Real Time Business Intelligence With SAP Business One

Real Time Business Intelligence

Ambition Enterprise including SAP Business One can put information at your fingertips.  As an integrated system you can access infromation from across the business in one place, and have the data meaningfully presented to you in real time.

Our service provides you with SAP Business One running on SAP HANA, the in-memory database from SAP.  This has been engineered to provide exceptionally fast access to data and offers outstanding performance to power through requests for data.

Of course being able to accessing data is not the same as having business intelligence.  The data must be presented in a useful way to be information, be available to the users that need it and be presented in way that allows it to be easily used.  Often an organisation will have access to lots of information that’s not used because the users that need to use it don’t know how to access it, or how to use it once they have it.

For example, if you have users that are competent Excel users giving them access to Pivot Tables in Excel could be a very sensible way to provide them with information that is useful to them.  They can easily bring information out in different ways simpoly by using the Excel Pivot Table.  However, users that aren’t so comfortable using Excel may struggle to obtain anything meaningful from the same information.  Choosing how information is provided can be just as important as having the information in the first place.

Fortunately you have lots of different options for presenting and using information available to you with Ambition Enterprise including SAP Business One.

Dashboards

You can give each user access to a personalised dashboard.  This can include KPI indicators, graphs and tables of information.  Users can click through to find more detail.  You can also attach relevant dashboard ‘widgets’ to different records - for example order history can be attached to a customer.

Great for: making relevant summary information directly visible.

User Queries

Customised database queries can be written and saved for easy retrieval by users who don’t have database skills.  Users simply call up the query by a user friendly name, specify the relevant options for that query and the system presents them with the infromation held in the database.

Great for: making defined data sets available to users.

Crystal Reports

Included in SAP Business One is the ability to present information from Crystal reports, considered by many to be the de-facto standard in formatting and presenting information from all sorts of databases.  Customised reports can be written and used as required.  User that have skills in using Crystal reports can use the tool to prepare their own reports as required.

Great for: information to presented to users without logins to the system or that's intended to be printed.

Excel

Excel includes a range of tools for working with data, and many users are comfortable using it for analysis.  Information can be exctracted directly from the SAP HANA database that powers SAP Business One to populate data sheets within an Excel workbook.  As Excel allows workbooks to be protected you can also confidently give Excel based reports to users knowing that they cannot change or directly view the underlying data.

Great for: moderate to advanced Excel Users who want to ‘slice and dice’ information themselves.

Astounding Speed

There are three main reasons for the astounding speed of SAP’s HANA database:

In-Memory Technology

All of the data is loaded into memoery, not fetched from hard disk, so it’s much quicker to access.

Column Store

The database uses a radically different method to store your data, so it’s optimised for retrieval.

Service Layer

The HANA database capabilities can be extended through a programmable service layer, allowing code that has to heavily process the data to be run where the data is stored.

Which Means

It’s fast.  Really fast.

As one experienced database consultant reports: “... the results were pretty astounding.  We returned reports that ran for hours in a conventional Oracle database in just 8-10 seconds.” (you can read his article at this link.)