Life After ERP

by Bernd Kosnar and Tonny Dierckx

Your ERP system is in place. Now it's time for intelligence.

As a member of the SAP Software Partner Program, SAS receives a lot of queries from companies that want to use business intelligence to help them report, measure, plan or predict the business future based on the data from their SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. So we asked two experts to look at some commonly asked questions concerning ways that SAS and SAP cooperate. Bernd Kosnar is a technology strategist and Tonny Dierckx is the director of intelligence architecture, both for SAS International in Heidelberg.

What is the relationship between SAS and SAP, and how do you work together?

Bernd Kosnar: SAS is an established SAP Software partner with several SAP certified interfaces. While SAP is strong in transactional systems, SAS complements this offering by delivering an integrated environment with both the business intelligence (BI) and analytic intelligence required for fact-based decision making. This helps an organization that has implemented SAP to know more than just where it has been, but where it should go next.

My company is considering BI options for use on top of our SAP ERP system. What is the most important strategic issue we should consider?

Tonny Dierckx: First of all, you should define your BI strategy: You probably selected SAP, PeopleSoft and/or Siebel for your ERP strategy; Oracle or DB2 for your transactional data storage strategy; Microsoft Office as your desktop productivity strategy. BI deserves its own strategic choice because it is totally different than ERP, transactional data storage and desktop productivity. Although SAP can store data, you use Oracle or DB2; although SAP can make simple graphics, you use MS Excel. Why should you use SAP for business intelligence?

Then what are the criteria for choosing a BI strategy?

Dierckx: Similar to your choice of SAP to integrate several business processes, all BI processes – ETL[extraction, transformation and loading]; intelligent storage; businessand analytic intelligence– should be designed to work seamlessly together and share metadata. This cannot be accomplished by separate products that might come together from mergers or alliances.

Specifically, how does SAS work with SAP?

Kosnar: The SAS Intelligence Platformprovides all components required for managing business data, processes and technology across your operations, through SAP-certified integration of SAS 9.1 with SAP NetWeaver. Via its range of open interfaces, SAS supports highly scalable, bidirectional exchange of data and metadata with any SAP system.

What is the biggest challenge in a typical BI project? And how can SAS help with that?

Dierckx: Getting to all your data in a timely and cost-efficient manner is a business-critical challenge. It is estimated that business intelligence projects waste 60 to 80 percent of project time on extracting, transforming and loading business data.

Kosnar: Specifically for SAP, the SAS Solutions Adapter for SAP provides the SAS solutions with the ETL capabilities to get to the proper SAP data hidden in a plenitude of tables, so you don't have to write any interface or code to connect to SAP. All preprocessing is performed to load the analytic models, so there is a seamless link between your operational SAP data and the SAS solutions.

This means you can focus on analyzing data, rather than finding ways to access it.

My company is rolling out a "master data management" project, but we are having serious data quality problems.

Dierckx: By using shared metadata – as SAS does – you don't have the problem of multiple versions of the truth.

Kosnar: To solve the data quality problems, SAS offers solutions to profile, cleanse and consolidate your data, ensuring that your business and analytic intelligence are in accordance with your high quality standards.

BI queries put strain on my transactional systems. How can I maintain performance and response times of my ERP and BI systems?

Dierckx: Many companies would simply throw more hardware at this problem. Our experience shows that BI – and, especially, analytic intelligence – requires appropriate "intelligent storage" to guarantee optimal flexibility for various analysis techniques and to provide acceptable response times, online and in batch.

Is there another way to save more time?

Dierckx: SAS allows you to reduce the time to develop management reports or implement KPIs by a factor of 3 to 10. That means that the same team can develop 3 to 10 times more applications for creating competitive advantage.

Can SAS also make my operational systems more effective?

Kosnar: SAS can feed information created in your BI and analytic intelligence environment back into operational systems, making it easy to bring operational systems up to date and benefit immediately from this acquired intelligence by applying it to your business processes in real time.

The bottom line?

Dierckx: The ability to react quickly to business needs, to leverage all existing data and to avoid creating a patchwork of various solutions are among the key objectives that should drive IT decisions today. The ERP capabilities of SAP and the business and analytic intelligence of SAS make a perfect combination, giving your enterprise all you need to go beyond BI.

Bio:

Bernd Kosnar is a technology strategist for SAS EMEA, managing products that integrate data from enterprise applications and other existing data sources into warehousing, analytic and statistical business solutions.

Tonny Dierckx is the director of intelligence architecture for SAS EMEA, responsible for helping IT executives define an intelligence architecture within their organizations.