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Business Warehouse (BW) or Business Intelligence (BI)
BW is a data warehouse and contains tables of data that can be used for ad hoc reporting, either to view existing standard queries or to build queries. Financial and procurement data are loaded into BW tables from the real-time SAP R/3 system on a nightly basis (SAP R/3 is an On-line Transaction Processing software – OLTP). So while the data in BW is not updated real-time, there is only a one-day lag (SAP BW is an On-line Analytical Processing software – OLAP).
The BW tool uses an Excel Add-in, known as Business Explorer (BEx) to view the results of the query and manipulate the report to analyze the data in various ways that are not available in SAP R/3. In addition, BW allows departments to view all their cost objects (Cost Centers, Profit Centers, and WBS Elements/Projects) in one report.
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