Organisations embrace BI solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects Portfolio to provide business insight and scale with demand

Organisations embrace BI solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects Portfolio to provide business insight and scale with demand

SAP is highlighting how its business intelligence (BI) software, acquired with BusinessObjects in 2007 and Crystal Decisions in 2003, is driving greater levels of insight for small to midsized businesses (SMBs).

“SAP provides a broad set of BI solutions that help small and midsize companies tackle information overload, while offering pricing and packaging that addresses the particular needs of this market,” said Wayne Eckerson, director of research at The Data Warehousing Institute. “These customers need a solution they can easily customise, implement and manage, while providing immediate value to business users.”

SAP provides a range of on-premise and on-demand BI solutions for data access, retrieval, exploration, management and visualisation. The vendor said all of these products are specifically designed for SMBs, and are also adopted increasingly by departments and individuals within larger companies.

Gaining an edge with BI

For home fashion and furnishing retailer Anna’s Linens, BI solutions from SAP have helped in the company’s transition from a regional to a national company. The company is using SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software, which provides a full suite of exploration, dash-boarding, reporting and analysis tools, as well as information management solutions that unify data from multiple sources and help ensure that data is reliable and accurate. It is also using SAP Crystal solutions, which SAP said empowers business people to view, create and share interactive dashboards and reports.

“Our management team realised our success depended on visibility into our business to make sure we were on track with our strategic plan,” said Scott Gladstone, chief operating officer, Anna’s Linens. “SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI and SAP Crystal solutions have enabled us to benchmark and measure performance so that the company can see how well we perform against our goals and key initiatives.

“Now we’ve been able to combine data so managers can better understand KPIs [key performance indicators] like inventory productivity and gross margin return on investment. Company executives receive the same information in a dashboard format, so they can quickly and easily see a snapshot of the status of the business. With BI solutions from SAP, our management can drill down to see where opportunities exist and analyse what is happening at 260 locations quickly. All of this helps us make better decisions to drive our continued growth.”