Mastering the SAP business information warehouse

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data warehousing industries have evolved in parallel over the past decade. Now these two trends are finally onverging. More and more corporations have successfully implemented SAP® or another ERP package as a transaction-processing solution. These organizations may have started their projects in isolated divisions, but over the past several years, larger portions of the business are being run on ERP software. While we have seen only a few IT shops that rely exclusively on SAP software, the percentage of online transaction processing that is conducted via SAP software has steadily increased. We see many organizations adopting IT philosophies that have SAP software as the default solution. It is not uncommon to hear a CFO comment, “You better have a very good reason not to use the SAP software we already paid for.” These organizations have moved beyond automating and integrating business processes and now wish to optimize their business performance, reduce the slack in their supply chains, and realize the potential value of their customer relationships.