Developing BI Applications
This article looks at an approach to developing SAP BusinessObjects solutions where rather than just writing reports and universes we instead build a BI Application. The main benefit of this approach is a more efficient, streamlined and organised delivery process.
A BI Application is viewed as a complete project where the components of the BI application, the reports, universes, security model, user guides etc, all go through a typical systems development lifecycle of analysis and design, development, testing and release.
Initially this may not seem any different to any other approach but the key difference here is that it is a BI Application as a whole that is packaged and released through the different environments of development, testing, system testing and so on to production. By keeping all the related components together we greatly improve the efficiency and quality of delivery and at the same time reduce the risk of delivering a change in one area that adversely affects another existing BI implementation.
SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise is then viewed as a platform on which we can deploy many different BI Applications. The users are granted access on an application by application basis, greatly reducing the complexity of security modelling.
This article begins by looking at a typical BI project requirement and then looks at how a BI application approach helps implement this project.
Contents
Business Scenario
To help better understand what we mean by a BI Application and the benefits to the project life cycle let us look at a typical business scenario.
In this scenario we are delivering a project to implement a BI system for a high street clothing and food retailer called Grace Brothers. Grace Brothers have two initial BI initiatives:
- A system to allow reporting and analysis of product sales and marketing campaigns to look at best selling products and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
- A system to allow reporting and analysis of budgeting and forecasting data and to improve accuracy of the budgeting process through analysis of actuals against costs.
These two initiatives are the first of many and if these are successfully delivered they intend to immediately start with other BI initiatives.
Architecture
The high level architecture is to build a single enterprise data warehouse from which we expose the required data through the following data marts,
- Budgeting and Forecasting data mart – financial forecast and budget across the company.
- Costs data mart – actual costs by department across the whole company.
- Sales data mart – information on all products sold across all stores and online.
- Marketing data mart – marketing campaign information.
Security and Access Requirements
We are also required to maintain two separate groups of users who will have access to one or other of these two logical areas of financial analysis and sales and marketing analysis. Initially the two groups will contain employees from either the finance department or the marketing department but will expand in future to include employees from other departments. Some employees will have access to both.
The purpose of this is to minimise training and support where an employee will only be trained on the area they have access to.
It is also required that within these two groups the will be three different types of users:
- standard users who can view operational reports and any shared reports created by power users who belong in the same group.
- analysts who can create reports on their area but then only save the report to their own folder and,
- power users who can create and maintain the shared reports.
Deliverables
Deliverables for the financial analysis subject area
- Budgeting Dashboard – an Xcelsius dashboard displaying costs against targets across the business
- Financial Operational Reports – departmental reports detailing costs and other reports displaying budget information using Crystal Reports
- Budgeting and Forecasting universe – for analysis of data in the Budgeting and Forecasting data mart
- Costs universe – for analysis of data in the Costs data mart
- Sample Web Intelligence Reports – a set of sample Web Intelligence documents of the above universes
- User Documentation on the universes – documents that detail the structure of the two universes.
Deliverables for the sales and marketing analysis subject area
- Sales Operational Reports – for every store a set of reports detailing weekly sales information. Delivered in Crystal Reports
- Sales universe – allows the business to analyse sales data within the sales data mart
- Marketing universe – allows the business to analyse data within the Marketing data mart
- Sample Web Intelligence Reports – a set of sample Web Intelligence documents of the above universes
- User Documentation on the universes – documents that detail the structure of the two universes.
These are the high level requirements of the project and the next section will look at the development process where we deliver BI Applications. But first let us define what is a BI application.
Definition of a BI Application
Looking at the above requirements it is obvious that we have two distinct subject areas: financial analysis and sales and marketing analysis. We can then think of a BI application being a subject area, that is, a BI application will consist of all the reports and universes that can be used to report and analyse data within a single subject area. This definition is based around the data that the BI application provides access to however for a full definition of a BI application we need to consider additional components.
In addition to controlling data access we must also control which users have access to this data and also what they are then allowed to do with this data. We can now define a BI application based on 3 key areas,
- the data that the application works with
- the users that can access the application
- the functionality that those users will have when working with the data
By keeping these three areas in mind we can fully define our BI application. Let us look at how this then impacts our above delivery requirement.
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