Additional Components

Business Warehouse

In addition to the financial reporting functions available in SAP, the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) product is available as an additional tool for more advanced reporting options. 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 system on a nightly basis. So while the data in BW is not updated real-time, there is only a one-day lag.

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. In addition, BW allows departments to view all their cost objects (Cost Centers, Profit Centers, and WBS Elements/Projects) in one report. Most reports for the University and School of Medicine (Company Code 0010) allow for reporting on only one kind of cost object at the time.

See your SAP Security Administrator to gain access to BW.