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, payroll, human resources, 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 Analysis for Office or Analysis for Excel 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. 

Gaining Access to Business Warehouse (BW)

To gain access to Business Warehouse (BW), follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have security access to use BW via your SAP Security Initiator.
  2. Contact Desktop Support for your department and ask to for installation of the latest version of SAPgui, which includes BWP - Business Warehouse Production, according to the instructions on the OIT Knowledge Base article KB0032058.
  3. Learn more about BW from the following resources: