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SAP SPeciAl RePoRt SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

JOnAthAn D. BEchEr

Senior Vice President Marketing

SAP

Better Answers Through Better Questions

Inside This Special Report

S-4 | Is Business Intelligence Ready for the Masses?

S-7 | How SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Is Revolutionizing BI: 4 Industry Use Cases

Þ

Q: can you contrast SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to

the business intelligence (BI) tools our readers now

have in place?

A: There are certain questions that you know you want to

routinely ask. For example, “How many widgets did we sell last

night?” For these questions, when people know precisely what

it is they want answers to, scheduled queries and the reporting

tools in use today are great options. In business, however, you

often have to ask 5, 6, 10, 20, or even 30 wrong questions to get

to the right one. And sometimes the best questions are open-

ended. It’s here where you find the first big difference. With tra-

ditional BI tools, the answer is the objective. SAP BusinessObjects

Explorer is about data exploration, not report generation.

The second big differentiator is accessibility. Everybody

who needs access to your company’s business data can use

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. While many of your readers

work for companies that are now running BI solutions, most of

the employees who need access to business data can’t use the

tools. Mastering their requirements and interfaces just isn’t

Think about how we explore areas of interest with Google.

Start with an inquiry. Get results. Gain insights, ideas, and

perspective. Explore some more, this time asking new or

more pointed and probing questions. There’s great value to be

gleaned from this progression — this ability to acquire knowl-

edge and challenge, change, and refine questions on the fly.

Most SAPinsider readers don’t interact with business

data in this way. You get reports. You work with spread-

sheets. You have a number of business intelligence (BI)

tools. But a simple, fluid, and familiar Google-like explora-

tion of information within your SAP and non-SAP systems?

That’s not the norm.

That changes with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer supports precisely this

type of interaction with your company’s business data. To

explore a topic, type in a question or keyword. Answers

immediately appear, and they don’t just hail from your

SAP systems. Search and data aggregation is done across

all systems, with results ranked and presented based on

relevance. It’s also worth noting that data is presented in

graphic formats (bar graphs and pie charts, for example)

and you can click and drill down into specific areas for fur-

ther investigation. The search facility is so familiar that

you don’t need training or help from power users or IT staff

to use it.

This technology is not reminiscent of the reporting tools

that SAP customers currently run. To help readers under-

stand the difference, SAPinsider asked Jonathan Becher,

Senior Vice President of Marketing at SAP, to explore:

What differentiates SAP BusinessObjects Explorer from

BI tools you may be using now

How your approach to BI could change because of

the product

Where you can go to test-drive the tool

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SAP SPeciAl RePoRt SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

practical, so the BI tools remain

the exclusive purview of a relatively

scarce number of power users, ana-

lysts, and IT department members,

and the broader business user com-

munity has to go through one of

these intermediaries to get their

questions answered.

It’s analogous to the way people

made phone calls a few generations

back. To place a call, you would pick

up the receiver and wait for an oper-

ator to get on the line and ask to

whom you’d like to speak. If that

person was in a different part of the

country, a series of local operators,

each covering specific regions of the

country, worked to facilitate the

connection. There was nothing self-

service about it. In a very real sense,

this is the way BI — and frankly, deci-

sion making — works today.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

changes this. It is so easy to use, it

democratizes access to data. Anyone

who has used Google or any of the

other popular Internet search

engines can use SAP BusinessObjects

Explorer. Type in a keyword; get back

your search result. It’s that simple.

