wrong. Of course there can be hundreds of reasons for that, but you can still provide these information using data which is already available in the system in a very readable format.

Let me explain to you with an example. If you are Sales manager and you see a downward trend of orders for a particular customer what will you expect the report to provide you. Firstly may be last 2 years trends of how the customer has placed orders and then may be whether we are able to provide the customer material on time or not (On time delivery analysis), who are my sales responsible for this customer, how many rejections or returns do we have from the that customer, how many times we have cancelled the invoices, are my receivables been taken care of and the list goes on. These data are available in the system in one or the other form. We only have to pick it up and present it in the right way.

Why BW?

The main reason why BW is needed is that only BW can bring in all these information together spread across different modules and hold it at one place.  Performance and easy navigation is the other reason. BW can provide the top to bottom analysis for KPI and this can be easily done through several method , some of them mentioned below

1. Web Application Designer – You can select a customer through filter pane or drop down box. Analysis can be kept in different tab for each of the KPI.
2. RRI – Report to Report Interphase is a good option if the user wants to drill down one report to another
3. APD - There can be calculations which you will have to do on monthly basis or which will be difficult to calculate on run time
4. Dashboards – Of course if Business Objects tools are used data can be represented more vibrantly.

With right functional specification, modeling and report designing BW can add more value to the business. It can highlight the pain areas using the transaction data and give right direction to the business.

This has been one of my experience with BW where I realized  what a wonder tool  BW is. I would like to know your experience where you felt the same. Please share as your comments

Best Regards

Gajesh