SAP Business Intelligence (SAP BI)

The solution SAP BI (SAP Business Intelligence) is a business analysis system that allows you to conduct strategic data analysis and support the management decision-making process in your company. It is designed to provide access and processing of information contained in various systems or databases of organizations, its analysis. Sources can be any information systems, accounting and financial programs, specialized industry solutions, as well as local sources (for example, Excel or Access files).

SAP Business Intelligence is a suite of analytical applications. Provides multidimensional performance analysis for forecasting and planning future business performance. The solution includes tools for creating and publishing customizable online reports and applications that provide a whole new level of awareness for decision makers. The system provides tools and ready-made models for information analysis and reporting, which provides an integrated approach to rationale for decision-making.

SAP Business Intelligence − a complete solution that provides the necessary end-user functionality − IT professionals, responsible employees and management:

Data Warehousing

SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) - Data warehouse management, business modeling, data extraction, transformation, and loading functions enable you to build data warehouses, model the architecture of information according to your business structure, and manage data from multiple sources.

Knowledge Management

SAP Knowledge Management (SAP KM) - Online analytical processing, implicit dependency search, correlation search, and exception detection.

Measurement and control

Strategic Enterprise Management (SAP SEM) is a solution for managing corporate strategy. Decision support at any level, analytical applications and dashboards.

SAP Business Intelligence is focused on decision support at any level. The measurement and control tools contain analytical applications and tools to improve the quality of the decision being made.

Planning

Part of the complex, the Integrated Planning Solution (BW/BI-IP - in SAP terminology), together with SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence helps speed up the decision-making process, predict trends based on historical analysis and provides all decision-makers with a single point of access to information and data.

This solution is fully integrated into the BI (SAP Business Intelligence) system.

Planning and Modeling

BW-BPS (Business Planning and Simulation) - like BW/BI-IP, is fully integrated into the BI suite and SAP NetWeaver platform.

Integration

Business Intelligence, as a component of the BI application suite, is integrated with all components of the SAP NetWeaver platform.

Openness

Business Intelligence supports open standards such as XML, XML for Analysis (XMLA), OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO), Common Warehouse Metadata Interchange (CWMI), Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI), ABAP programming language, Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and JDBC interfaces.

Expansibility

Business Intelligence has the potential to expand and adapt to changing enterprise needs. It contains tools and interfaces to enhance and enhance existing business content and integrate with analysis and reporting tools developed by other vendors.

This product allows you to solve a wide range of tasks related to the financial sector, business intelligence, etc.

The main advantages are: SAP BI

• Comprehensive, integrated solution to analyze data from multiple sources, report, and share information in a single environment
• Simple and easy-to-understand interface, easy data loading, rich visualization capabilities, powerful search, analysis, and data matching from multiple sources
• Advanced security to limit access and protect data
• Managing key performance indicators based on financial results, accurate forecasting for risk, opportunity and financial impact management
• Eliminate reporting costs, develop and test reports, increase query efficiency, and reduce reporting time
• Scale as your business grows, lower information infrastructure costs, and lower total cost of ownership

Depending on the purpose of implementing the SAP BI solution, it can be used by various employees who need information stored in systems for work - employees of the commercial department, IT departments, marketing, accounting, etc.

Key Business Analysis Challenges

• Complexity and duration of operational analysis of information due to large amounts of data.
• The inability to obtain business information without involving IT specialists.
• Complexity of analyzing business information stored in various sources.
• Inability to effectively match and analyze historical data.

SAP BusinessObjects Capabilities

Dashboards and Visualization

• Building customized, flash-based dashboards.
• Easy to build and use the model for what-if analysis.
• Integration into Enterprise Portal.
• Predefined components: graphs, maps, speedometers, selectors, switches.

Special Request Processing, Reporting and Analysis

• Ease of use and focus on business users.
• A single interface for accessing all data sources.
• Use familiar business terms when building an analytical query.
• The ability to independently build non-standard analytical queries.

Reporting

• Retrieving data from any source.
• Access and convert information to a report form without programming.
• Ability to build hierarchical reports.
• Wide possibilities for preparing printing plates.
• Providing information via the WEB.

Search and evaluation

• Easy to evaluate and search through hundreds of internal and external data sources.
• Easy to use (similar to Yandex, Google).

Advanced analysis

• Perform interactive analytical processing of data.
• A wide range of functions for analyzing diverse datasets.
• Ability to conduct more advanced and accurate predictive analysis.

Integration of BusinessObjects with MS Office

• Easily integrate analytics into Microsoft Office applications.
• The ability to update data directly from Microsoft Office applications.
• The ability to exchange documents with embedded evaluations.

BusinessObjects Mobile

• Access to analytical information from a mobile device.
• Easy installation and configuration.
• Secure access to data.

Benefits of Implementing SAP Business Objects BI

Increased profitability. Increase Sales Efficiency

• Optimization by comparative analysis of the profitability of each product.
• Optimize the price of products according to their cost.
• Improve sales performance by leveraging customer analytics.

Understanding customers. Optimizing Marketing Strategies

• Opportunity to attract long-term customers.
• Attract and retain the right customers through targeted marketing.
• Track and manage all aspects of customer engagement.

Optimize Supply Chain and Supply Chain

• Reduce inventory storage costs by optimizing material flow.
• Increase revenue by improving inventory management
• Ensure timely availability of products at sales locations

Quality service and customer preservation

• Marked list elementReduce customer churn by increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Customer service according to buying behavior models.
• Quickly solve the problem of customer outflow using root-cause analysis.

Financial Management

• Managing key performance indicators (KPIs) based on financial results.
• Respond quickly to changes by reducing planning, budgeting, and consolidation cycles.
• Accurate forecasting for risk, opportunity and financial impact management.

Improve IT efficiency

• Eliminate the cost of creating, developing and testing reports.
• Increase query efficiency and reduce reporting time.
• Lower information infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership.

Chronicle

2024: Holes found in the system

In mid-August 2024, SAP released a security update, eliminating 17 new vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to bypass authentication, fake server requests and completely control defective systems. These vulnerabilities are rated 9.8 and 9.1 on the CVSS scale, indicating a serious risk of abuse.

According to official SAP security notes, one of the vulnerabilities arises from a "lack of authentication validation" at the REST endpoint. In this case, an unauthorized user can gain full access to the Business Intelligence Platform. Such hacking can completely compromise the system, violating the privacy and integrity of the data.

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Bloomberg

Another visibility poses a threat to applications created with SAP Build Apps. It belongs to the class of server-side request spoofing (SSRF). Such a vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target system, which potentially provides a complete capture of the system.

All organizations using SAP Business Intelligence Platform versions 430 or 440 or applications created with SAP Build Apps versions older than 4.11.130 are at risk. All organizations are encouraged to install updates and verify security configurations, primarily those related to SSO and access control. In addition, organizations are advised to consider additional security measures, such as the implementation of multifactor authentication (MFA) and network segmentation. Businesses should also consider the security status of third-party software vendors and implement risk mitigation measures for integrated solutions.^[1]

Links

• SAP Business Intelligence
• Business Analytics - A Holistic Picture of Intelligent Business Operations
• Business planning as part of the complex

Notes