The underlying search may span

lots of SAP and non-SAP systems

and millions of records, and it takes

less than a fraction of a second for

the response. This is another point

worth mentioning. It’s fast! There

are other products out there that

offer fast response times, but as far

as I know, none combine to address

all of these challenges:

1. Simple, easy, and intuitive

exploration of business data

2. Accessibility and self-service

for all business users

Explore Information Without BoundariesSAP BusinessObjects Explorer provides an easy-to-use, easy-to-navigate user interface to find the answers you need. The figures below show sample data retrieved using the tool.

p Users can quickly analyze large volumes of data through SAP Businessobjects explorer’s

word cloud capabilities

p A lightning-fast search across millions of records results in an interactive, intuitive display

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3. Searchability across large and varied numbers of systems

and virtually limitless amounts of data

4. Rapid response times

I’ve seen tools offer fast response for limited amounts of

data. And there are products that allow for fast response and

lots of data, but they are built for experts by experts. SAP

BusinessObjects Explorer is the only tool that optimizes across

all four dimensions.

Q: In the months ahead, how do you see the BI land-

scape changing for SAP customers?

A: On the IT side, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer will free up a lot

of resources, and on the business side, it will promote much

better decision support. Planning meetings and operational

reviews offer an ideal backdrop to illustrate this point.

It’s pretty common for participants to show up at planning

meetings with their go-to PowerPoint presentation, replete with

their favorite metrics about what strategic concerns the busi-

ness faces. And it’s extraordinarily common for these metrics

not to match up — at all. Consider a simple question: How many

new customers did we acquire last quarter?

The operations organization posits that people who

bought and then returned products do not constitute

“new customers.”

Metrics from the head of marketing, who views returns as

a quality issue, not a sales issue, do count customers who

bought and subsequently returned products last quarter

as “new customers.”

The Large Enterprise Sales organization recognizes “new

customers” as only those with orders in excess of US$10,000.

Given that the purpose of the meeting is to devise or refine

plans, do you really want to lose another planning cycle sending

participants off in pursuit of a new definition of the term “new

customer,” asking them to regenerate their figures? With SAP

BusinessObjects Explorer, this could be done in real time, with

all stakeholders looking at the same data.

Take the example one step further. Let’s say that I am the

head of the Large Enterprise Sales organization, and I want to

compare sales in select regions of the country. I throw in a

few other requirements, and we’re no longer dealing with a

standard query — so I have to enlist the help of an analyst. The

analyst needs certain warehouse statistics, but finds the right

data isn’t loaded, so a call goes out to a data architect, who in

turn enlists the help of others to cleanse and load the data.

Eventually, I get the report. And 99 times out of 100, the experi-

ence ends with something like this: “Oh! That’s not the question

I meant to ask. I meant to specify New York City, not New York

state, and I actually needed to account for sales that took place

in the wake of a new promotional campaign.”

This happens all the time. Rarely is your first question

the right question. Far less overhead and far better decision

support will come about when your business teams can start

the query process on their own, similar to how they do Web

searches today. Take a stab at a subject, progressively refine

your questions, and you arrive at a much better place from

which to make decisions.

With SAP BusinessObjects Explorer going mainstream, your

BI landscape will invite a more exploratory approach to busi-

ness challenges. This will confer untold advantage. Through

exploration of your business data, you can:

Assess whether the questions you first raised correctly

frame your actual intent

Substantiate, refine, or completely refute prevailing

assumptions

Expose knowledge gaps, uncovering key information you

need to know but have likely never seen before

Put the power of information into the hands of the people

within your organization who need it

If SAP BusinessObjects Explorer sounds revolutionary, it’s

because it is revolutionary. It changes the way you interact with

information, and it will change the way you make decisions.

Q: can readers take SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

for a test-drive?

A: They can, and they can even upload their own data to do the

test drive. Trying it with your own data is the best way to under-

stand the tool’s business impact and appeal to users. Hearing,

reading about, or even seeing this tool gives you only limited

insight. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is something that makes

more sense when you experience it. n

Ready for Your Test-Drive?Go to http://explorer.ondemand.com to get started. You can also try SAP BusinessObjects Explorer using some sample microfinance data at http://microfinance.sap.com.

SAP SPeciAl RePoRt SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

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You’ve been here before: You walk into an important meeting,

where the objective is to make a significant business decision

— Do we expand into Asia Pacific?, for example. But there’s

simply not enough hard data in the room to make an informed

choice. People start arguing about their feelings and their

propensities, but not about the actual facts of the business.

