Big4Guy

SAP BW is a winner SAP application as far as business decision support is concerned. Readers might remember my post of how implementing SAP R/3 is different from implementing SAP BW. Having decided to implement SAP BW, organizations are faced as to the apporach to take to implement BW. There are generally two categories here, companies which already have SAP R/3 implemeneted and want to implement SAP BW to leverage business decision making. On the other hand, there are orgzanizations which are looking at BW implementation parallely with R/3 implementation.

Whichever category your organization may be in, there are two implementation approaches. Here is a short description of each approach.

Pilot Approach - In this appraoch, SAP BW is implemented for key business processes accross the enterprise. Processes which have the highest financial impact should be chosen as the pilot process. Once BW is successfully rolled out for the pilot processes with adequate testing, it can be duplicated for the other processes as well. the advantage of the pilot model to implement BW is that learnings from the pilot process implementation can be used in other BW implementations.

Big Bang Approach - The other not so recommended approach is to go for an all out implementation of SAP BW across all the business processes. So processes like order to cash, procure to pay, payroll, inventory, financials etc will all be covered in the implementation. The risk in this approach is unless planned properly, the big bang approach tends to fail. Further, this approach to SAP BW implementation requires an huge initial investment of resources as well as money.

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