What Is Business Intelligence?

The Purpose of Business Intelligence

During all business activities, companies create data. In all departments of the company, employees at all levels use this data as a basis for making decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) collates and prepares the large set of enterprise data. By analyzing the data using BI tools, you can gain insights that support the decision-making process within your company. BI makes it possible to quickly create reports about business processes and their results and to analyze and interpret data about customers, suppliers, and internal activities. Dynamic planning is also possible. Business Intelligence therefore helps optimize business processes and enables you to act quickly and in line with the market, creating decisive competitive advantages for your company.

Key Areas of Business Intelligence

A complete Business Intelligence solution is subdivided into various areas. SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) provides comprehensive tools, functions, and processes for all these areas:

A data warehouse integrates, stores, and manages company data from all sources.

If you have an integrated view on the relevant data in the data warehouse, you can start the analysis and planning steps. To obtain decisive insights for improving your business processes from the data, SAP NetWeaver BI provides methods for multidimensional analysis. Business key figures, such as sales quantities or revenue, can be analyzed using different reference objects, such as Product, Customer or Time. Methods for pattern recognition in the dataset (data mining) are also available. SAP NetWeaver BI also allows you to perform planning based on the data in the data warehouse.

Tools for accessing and for visualization allow you to display the insights you have gained and to analyze and plan the data at different levels of detail and in various working environments (Web, Microsoft Excel).

By publishing content from BI, you can flexibly broadcast the information to all employees involved in your company's decision-making processes, for example by e-mail or using an enterprise portal.

Performance and security also play an important role when it comes to providing the information that is relevant for decision-making to the right employees at the right time.

Preconfigured information models in the form of BI Content make it possible to efficiently and cost-effectively introduce SAP NetWeaver BI.

The following sections give an overview of the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver BI in these areas. You can find out more about the tools, functions, and processes provided by SAP NetWeaver BI using the links to more detailed information in the documentation.