Yet accessing those facts isn’t an easy feat. You might have

the information you need somewhere in your enterprise, but it’s

locked away in a data warehouse and no one knows how to

access it. You could run a query, but it would take far too long to

process. It would take even longer to generate a report based

on the questions you’re asking. Before you know it, your com-

petitor has moved into the market, and you’re left behind, still

trying to run reports and parse through mountains of data.

The overall market perception (which I agree with) is that

business intelligence (BI) has not quite become accessible or

applicable to the broader business user audience. Even today,

BI is still largely confined to power users and analysts. The

desire for easy-to-consume data that’s broadly available in an

intuitive fashion for business users goes unrequited. In most

organizations, this need is much, much broader than what a BI

analyst team can support by crunching, reporting, and

publishing data to a dashboard.

That is precisely the need we are filling with SAP

BusinessObjects Explorer. The solution helps you get the data

you need out of the data warehouse and into the decision-

making room. It lets casual business users, who would never

have used a BI tool before, effectively view large information

sets and make informed decisions based on them. And there’s

no training manual necessary.

You Can Incorporate and Analyze Data from Any Source, Not Just SAP NetWeaver BWThink of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer as a tight-knit family

of components, including an intuitive user interface and the

in-memory capabilities of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

Accelerator (SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator). We’re enhancing

and delivering the connections between these components

in waves — and in late 2009, we rolled out an exciting,

game-changing development: Whereas previous versions of

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer required customers to use

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) as

their data warehouse of record, we’ve now opened up SAP

BusinessObjects Explorer to any data, anywhere, and in any

shape or size. Users can directly access and accelerate non-SAP

sources of information — a Teradata, IBM DB2, or Oracle data

source on the back end, for instance, or even information from

an application like PeopleSoft — as efficiently as they could an

SAP NetWeaver BW data source. Now, with access to all enter-

prise data, not just BW data, users can truly get a 360-degree

view of their business. (See sidebar on page S-6 for a detailed

look at our wave rollouts.)

The Customer Experience Is UnmatchedSAP BusinessObjects Explorer is not some random science

experiment — real customers are getting meaningful insight

into their business on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. Users

are learning things about their data and, more importantly,

about their business that they previously didn’t know. Custom-

ers say the results literally leap out of the page.

One company said it was able to load 83 million records

into the solution and access it with sub-second response times.

Then, a week later, the same company loaded in almost 300

million more records and got the very same response times.

In the following article, my colleague Jeff Veis will delve

more deeply into how customers in four specific industries —

GEOrGE MAthEw

Vice President and General Manager

SAP Businessobjects explorer

SAP

Is Business Intelligence Ready for the Masses?With SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, Business Users Can Now Intuitively Access Data from Any Enterprise Source

SAP Businessobjects explorer helps you get the

data you need out of the data warehouse and into

the decision-making room.

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health care, insurance, consumer products, and services — can

use the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer tool to exploit their data.

How Does SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Fit into the Bigger BI Picture?Customers commonly ask how SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

relates to the rest of the tools in the SAP BusinessObjects

portfolio. It’s really a matter of having the right tool for the

right job.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is geared toward casual users

— or even non-users — of BI, giving them a lot more interactivity

around their data so that they can search and explore effec-

tively. Analysts can use the product and appreciate it, but the

broader use case involves the line of business managers and

executives who don’t want to go back to IT for answers to

straightforward questions about their business.

That said, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer sits on the same

platform as other BI tools in the SAP Business-

Objects portfolio, including SAP BusinessObjects

Voyager for OLAP analysis, SAP BusinessObjects

Web Intelligence for ad hoc reporting, Xcelsius

for dashboards, and Crystal Reports for produc-

tion reporting (see Figure �). SAP BusinessObjects

Explorer is designed to complement the exist-

ing platform rather than sit wholly outside of it.

