Academy of Better Business

Xcelsius integrated with SAP BW

KPI dashboards for management

Xcelsius – a tool from the SAP BusinessObjects family, integrated with the SAP data warehouse, enables you to easily create manager dashboards on your own. It’s good news for managers who perceive Business Intelligence as an important tool for tracking performance metrics.

From the point of view of the company management, a large portion of information requirements can be translated into Key Performance Indicators (KPI), whose tracking and monitoring is essential for an organization to function efficiently. The awareness that the effectiveness of business processes can be expressed using numerical values brings the objectives of persons responsible for the execution of individual processes closer to the company’s strategic objectives. Indirectly, they impose a discipline and regularity in the work of all people – from an operational level up to management.

Necessary Business Intelligence

In today’s business environment characterized by the accumulation of information from various sources (transactional systems, spreadsheets, intranet and other), it is not possible to make a KPI analysis without a Business Intelligence (BI) solution. As with other tools for corporate performance management, after the implementation and the first period of the BI system operation, it is the time to determine its quality and to make decisions on the directions of its development.

A measure of the BI system quality must be, of course, its functionality, but do not forget that BI tools can fulfill their tasks only if they are able to keep pace with changing information requirement from the business users. Even the most flexible reports are worth as much as the value of the performance data are current and relevant.

The time required from arising the need to create a new KPI to its implementation in the system must be acceptable in business terms. Often this element is underestimated during the implementation of the BI system, which may lead to a smaller-than-expected acceptance and use of the BI system by users.

Managerial dashboards for KPI tracking

For the users who perceive the Business Intelligence system as a tool for tracking KPI and not only as a reporting tool, SAP prepared an additional functionality in the SAP Business Warehouse system – a full integration with Xcelsius. So far, these tools have been interoperating using functions available in the BusinessObjects platform. Now, new SAP BW functions make Xcelsius a fully functional tool of the SAP BW reporting layer, like Business Explorer (BEx) or Crystal Reports.

This enables analysts to work with Xcelsius more intuitively and independently using data from SAP BW – to prepare, modify and publish manager dashboards.

The integration of Xcelsius dashboards with SAP BW means increased security. Dashboards prepared in Xcelsius become SAP BW objects, and thus they are subject to the SAP transport system rules. A dashboard, like any other BEx or Crystal Reports, can be prepared and tested in the development system, and then transported to production environment. In this way, it is possible to separate the development work from the productive operation – which increases control and ensures the continuous operation of the system.

Simultaneously, SAP AG prepared a new interface to data in the warehouse (called BI Customer Services). It enables a dashboard creator to directly connect a dashboard element (e.g. a chart) to a BW query. So far, this has been possible only through the BusinessObjects Enterprise (BOE) platform or Web services, and thus it has required more time and additional efforts to prepare data sources for Xcelsius.

The new interface in this case means that it so no longer necessary to use middleware and additional technologies only for feeding dashboards with the SAP BW data. It simplifies a lot the feeding of the dashboard with data from the business information warehouse. You simply select an appropriate data source type and indicate a query in SAP BW.

Xcelsius dashboards in the BI portal

The new integration means also the possibility to publish Xcelsius dashboards in the BI portal (SAP NetWeaver Portal). With just few clicks the dashboard can be made visible for portal users logeed on. The dashboard displayed on the portal uses users’s authorizations in the BW system. This means that the data displayed in the dashboard is always consistent with the scope of data to which the user is authorized. 

It is extremely important, particularly with regard to performance metrics crucial for business operations which are only relevant for a specific group of users. This also enables, for example, one dashboard to be published for all regional sales managers and each of them will see on the dashboard the indicators calculated for his/her own region.

All new functions described above will make the KPI analysis in the SAP BW business information warehouse more user-friendly, and its support will require less effort. The presented possibilities confirm that SAP AG consistently follows the outlined path of development of SAP BW and BusinessObjects tools, which aims to provide customers with best-of-breed Business Intelligence solutions.