Purpose
The reporting, analysis, and interpretation of business data is of central importance to a company in guaranteeing its competitive edge, optimizing processes, and enabling it to react quickly and in line with the market. With Business Intelligence (BI), SAP NetWeaver provides data warehousing functionality, a business intelligence platform, and a suite of business intelligence tools with which an enterprise can attain these goals. Relevant business information from productive SAP applications and all external data sources can be integrated, transformed, and consolidated in BI with the toolset provided. BI provides flexible reporting, analysis, and planning tools to support you in evaluating and interpreting data, as well as facilitating its distribution. Businesses are able to make well-founded decisions and determine target-orientated activities on the basis of this analysis.
Integration with Other SAP NetWeaver Components
BEx Information Broadcasting allows you to publish precalculated documents or online links containing business intelligence content to the portal. The Business Explorer portal role illustrates the various options that are available to you when working with content from BI in the portal. For more information, see Information Broadcasting.
The BEx Broadcaster, the BEx Web Application Designer, the BEx Query Designer, KM Content, SAP Role Uploads, and the Portal Content Studio are used to integrate BI contents into the portal. For more information, see Integrating BI Content into the Portal.
The documents and metadata created in BI (metadata documentation in particular) can be integrated using the repository manager in knowledge management. The BI Metadata Repository Manager is used within BEx Information Broadcasting. For more information, see BI Document Repository Manager and BI Metadata Repository Manager.
You can use SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (SAP NetWeaver XI) to send data from SAP and non-SAP sources to BI. In BI, the data is placed in the delta queue where it is available for further integration and consolidation. Data transfer using SAP NetWeaver XI is SOAP-based. For more information, see Data Transfer Using SAP XI.
Integration with BI Content Add-On
With BI Content, SAP delivers preconfigured role and task-based information models and reporting scenarios for BI that are based on consistent metadata. BI Content provides selected roles within a company with the information they need to carry out their tasks. The information models delivered cover all business areas and integrate content from almost all SAP and selected external applications. For more information, see BI Content.