The tool is an essential part of the DNA of how

SAP is moving forward with BI — getting large

information sets organized in an easy-to-

search, easy-to-navigate fashion for any user.

Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer: What Should You Do Next?It all depends on where you are in your SAP

software life cycle:

If you currently use SAP NetWeaver BW as

your underlying data warehouse, you’ll need

to make sure you’re on SAP NetWeaver BW 7.0,

enhancement package 1 (it’s a prerequisite).

Based on what we’ve learned from experi-

ence with our pilot customers, the challenge

of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer lies not in implementing

the product itself or connecting the accelerating technology,

but rather in the data source. If you want to take full

advantage of the ongoing investments we’re making in SAP

NetWeaver BW Accelerator and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer,

then you will want to upgrade to the most recent version of

SAP NetWeaver BW.

2 Current Versions, and When to Use EachYou may see information on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer that discusses two variants of the product: an accelerated version and a universe version.

When you hear about an accelerated version of Explorer, think

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer plus the in-memory accelerator.

This accelerated version can process hundreds of millions of

data records in seconds.

The universe version connects directly into BusinessObjects

universes, a suitable option for mid-market customers with a

few million data records.

Full Limited

Exploration

Executive

Line of Business

Management

Analysts

DashboardsOLAP

analysisAd hoc

reportingProductionreporting

SAPBusiness-Objects

ExplorerXcelsius

CrystalReports

SAPBusiness-ObjectsVoyager

SAP BExAnalyzer

SAPBusiness-Objects

WebIntelligence

Interactivity

FIGURE 1 p Generally speaking, customers can categorize SAP Businessobjects tools into

the use cases depicted above. that said, discussions around which Bi tool is right for

each business purpose are unique to each company. Readers should contact their SAP

account teams to have a deeper discussion around which tools are right for them.

For SAP Businessobjects explorer, it’s no longer just

about SAP NetWeaver BW data; it’s about data of

any size, source, and shape.

SAP SPeciAl RePoRt SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

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If you don’t currently use SAP NetWeaver BW — or if you have

a lot of information outside of SAP NetWeaver BW that you’d

like to accelerate — I recommend that you look into our

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services product. Using SAP

BusinessObjects Data Services, you can take advantage of

any existing connectors that Data Services supports (it

currently supports about 150 information sources). And in

release 3.2, SAP BusinessObjects Data Services can create

the in-memory index for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

directly. What does this mean for customers? Information

can come in from any source — including non-SAP, non-BW,

and third-party sources — and then go directly into SAP

BusinessObjects Explorer’s in-memory accelerator.

Whether or not you use SAP NetWeaver BW, you’ll need to

ensure that your hardware landscape is set up appropriately.

We have recommendations about what the accelerated Explorer

hardware profile should look like. To get the best possible per-

formance results for your business, I’d advise you to work with

your SAP account team, choose a preferred hardware partner,

and bring in technology that’s sized to your data needs.

Democratizing Access to Business IntelligenceSo is business intelligence ready for the masses? We believe

that SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is a momentous step in the

right direction. If you have not already done so, come explore

the possibilities at http://goexplore.ondemand.com. n

The Waves of SAP BusinessObjects ExplorerTo fully appreciate SAP BusinessObjects

Explorer from a technical standpoint, it’s

important to understand how the solution

has evolved. We’ve rolled out the solution’s

components — and the various connections

between them — in a series of waves (see

figure below).

In Wave 0, Explorer connected directly

to a BusinessObjects universe, which can

effectively handle two to three million

records, typically for mid-market customers.

In Wave �, we saw customers with a

lot more data — hundreds of millions,

even billions, of records — who wanted

to view their data in a similar fashion. So

we took the universe-based Wave 0 offer-

ing and tied it directly to the in-memory

capabilities of SAP NetWeaver BW Accel-

erator, creating a level of linear scalability

that wasn’t necessarily possible through

universes. This version required custom-

ers to use SAP NetWeaver BW as their

data warehouse of record to accelerate

and explore.

