PRODUCTS

BUSINESSOBJECTS
RAPID MARTS FOR SAP SOLUTIONS

BusinessObjects PREPACKAGED DATA WAREHOUSING SOLUTIONS FOR

Rapid Marts
Benefits
FASTER, HIGHER ROI
Accelerate your business intelligence (BI) deployment with a prebuilt data mart, using
Gain rapid insight
preconfigured metadata (Business Objects universes), sample reports, and built-in best
Accelerate BI practices for data integration in an SAP environment. BusinessObjects™ Rapid Marts™ from
deployment Business Objects, an SAP company, enables your organization to quickly build application-
specific data marts without waiting for a long data warehouse deployment or placing a heavy
Lower development
cost burden on your IT staff. Delivering prebuilt data flows, business logic, and schema,
BusinessObjects Rapid Marts understands the SAP® ERP metadata, interprets hierarchies
and difficult data structures (such as pool and cluster tables), and is rapidly deployed and
Skills Required for
Developing an extended.
SAP ERP Data
Warehouse COMPARISON OF SAP ERP AND DATA WAREHOUSING
Business analysis
SAP ERP Data Warehousing
Data modeling Design • Quick data entry • Query performance
Objectives
SAP ERP • Transactional integrity • Understandability
ABAP/4
• Avoids transactional system impact

API Support
Data Scope • Limited to current • Includes actuals, budgets, forecast, and historical
transactional data data
ABAP
• Preserves historical data relationship
BAPI
• Makes it easy to include additional data sources
IDoc
RDBMS • Complex data analysis • Simple and predictable
Design
• Thousands of tables • Dozens of star schema

• Normalized data • Denormalized data

Table 1: Comparison of SAP ERP and Data Warehousing

.
BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP Solutions are prepackaged, flexible data marts that can
be implemented in weeks instead of the months or quarters that are normally associated with
data warehousing projects on SAP ERP. Rapid Marts are powered by BusinessObjects Data
Integrator, a powerful and productive data integration platform that leads the industry with its
support for extracting data from and loading data into SAP ERP and SAP Business Information
Warehouse (BW) systems. SAP application interfaces supported include ABAP, BAPI, and
IDoc.

With Rapid Marts, you don’t need to acquire specialized skills in the areas of data
warehousing, data modeling, business domains, and enterprise applications. As a result, you
can significantly lower your development costs.

Rapid Marts are designed using industry best practices and input from hundreds of companies
to meet the vast majority of your needs. Within days, you can quickly and easily customize the
Rapid Marts for your specific query and analysis, reporting, and performance management
requirements.

Each Rapid Mart™ is designed to address the reporting and analytic needs of a specific
business area like general ledger, sales, or purchasing. A component-based framework allows
you analyze across these subject areas by combining different Rapid Marts. This allows your
business priorities to drive your BI deployment while enabling you to lower maintenance costs.
10 Essential Steps for Building Data Marts and Data Warehouses on SAP ERP
Data
The following lists the 10 essential steps for building data marts and data warehouses on SAP
ERP data. BusinessObjects Rapid Marts facilitate the first nine steps.

1. Specify business requirements.

2. Determine what data is required.

3. Discover exactly where that data is held.

4. Identify and incorporate SAP ERP customizations.

5. Design and build database schema for the data mart.

6. Create programs to initially populate the data mart.

7. Identify and capture new, changed, and deleted transactions.

8. Cleanse, transform, validate, and load changes.

9. Robust error recovery and failover processes.

10. Gather feedback, refine, and go live.

PREBUILT FOR RAPID IMPLEMENTATION

BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP ERP delivers packaged functionality, including:

• Business domain expertise

• Data modeling expertise

• SAP ERP and ABAP/4 technical expertise

• Data warehousing expertise

Business Domain Expertise

Each Rapid Mart reflects the expertise and experience of leading business analysts and SAP
ERP domain experts from hundreds of organizations. Rapid Marts provide best-practice
business analysis and data models that span multiple business processes and functions.
BusinessObjects
Rapid Marts
Features

