SAP has sought to human­ize (or per­haps even busi­ness-ize) its data ware­house solu­tion by delib­er­ate­ly not call­ing it a data warehouse.

Rather than nam­ing it SAP DW∕4HANA, the com­pa­ny used SAP BW∕4HANA, with the BW stand­ing for busi­ness ware­house. Pre­sum­ably this is meant to imply that it has rel­e­vance for dis­cus­sion around the board­room table by the entire C‑suite, which should now more active­ly take an inter­est in the data back­bone of its company.

But what is a data ware­house in the first place? And how does SAP’s take on a busi­ness ware­house dif­fer from a data ware­house? And most impor­tant­ly, why should it mat­ter to ASUG Mem­bers?

Data Ware­house 101

At its most basic, a data ware­house is one step beyond a data lake. If a data lake is a mas­sive repos­i­to­ry of what is often very raw and unstruc­tured data, a data ware­house applies more struc­ture to the data it holds, includ­ing some order­ing and dedu­pli­ca­tion work. 

A data ware­house has extract, trans­form, and load (ETL) func­tions. It can apply data inte­gra­tion func­tions and oth­er extend­ed lay­ers that allow it to feed busi­ness intel­li­gence (BI) engines. A data ware­house still has con­nec­tions to var­i­ous dis­parate data sources, data stores, and oth­er occa­sion­al­ly chaot­ic oper­a­tional systems.

A data ware­house has a ​“stag­ing” area where data is cleansed, dedu­pli­cat­ed, and ordered. It also has a ​“pre­sen­ta­tion” area where data is ware­housed. Data ware­hous­es can be aligned to feed data marts, which are small­er and more spe­cial­ized sys­tems of data that sit as decen­tral­ized units to serve spe­cif­ic busi­ness groups in an organization.

Busi­ness Ware­house 101

If a data ware­house feeds on data sources, then one of those data sources could (and prob­a­bly should) be the company’s ERP sys­tem. There­in lies the con­nec­tion and the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for SAP label­ing its data ware­house as it has. For the record, the oth­er data sources that a data ware­house might feed upon include CRM sys­tems (again SAP), finan­cial appli­ca­tions (very much in SAP ter­ri­to­ry), and the pletho­ra of data like­ly held in dis­parate Microsoft Excel files around the organization.

Run­ning at the Speed of HANA

SAP explains SAP BW∕4HANA as a data ware­house solu­tion that’s high­ly opti­mized for the SAP HANA plat­form. SAP has con­struct­ed pre­fab­ri­cat­ed tem­plates for build­ing a data ware­house in a stan­dard­ized way.

It’s impor­tant to note that you need to be on SAP HANA in order to take advan­tage of SAP BW/4HANA. The SAP HANA plat­form gives you access to the ben­e­fits we all hear about, includ­ing an in-mem­o­ry data­base, which means faster data extrac­tion, eas­i­er paths to automa­tion like robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA), and the abil­i­ty to build reports and dash­boards with much more speed and agility.

In much the same way as SAP has worked to show­case tem­plate-based pre­fab­ri­cat­ed build­ing blocks in SAP Leonar­do, SAP has car­ried for­ward some of that DNA into the data ware­house world by engi­neer­ing a quick­er fit to proven use cases.

The Evo­lu­tion of SAP BW/4HANA

When it was first intro­duced in 2016, SAP BW/4HANA was tout­ed as the next-gen­er­a­tion data ware­house, built on the inno­va­tions of SAP Busi­ness Ware­house (BW) and pow­ered by SAP HANA. Over the next two years, SAP intro­duced enhance­ments includ­ing data tier­ing opti­miza­tion, ana­lyt­i­cal engine improve­ments, and a uni­fied user inter­face (UI).

In its newest iter­a­tion, SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 is tout­ed as SAP’s vision for a mod­ern pack­aged data ware­hous­ing solu­tion that offers smart inte­gra­tion of all busi­ness appli­ca­tions and mod­ern data sources.

The most impor­tant upgrades include cloud con­nec­tiv­i­ty, SAP Data Hub inte­gra­tion, the SAP BW/4HANA Cock­pit which offers enhanced admin­is­tra­tion in the web, and the SAP Data Pro­tec­tion Workbench.

The Sim­pli­fi­ca­tion Factor

So why would ASUG Mem­bers care? To start, a high­ly sim­pli­fied data ware­house offers reduced data lay­ers and a con­sol­i­da­tion of mod­el­ing objects, which ulti­mate­ly pow­ers much high­er agili­ty when it comes to busi­ness process changes and new busi­ness requirements.

SAP HANA’s sim­pli­fied data­base also offers speed. An attendee of one of our BI+Analytics Exec­u­tive Cir­cle round­ta­bles not­ed, ​“We did an evo­lu­tion, not a rev­o­lu­tion. We point­ed the new reports to SQL to the data that they were used to, that they had trust­ed for years. Then as we did that, we shift­ed the stored pro­ce­dures off SQL into SAP HANA, and at that point they noticed the dif­fer­ence. What used to take us a day to refresh reports at month-end close was now tak­ing less than an hour. I’m talk­ing mil­lions of rows of data.”

SAP BW/4HANA is open to SAP and non-SAP sys­tems via the SAP HANA EIM inte­gra­tion. This offers pre­de­fined adapters and flex­i­ble access meth­ods like vir­tu­al­iza­tion, real-time repli­ca­tion, or an auto­mat­ed switch between these methods.

SAP plans to con­tin­ue the evo­lu­tion of sim­plic­i­ty, start­ing with Project Blue­ber­ry, a soft­ware as a ser­vice data­base that inte­grates with SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud and pro­vides a seam­less user expe­ri­ence with the inter­face. The SaaS pro­vides an out-of-the-box inte­gra­tion with both SAP and non-SAP sys­tems. SAP also plans on automat­ing data tier­ing opti­miza­tion based on rules and sta­tis­tics, as well as machine learn­ing capabilities.

Your Options

We know that SAP BW/4HANA helps you sim­pli­fy your busi­ness ware­house strat­e­gy. We also know that it can help you reduce mod­el­ing costs, auto­mate your process­es, and pro­vide you with struc­tured and unstruc­tured data, in real time. But how do you get there?

There are two ways to migrate to SAP BW/4HANA: A green­field approach is an option for both new BW cus­tomers and those using old­er ver­sions of SAP BW on xDB with numer­ous 3.x objects. Or, you can con­sid­er a brown­field approach if you’re already run­ning on a recent ver­sion of SAP BW on HANA or a non-HANA data­base. You can also move to SAP BW/4HANA on-prem, in the cloud, or using a hybrid approach.

SAP has a white paper on build­ing a busi­ness case to move to SAP BW/4HANA and the top 10 con­sid­er­a­tions you need to think about. Most impor­tant­ly, you should think about how you want to store your data, whether you want it on-prem or in the cloud, and what tech­nolo­gies you want to use to make these process­es eas­i­er. Ulti­mate­ly, what mat­ters is what a solu­tion like this can do for your business.

ASUG Mem­bers can lis­ten to the on-demand web­cast, ​“What’s New in Tran­si­tion­ing from SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA” to bet­ter under­stand the lat­est updates and learn how to per­form a readi­ness check. And any­one can join us at our ASUG Expe­ri­ence for Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (EIM) event in Octo­ber in Min­neapo­lis to hear more about how to empow­er your orga­ni­za­tion with data.