At the end of 2009, we announced our

Wave � enhancements. We still leverage

the powerful combination of SAP Business-

Objects Explorer and SAP NetWeaver BW

Accelerator, but now customers can go after

data of any shape and size. Users can directly

access and accelerate non-SAP sources of

information — a DB2 data source in the back

end, for example, or even information from

an application like PeopleSoft — as effi-

ciently as they could an SAP NetWeaver BW

data source. SAP NetWeaver BW Accelera-

tor truly becomes SAP BusinessObjects

Accelerator. And I’m pleased to report that

every one of our customers from Wave 1 is

in the process of joining us for Wave 2.

Moving forward, we can easily see this

acceleration being packaged not just for

large enterprises, but for a mid-market

audience as well. In Wave �, we’ll be build-

ing an appliance offering for these mid-

market and departmental audiences while

accelerating all of our BI clients, not just

Explorer. (Yes, 2010 will be a busy year!)

Wave 0(2008)

Explorerbasic version

User Interface

BOE/EDGE

Wave 1(May 2009)

Exploreraccelerated

version

SAP NetWeaverBW

SAP NetWeaverBW Accelerator

Suite

Wave 3(2010)

Explorerappliance

version

Data Services

SAP Business-Objects

Accelerator

Any Source

Wave 2(Q4 2009)

Exploreropen accelerated

version

BW AnyDW

SAP Business-Objects

Accelerator

Any App

User Interface User InterfaceUser Interface

p the waves of SAP Businessobjects explorer: critical in Wave 2 is customers’ ability to

use any data warehouse — not just SAP NetWeaver BW — as the database of record

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JEff VEIS

Vice President industry Solutions

and Strategic initiatives

SAP Businessobjects

Transform the Way Your Company Thinks About Business IntelligenceHow SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Is Revolutionizing BI: 4 Industry Use Cases

When most users think of business intelligence (BI), they think

of it in a very traditional sense: predefined reports that can’t

account for real-time market fluctuations and that don’t allow

business users to truly engage with the information.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software changes all that.

Using the tool, companies can extend the reach of BI to all busi-

ness users — not just a small subset of expert data analysts. This

innovative software combines the power of intuitive insight with

the high performance and scalability of SAP NetWeaver Busi-

ness Warehouse Accelerator. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

enables deep exploration of vast amounts of data, enabling

users to identify, manipulate, and act on insights that a pre-

structured, traditional BI tool would be hard pressed to deliver.

Although this description nicely describes the technical merits

of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, it simply doesn’t do justice to

the revolutionary way this solution changes how we think about

conducting business. To appreciate the real power of this innova-

tive tool, let’s look at four real-world, industry-specific examples

of how SAP BusinessObjects Explorer has enabled users to take a

fresh look at their data, their business, and their industry.

Improving the Clinical Pathway Tradition: The Health Care IndustryIn many health care systems, there is a growing concern around

the delivery of high-quality care. And rightly so: A recent study

revealed that as many as 200,000 Americans die each year

primarily as a result of medical errors.

Traditionally, gathering quality-of-care data is tied to a

process called a clinical pathway. This approach, which is often

paper-based, relies on a single bedside document — the well-

known clipboard — to encompass the care a patient is likely to

receive throughout his or her treatment. This clinical pathway

tries to document foreseeable medical interventions that repre-

sent known best practices in patient care. However, clinical

pathways are not completely prescriptive — each patient’s jour-

ney is an individual one. That’s why another important part of

the clinical pathway is to document information on variances —

unexpected results or actions that diverge from the pathway.

While paper-based clinical pathways can provide reliable docu-

mentation, they can’t always provide the transparency and

insight required to proactively ensure the best quality of care.

