Many organizations rely on SAP systems to run their business. Yet, when it comes to reporting and gaining business intelligence (BI), SAP users like yourself have some serious issues. Although SAP systems provide their own reports, those reports fulfill only a portion of your needs. Furthermore, your organization probably has other key sources of data outside SAP. Finally, setting up reporting in SAP is too complicated for most users and, in many cases, requires help from IT.

Your organization has invested heavily in SAP, but needs a faster, better way to provide reporting to a wider cross-section of your user base. Ideally, you want a self-service portal so end users can request or assemble reports on the fly from SAP and other enterprise sources – without needing to know Excel or relying on the services of IT.

This release of WebFOCUS has major enhancements to accommodate the complex nature of BW hierarchies that are now automatically described using a parent/child relationship within the WebFOCUS metadata layer. Controlling which levels and members of a hierarchy you need on a report is a snap. We have made our developer tool more intelligent as it will guide and enforce specific SAP BW reporting rules upon the user before a report is submitted. The end user experience is greatly improved.

In turn, WebFOCUS provides a much simpler alternative to SAP's Business Explorer (BEX) reporting interface, which relies on a spreadsheet interface to populate and present reports, plus HTML, ABAP, and JavaScript programming to arrange them on a Web page if you are looking for sophisticated self-service applications. Instead, WebFOCUS provides more intuitive wizards for populating reports and pre-built HTML Web page templates on which you can layout the report. If your organization already uses SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) for reporting, we have also dramatically simplified the process of bringing non-SAP data into the warehouse. Rather than relying on IT to write complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) routines, WebFOCUS provides a simple Match wizard that lets you join external data sources dynamically.

Looking forward, SAP will be exposing its core application through hundreds of Web services as part of its Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA). With ESA, your organization will have the flexibility to orchestrate SAP processes with external services from both inside and outside your organization. For instance, you could orchestrate a procurement from SAP with a logistics service, perhaps to choose a freight carrier and a weather update, or to help choose routings.

When SAP rolls out services as part of ESA, will you be ready? Thanks to the WebFOCUS Web Services Adapter, you will be able to consume the service as if it were just another data source.

As the heartbeat of your enterprise, SAP plays a pivotal role in helping your organization run its business. Yet, while enterprise systems like SAP are highly efficient for processing routine transactions, the business of generating reports and BI analyses has traditionally required the services of IT or an elite cadre of business analysts to derive any value.

In today's highly dynamic economy, your organization requires a solution that lowers the barriers and the costs of BI and reporting. WebFOCUS is the solution that can help your organization unlock the potential of your SAP system.

You don't have to read the headlines to understand the volatility in oil pricing. In highly turbulent markets, petrochemical suppliers are often caught in the middle, between the rising commodity process and the mix of short- and long-term contracts, as well as pricing promotions that they have with retailers. While SAP was designed to process transactions, it was never designed for the kind of constant decision support required by enterprises competing in sectors where the ground rules change daily.

A large petrochemical firm has relied on WebFOCUS to make their strategic and operational decisions smarter. Is the company profiting from current delivery contracts, and are inventories properly balanced to meet fluctuating supply and demand? The company uses WebFOCUS to generate the kind of daily, weekly, and monthly profit/loss reports for which SAP was never designed. Using WebFOCUS, managers can view trends while drilling down on specific line-item budget data. This capability empowers them to glean information such as the impact of specific promotions on sales or the profitability of certain contracts.

In a constantly changing market, one thing remains the same: WebFOCUS provides the best of both worlds – easy access to critical details and the big picture alike.

Etta Levine is editorial director for Information Builders' Insights and editor in chief of Information Builders Magazine.

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