Data models

DDL for schema

creation

Recommended
joins and indexes

ETL workflows for

initial and
incremental data

Job recovery
framework

Sample universes,
SQL, and reports

Technical and Figure 1. BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP

business analysis
documentation Each SAP ERP module offers flexibility and the ability to be customized, with much variation in
business processes and analysis requirements between modules. Therefore, the underlying
data model is very complex. For example:

• Some modules allow transactions to be physically deleted, making it difficult to track or

analyze cancellations.

• Most modules copy master data as each transaction advances through a business
process, which presents the question: For each transaction type, which version is the
right version?
Data Modeling Expertise
As different as each SAP ERP module can be, it’s vital that each Rapid Mart can be linked
together to support analyses like customer profitability, marketing effectiveness, and employee
productivity. This connectivity requires data from different modules. You can install the data
models for each Rapid Mart together to create a conformed data warehouse based on industry
best practices for data warehouse design, as defined by The Kimball Group. Adherence to
standards enables business queries to traverse multiple subject areas and deliver even greater
insight.

BusinessObjects Rapid Marts are easily extended to include additional data from SAP ERP,
SAP BW, other SAP systems, and data from all your other enterprise databases, applications,
or legacy systems.
SAP Technical Expertise
Rapid Marts exploits the rich support for SAP ERP provided by BusinessObjects Data
Integrator, including browsing and importing metadata from SAP’s data dictionary, generating
ABAP/4 to access all ERP data – pooled, clustered, and transparent tables. Industry experts
have developed, refined, and incorporated the best techniques for correctly extracting and
preparing the data to meet the business analysis requirements for each Rapid Mart. For
example:

• BusinessObjects Rapid Mart for SAP ERP Sales provides alternative methods for
calculating backlogs that manage the identification and removal of cancellations and
physical deletions.

• BusinessObjects Rapid Mart for SAP ERP Inventory includes an option to create a
derived history of daily inventory by accumulating materials movements over time, to
overcome the lack of inventory history in SAP ERP.
 • BusinessObjects Rapid Mart for SAP ERP Production Planning saves planned orders
during initial and incremental loads. This is necessary for comparing material
requirements planning (MRP) production plans with actual production orders, as ERP
planned orders have no creation dates and are deleted when converted to production
orders.
Data Warehousing Expertise
BusinessObjects Rapid Marts embody the practical experiences from thousands of data mart
and data warehousing implementations. The flexible, component-based design means that
these Rapid Marts can be implemented standalone or in any combination. The advanced error
recovery and intelligent workflow framework prevents jobs from being repeated unnecessarily
– even where Rapid Marts share components for conformed dimensions or partially completed
workflows are restarted.

FLEXIBLE AND CONFIGURABLE

Each Rapid Mart is designed to be easily configured and extended. Dozens of variables are
used to control all the extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. For example:

• The BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP ERP Sales includes parameters for defining
whether to examine drop shipments and when to search for deleted orders or changes in
business partner data.

• All BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP ERP contain parameters for defining default
values, company code, and start and end dates for data extraction.

• The BusinessObjects Rapid Mart for SAP ERP Accounts Payable includes parameters
that define buckets for aging periods.

Rapid Marts are designed with input from hundreds of companies to meet the vast majority of
your needs in a matter of days. Additionally, using BusinessObjects Data Integrator, you can
quickly and easily customize the Rapid Marts for your specific query and analysis, reporting,
and performance management requirements.

IMPLEMENT IN DAYS, CUSTOMIZE WITHIN WEEKS

With BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP Solutions, you can get the right information at the
right time to improve your organizational performance. To learn more about our
BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP Solutions and how they can make data management
and business intelligence easy for your organization, visit us online at
www.businessobjects.com.

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