Using a flexible self-discovery tool, such as SAP Business-

Objects Explorer, health professionals can explore clinical path-

way data to go beyond traditional key performance indicator

(KPI) variance analysis and identify potential root causes that

may affect the quality of care. For example, say a quality-of-

care analysis application alerts a physician of an ongoing issue

in the area of cholecystectomy (the surgical removal of the gall-

bladder) — a high number of patients have been given a false

preoperative diagnosis. This alert would prompt the physician

to perform a root-cause analysis. Using SAP BusinessObjects

Explorer, the doctor can easily see a correlation between these

critical cases and a specific set of attending physicians (see

Figure � on the next page), enabling the hospital to take imme-

diate corrective action. Without such a tool, this link might go

undiscovered for months or years, if it was detected at all.

Unleashing Actionable Insight from Siloed Claims Data: The Insurance IndustryCan a company ever have too much data? For companies in the

insurance industry, it can often seem that way. For example,

insurance organizations that perform underwriting and claims

processes regularly generate terabytes of data. Often, this data

is siloed within geographically diverse organizations, making

rapid data analysis and informed decision making a challenge.

An insurer’s ability to promptly pay out on a legitimate claim is

a key factor for customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, since the

data needed to support claim approvals is often siloed, gaining

SAP SPeciAl RePoRt SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

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a 360-degree customer view is cumbersome. These barriers also

burden the insurance carrier’s field management and adjusters,

who must manually pull data from disparate spreadsheets, policy

and claim systems, and facsimile images. This tedious manual

work takes up valuable time and delays claims decisions.

Furthermore, since the data cannot be effectively aggregated

and analyzed to identify broader hidden issues and trends — such

as medical fraud, litigation success rates, or claims aging — the

business is prevented from effectively using analytics to strate-

gically reduce claims costs and improve overall performance.

With SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, however, an operational

claims manager can easily analyze aggregated claims data at the

adjuster, office, and regional levels (see Figure �). The manager

can quickly identify key business insights — such as medical

Users can select the medical pro-cedure they are interested in analyzing

Drill-down capabilities allow users to filter by false preoperative diagnoses Graphics help users easily iden-

tify the responsible physicians who correlate with this trend, and then explore common patterns with respect to these physicians

FIGURE 1 p SAP Businessobjects explorer allows business users to drill into data to uncover the root cause of ongoing issues

Users can easily see that many causes of accidents were not categorized

By typing in the casual query “auto bodily injuries 2009,” the user is presented with the top types of claims in tabular and visual screens

FIGURE 2 p SAP Businessobjects explorer makes it easy to track and identify trends

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provider costs in multiple claims that are out of line with industry

norms. And because SAP BusinessObjects Explorer has a natural-

language search capability that finds and contextually arranges

the data pulled from legacy systems, it can be used by a typical

business user, not just a small group of analytical or IT experts.

The solution also helps users identify and visualize long-term

trends. Say an auto liability claims examiner wants to deter-

mine why claims frequency and costs are rising; he wants to

uncover any external causes that could be proactively managed.

Using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, the examiner can not only

identify the primary reasons for accidents, he can also see an

in-house trend: the reasons for accidents are not always being

categorized. This quality issue, which can skew claims analysis,

can easily be remedied through proper training and by tracking

data quality in any new claims.

Overcoming the Out-of-Stock Challenge: The Consumer Products IndustryIn the consumer products industry, the ability to correctly antic-

ipate and serve customer demands is critical to a company’s

success. One particular challenge in this industry is managing

product out-of-stock occurrences. A lack of visibility into rising

demand can result in failing to deliver the right product at the

right time, causing a significant loss of revenue and consumer

loyalty, in addition to potential market share erosion. At the

same time, too much supply can result in the overuse of trade

promotion funds to offload stock, thus reducing profit margins.

Traditionally, customer demand projections are based on

the average historical movement of products. But this static,

“rearview-mirror” approach lacks the timeliness and flexibility

to incorporate dynamic variables that can skew real-world

demand, including seasonal promotions and competitive

actions. To mitigate this, history-based approaches usually gen-

erate exception alerts when a specific inventory level triggers a

preset threshold. However, these narrow, siloed perspectives

mean that a supplier could still miss the big picture and easily

misjudge demand.

