SAN FRANCISCO (02/18/2000) - New data warehouse software introduced by Server Advertisement Protocol last week should help companies make better use of data in their SAP America Inc. enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for handling e-commerce and other transaction-oriented applications.
SAP's Business Information Warehouse 2.0, like the first version of the product introduced a year ago, is designed for analyzing data in SAP R/3 ERP systems and generating reports based on the data.
But Version 2.0 also has some new wrinkles. For instance, if there's a problem in order processing - say some merchandise isn't getting shipped in a timely manner - the data warehouse software can send a message to the appropriate manager.
And unlike the original version, which only allowed sophisticated data-mining queries to be generated through a proprietary client, the new edition lets end users employ a Web client to perform such queries. The software can be used to deliver analytical reports into Excel spreadsheets. And now, it can present business data in color graphics, not just plain text.
SAP introduced Version 2.0 at its first Business Information Warehouse conference in San Francisco. Company CEO Hasso Plattner said during his keynote address that the technology is SAP's attempt to address shortcomings in R/3 itself. "We were so concerned about optimizing the business process in R/3 to please the processing engineering people that we did not work on pleasing the end user," he said.
During the conference, customers told of their experiences with SAP's data warehouse software.
Michael Crowe, director of global application development at Colgate-Palmolive, said his firm has deployed R/3 at sites around the world but has centralized its data warehouse in Piscataway, N.J. Colgate-Palmolive also has a data warehouse backup in another city. The warehouse receives regular encrypted updates over the Internet concerning the $9 billion in annual sales that Colgate-Palmolive conducts around the world. "We need to deliver this information to one place for decision-making purposes," Crowe says.
Colgate-Palmolive has about 300 end users trained to use the data-mining tools and hopes to have many more using them this year. "We even have a [Business Information Warehouse] Steering Committee in our company with senior management from Colgate," Crowe says. "It's there to align the goals and objectives of the organization based on analysis."
Version 2.0, which SAP says can process three million records per hour into its repository, starts at $1,000 per user but usually costs less for customers with an existing R/3 license.
SAP: www.sap.com.