SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence reviews

At first, the software is looking complicated, but using it very easier after passing an induction

allow exporting data to another tool for further exploitation, good data cleaning and KPI monitoring

easy to set up , handle and customize

the cost of the license is as high as it cant allow small-scale business to buy and use

Possibility to apply to different regions of company operations in the world, make it standard.
Crosschecks rules to ensure consistent reports

No low code
It demands techinal team queue to update business needs.

It's easy to use, the cost is less as compared to tableau or other BI products in the market and customer care is good.

You need to maintain universe layer to talk to the database, it does not talk to databases directly. If you have to add a new field in the report from the database then you have to add that particular field in universe layer which is added headache.
If you have to create a report by using data from multiple data sources then you have to create detail variable, which is again a mess!!!
Also, visualization wise it is pathetic because I have checked tableau. Usually, I use excel to do my visualization and presentation because it's better than business objects
Also, you cannot use it for predictive analysis.

Ease of use and fast in generating reports

Refresh time needs to be improved particularly to fix issues or errors

Easy to use Tools and Data analysis Kits

Need to adopt some dynamic features like Tableau and Power BI

Business Objects has many capabilities, for me, the ease of publication of reports is the most important.

SAP is a large company, if you work for a relatively small company (700 people), then you have to go through a partner. The quality of these partners varies.

I love the scheduling feature of the reports wherein you can easily schedule reports to be executed on a particular day.

Reports with data more than 1 lakh rows takes a lot of time and even crashes sometimes

For an SAP environment, this is best tool for reporting, since it can be connected effectively with SAP

The connectivity of this tool with non SAP tools is not straight forward or simple

Fast and reliable. Data protection given utmost priority

Not that user friendly compared to other tools in the market.

This is good time management tool with simple user interface

User interface can be modified for more simplicity.

I love most everything about BusinessObjects. It's a great way for our employees to self-service in many cases as previously they had no way to get access to larger data sets unless they put in a request with analytics. But now our Directors have access to data and reports at their fingertips with minimal training (they don't need an in-depth understanding of databases or SQL queries to use the software).

A con that is worth mentioning is that exporting large data sets can be a bit slow. But the ease of use and other benefits definitely outweigh that.

1. It is a massive BI tool which can support thousands of reports within the company
2. The security implementation is much far advanced
3. The different tools of the package WebI, Crystal, analytical tools serves/covers all needs
4. Lot of intelligence applied building this software and latest versions 4.2 is much advanced and feature rich
5. It also has ETL tool BODS providing end to end solution
6. It connects to all most all RDBS databases

1. Platform administration is too challenging
2. software version and patch takes lot of time
3. Too many features sometime confuses the developer and users (till there is scope for user friendly)
4. New release are too late and other side competitor like Tableau are moving very fast
5. Lumira still lacks lot than equivalent competitor tools

The speed and ease of using SAP BI in c comfortable format (we use the Excel Inrerface)

Sometime a pre-existing BI report does blow up and it leaves the report without a connection to BI. Report has to be recreated - no recovery.

Once it's been implemented for the entire company it integrates every aspect smoothly. The ability to link every part of the business is invaluable. From HR to logistics to production, managing warehouse inventory cost saving are realized.

Implementation can be tricky if the people setting it up dont take the time to learn the business from one end to the other. It takes a team working in unison to develop a fully functional system. I've seem great things from SAP and I've seen a company sinking from a poor implementation.

We use SAP Business Objects in conjunction with Crystal Reports to provide web based links for our employees to run on their own within the constraints of the parameters. I like that it is easy to navigate and sort by file name. The organization of information is clear and straightforward and it is easy to customize how you want to see things.

I wish there were options to add certain columns to your view. For example if I want to sort by name or last update, I can, no problem. But if i want to get any details on frequency or last time a user ran a report, i have to either go into the settings or run a report.

I use SAP solutions to create dashboards and visual reports.
What I like in SAP BO, that we can create powerful and innovative presentations - from 0 to our vision.
I use many of all great options like:
- maps
- charts
- gauges
- sliders.
Except that, it's possible to add external data and visual elements like shetchnotes and files from other formats.
What is very important, reports are interactive, so we can create what-if analysis in easy way, with our vision in out minds. Dashboards can be connnected to external data sources like Excel or databases.

It would be great to be able to work more without specific informatics knowledge. It would be great to see more options to share final work with others.

SAP Business objects is great for storage, creation, and reports sharing. It allows us to use real time business data and prepare reports from real time data for making business major decisions.
Reports creation could be difficult for the beginners, since there is a long learning curve to master all it´s functionalities. But once you´re there, you realized how powerful this tool is.

SAP support service is not the best in my opinion. Long response times, and sometimes they don´t offer effective solutions to our problems.

The best part of SAP Business Objects is it's powerful suite of tools. You can run Analysis for Office for many end users and they are able to self serve whatever they need. You can build out powerful storyboards with Lumira. You can also create standardized formatted reporting with Crystal Reports. That doesn't even touch on Design Studio, which can also be a powerful tool.

Some of the programs are still not quite as bug free as you would expect from a vendor like SAP. I feel like we still have too many freezes, crashes, and unexplained behavior. However, I will say that SAP is very quick to respond and they are a great vendor to work with.

Once you know how to utilize the system, the data and information you can obtain and reports that you can set up are endless

Very challenging for non-accounting minded folks to understand, difficult for beginners to use without lots of support, customer service is non-existent

You have options to upgrade, SAP Lumira is the next amazing product to always upgrade to when you are ready for the next level of analytics and graphical representation of your data

SAP BI itself is still stagnant in its improvements, sticking on to the traditional functionalities of the product, it has a huge gap between its next level of reporting.

I liked that it could be embedded with single sign on with a transactional application in a SaaS environment. This enables companies to build the software they have domain knowledge in and take advantage of reporting capabilities that tools like Business Objects has.

It can sometimes be difficult to work through navigation issues when embedding the software. It requires someone to understand how to get into the toolkit, which has a learning curve.

facilitates self service and is user friendly to write queries with basic training of users thereby reducing reliance on central IT. Also data can be exported to excel/pdf etc.

This product works well when there is a data warehouse and data is regularly uploaded to the data warehouse so that users can write query and generate data from the query.

Love how quick and easy it is to use this program . A lot of our major software programs are SAP based and very user friendly

sometimes the layout of things was a little confusing or too cluttered for my taste. i would probably change the layout

SAP is one of the leading companies in the business intelligence industry.
The seriousness and professionalism of SAP is maximum, the products are highly professional and suitable for large companies wanting to establish a comprehensive BI solution structured and well-functioning.
Through SAP Business Objects you can independently develop highly professional products business intelligence, creating optimal and detailed reports, dashboards attractive, and OLAP structures by connecting to different heterogeneous data sources.

SAP Business Object surely is not a product that can be developed by inexperienced users, can certainly be used by intermediate users following a minimum of necessary training.

The best thing about SAP in our institution is that it is extremely easy to get data from the system as well as doing you own management applications, from having a data sheet about the number of students to ask for annual leave.

It may be a bit complicated to learn how to use it but once you do it is quite useful