For example, if a company sees increased demand for cough

medicine and steps up production to meet it, it may overlook

the increase’s correlation to changing weather patterns and flu

outbreaks. Once those conditions are gone, the demand will drop

and the manufacturer could be left with a surplus of products.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer can help address the challenge

of siloed information by aggregating heterogeneous data sets

— including information about promotional campaigns, inven-

tory levels, competitive campaigns, regional flu outbreaks, and

weather forecasts — with a single, easy-to-use environment that

invites ad hoc exploration. This enables business managers to

identify issues related to inventory requirements and recognize

out-of-stock patterns (see Figure �).

Users gain visibility into the performance of a specific cat-egory (cookies, in this case) and can drill down into key metrics

Users can narrow the scope of the problem to identify potential out-of-stock issues with drill-down details about each product

FIGURE 3 p SAP Businessobjects explorer provides a high level of detail around sales trends, allowing business users to make

correlations between external conditions and consumer demand

Users can easily see variances in planned sales versus order quantity in relation to inventory

SAP SPeciAl RePoRt SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

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With SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, a brand or sales manager

can analyze multiple dimensions of inventory by assessing the

total amount of products invoiced to a retail customer. These

dimensions can be viewed by date, region, or customer and

compared against targeted inventory requirements, inventory

on hand, and planned inventories, enabling the user to isolate

any exceptions and reduce out-of-stock issues with the retailer.

Shining a Light on After-Sales Service: The Discrete Manufacturing IndustryIn today’s demanding marketplace, executives need to clearly

see their costs and margins, as well as the types of customers

they are serving, to quickly adapt their sales and after-sales

service activities to changing market conditions. Yet information

about after-sales service is traditionally scattered across myriad

systems, making it practically impossible to gain a holistic view

of after-sales service trends and their related root causes. These

unmanaged costs directly reduce baseline operating margins.

On top of that, identifying and addressing specific customers

and products that are driving elevated service-related and

warranty-related costs are initiatives often beyond reach.

Using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, professionals at all levels

of an after-sales service line of business can gain financial and

operational insight into their service operation and identify criti-

cal root causes that affect overall service performance and cost.

Say there’s an unexpected spike in warranty costs for a residen-

tial air conditioner manufacturer. With SAP BusinessObjects

Explorer, a manager can analyze multiple dimensions of service

costs to identify the root cause of this spike, as well as the

specific product lines responsible for it (see Figure �). By cross-

indexing the company’s service-cost information against com-

monly available third-party data sources, the manager determines

that the claims spike correlates strongly with geographical

regions where high humidity and prevalent airborne ocean salt

are combining to accelerate the corrosion of a key component

of their product, which then causes the majority of the failures.

This key insight, which ordinarily would have taken months to

uncover, enables the company to take immediate action,

improving the product design and educating the service team

for those geographies.

Insight at the Speed of ThoughtYour valuable business data already exists. But until now, static,

predefined reporting traditions have made it nearly impossible

to use that data effectively. Only with an intuitive, flexible tool

such as SAP BusinessObjects Explorer can business users unleash

the true power and actionable insight hidden within their data,

uncovering critical trends and business outcomes at different

levels and groupings within their organization and industry.

I’ve taken you through four specific examples of how SAP

BusinessObjects Explorer revolutionizes the concept of business

intelligence reporting. There are literally hundreds more exam-

ples — from all industries — of how SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

is giving business managers unprecedented access to industry-

specific, role-based data from a multitude of systems, allowing

them to gain operational and strategic competitive advantages.

Learn more at www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/

large/business-intelligence/search-navigation/explorer. n

With comparative views of incidences by location, users can clearly see that warranty costs are highest in locations like tampa

Drill-down analytics show that the majority of installed base incidents are due to issues with the condensers

FIGURE 4 p With SAP Businessobjects explorer, users can compare their data to external data to identify root causes of costly problems