by Dr. Prasad Akella, SAP
Small businesses and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face three key challenges that impede their ability to make good, data-driven decisions: ensuring the integrity of information, democratizing the availability of information, and controlling the cost of ownership. This article sheds light on how the key components of SAP's SME portfolio — SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence software and SAP BusinessObjects Edge Rapid Marts packages — address these challenges.
SMEs face three key challenges that impede their ability to make good, data-driven decisions. The first challenge is ensuring the integrity of information. An Economist Intelligence Unit study revealed that more than 70% of companies say that accurate and timely data improves their customer relations and sales processes.2 In fact, the study found that data accuracy was reported as “very important,” garnering nearly twice as much interest as the level of detail within that data.
The second challenge is democratizing the availability of information; broader access to better information drives better decisions.
And the third challenge is controlling the cost of ownership by reducing the IT resources required to successfully deploy and maintain BI solutions. Pre-integration with other business management systems, such as SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and pre-packaging are great ways to control deployment and ongoing running costs.
To overcome these challenges, SAP BusinessObjects Edge solutions provide a comprehensive set of offerings specially packaged and priced for SMEs. The solutions provide capabilities that help companies ensure information integrity, transform decision making, and optimize business performance. For example, SAP BusinessObjects Edge solutions that address BI, information management, and data warehousing (see Figure 1) are available in four incremental versions:
- SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, standard package, includes capabilities such as dashboards, reports, flexible ad hoc queries and data exploration, and advanced analyses to address most BI requirements.
- SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, version with data integration, adds data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) capabilities to the standard package.
- SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, version with data management, adds data matching, de-duplication, cleansing, and address validation capabilities to the version with data integration.
- SAP BusinessObjects Edge Rapid Marts packages are prebuilt data integration packages that provide line-of-business database schemas, semantic layers, reports, and dashboards for the ERP functionality in, and the CRM functionality add-on for, SAP Business All-in-One solutions.