This is the first of the series of posts I will be doing to document my business intelligence training. If you are new to this blog, let me explain.
I have decided to pay some hard-earned money to get trained in SAP business intelligence. I have also decided to post some of my notes here for two reasons,
1. For you to be able to follow along and get educated along with me
2. To help myself understand what I am learning. I will not be able to write an article on something I don’t understand and this way I am forced to go and do some more research.
Okay let’s start, the first course was about the basic ideas of business Intelligence, what it is all about and why it is important to companies.
Why is business intelligence needed?
Modern day Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have made it easier to gather data about almost anything. This can be the date and time a customer ordered a product, the number of orders over the lifetime of that customer etc. Multiply this amount of data by the number of customers the company has and you can easily see that for a customer that has millions of customers, the amount of data gathered is huge. Another problem is that the data might be saved in different formats, different databases.
But this is necessarily not a problem. If you have a system that can efficiently gather the data from all theses sources and produce some meaning from it, that can potentially be powerful information for a company.
This is the goal of SAP business intelligence, to streamline the whole process all the way from
1. Gathering the data from all available sources
2. Storing it efficiently for fast and easy access,
3. Analyzing the data and creating reports that can be used to draw meaningful information.
4. Presenting reports in a multimedia format, in the form of charts, images etc.
5. And ultimately help the user in efficient decision making.
If someone asks you, what is a business intelligence system. You tell them it is one that basically makes sense of data.
This is all I have for now, there was more to the lesson. Stuff about the Data warehouse side of the story and
the differences between a BI/Warehouse (OLAP) system and a classic OLTP system. This is better explained using
a video. So I might do a screencast next.
Your comments are welcome as always….
This is the first of the series of posts I will be doing to document my SAP BI training. If you are new to this blog, let me explain.
I have decided to pay some hard-earned money to get trained in SAP business intelligence. I have also decided to post some of my notes here for two reasons,
- For you to be able to follow along and get educated along with me.
- To help myself understand what I am learning. I will not be able to write an article on something I don’t understand and this way I am forced to go and do some more research.
Okay let’s start, the first course was about the basic ideas of SAP BI business intelligence, what it is all about and why it is important to companies.
Why is business intelligence (BI) needed?
Modern day Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have made it easier to gather data about almost anything. This can be the date and time a customer ordered a product, the number of orders over the lifetime of that customer etc. Multiply this amount of data by the number of customers the company has and you can easily see that for a customer that has millions of customers, the amount of data gathered is huge. Another problem is that the data might be saved in different formats, different databases.
But this is necessarily not a problem. If you have a system that can efficiently gather the data from all theses sources and produce some meaning from it, that can potentially be powerful information for a company.
This is the goal of SAP business intelligence, to streamline the whole process all the way from
1. Gathering the data from all available sources
2. Storing it efficiently for fast and easy access,
3. Analyzing the data and creating reports that can be used to draw meaningful information.
4. Presenting reports in a multimedia format, in the form of charts, images etc.
5. And ultimately help the user in efficient decision making.
If someone asks you, what is a business intelligence system. You tell them it is one that basically makes sense of data.
This is all I have for now, there was more to the lesson. Stuff about the Data warehouse side of the story and the differences between a BI/Warehouse (OLAP) system and a classic OLTP system. This is better explained using a video. So I might do a screencast next.
Your comments are welcome as always….
You can find all the other lessons on SAP BI Training here.
Tagged as:
business intelligence training,
sap bi tutorial
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Nice way you have started. I would like to see its well progress. So waiting for your next post. Will you tell me how could i be informed about your next posting????
Thank you, Mezanur.
I am happy you are interested. If you subscibe to my email tips newsletter on the right, you will get a summary every week.
Cheers,
James
In your opinion what do you think the pre-requisite to learn BI?
While going through the course, I found out that having some basic database knowledge was an advantage. I don’t feel it is a prerequisite though, if you have an analytic mind you should be able to follow the concepts.
Good One……. keep posting…… I’m very interested in BI . working with ABAP is getting bore
Hey James – I like the way you have simplified things. Good approach and keep ‘em comming.
Thanks, Gajen… I will keep ‘em coming.. :-)
Hello,
I just started my SAP Training online and I think its great with screen shots and explanations using the skillport computer based online training . The materials are concise and straight to them point . I wanted to know more about the online access to SAP IDES systems that you mentioned for practicing what one learns. Do they contain preset data that u can use to configure BI solutions for say a ficticious company. How do these IDES work. How about these precofigured IDES Hard drives that are being sold from india? are they same with the online access?
thanks
Yes, IDES stands for Internet Demonstration and Evaluation System. SAP IDES is actually a fictitious company with a lot business processes already implemtented.
but you have to be careful, the companies offer IDES’s with SAP ERP ECC6.0 version installed, SAP BI 7.0 is an add-on to that installation. make sure that when you
are choosing one to go for, you ask if this is the case. Which option are you planning to go for?
I have never seen SAP BI being taught in this simple way. You make it look easier than I thought.
Thanks for sharing your skill and experience and I hope you keep this up.
I will like to suggest that you have all your recordings lessons structured and arranged for easy access.
I am glad you find it useful… Thanks