Reporting in Business Warehouse vs R/3

There is often a debate on what reporting requirements can be taken

care of in SAP R/3 and which ones are better suited for Business Warehouse. Both have their strengths for different types of

requirements. Here are two lists of requirements that are better met in either of these two platforms!

The following

information requirements generally better met in BW:

- Performance-intensive requirements - If performance problems will

likely occur on the R/3 system (i.e. reading Line Items, many Orders, etc.), most likely from a high volume of data, BW may

be the best option.
NOTE: BW is great for summarizing many line items for a report, but not necessarily for providing all

the detail in a line item.
- Summary-level information is required.
- Cross-modular information is required.
- Cross-

system information is required (i.e. from R/3 and another system)
- Standard R/3 report does not exist or is

unacceptable.
- Information is already available in BW and requirement can be met without additional data extraction.
-

Several similar requirements can be met in BW with the same data.

The following information requirements generally

better met in R/3:

- Detail information is required, such as document or line item information
- Standard report exists

and works well (i.e. performance is acceptable; output format is acceptable, etc.)
- Information is required daily or real-

time
- Only a single report is required (i.e. no ad hoc analysis). Underlying data is not used to meet other requirements.

Technorati Profile