InformationWeek

September 14, 1998

Tapping Into R/3

By Sean Gallagher

ata warehouses, online analytical processing engines, and other business-intelligence tools are generally good at accessing, converting, and archiving transactional data, then extracting relationships from that data for analysis. But enterprise resource planning applications, with their cryptic data structures and integrated business logic, make that process more complicated.

That's why there's so much interest in ERP-specific data analysis products like SAP's Business Information Warehouse. Such tools are designed to more easily access data in ERP systems, making it possible to integrate ERP and data analysis applications.

The Business Information Warehouse extracts R/3 transaction data and creates a metadata layer for tracking and managing that data. The data is stored on a server as an InfoCube, a multidimensional database. InfoCubes can be accessed from reports in SAP's Business Explorer reporting tool and brought into Microsoft Excel and other data analysis tools.

The Business Information Warehouse's Production Data Extractor is an application suite that extracts and consolidates transaction and "master" data to create a snapshot of the data in an R/3 system. Initially, the extractor programs pull the entire data set across; on subsequent extractions, they pull only incremental changes.

The extracted data is transformed into an InfoCube by SAP's Staging Engine, based on mapping and transformation rules. It can be merged with data from non-R/3 sources. Extraction and staging are controlled by the Business Information Warehouse Scheduler.

Return to main story, "New Value In ERP."