Expedite Your BI Implementation with SAP Best Practices

Find out about the content and methodology of SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence intended for small to mid-sized businesses. SAP Best Practices are preconfigured, tested, and documented scenarios you can use during the implementation process.

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Key Concept

SAP Best Practices is the brand name for preconfigured business scenarios that SAP delivers. They are designed to simplify and speed up your implementation project. In 2004, Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences conducted a study of 192 companies that implemented SAP software with built-in industry best practices. It found that SAP Best Practices helped reduce overall project risk by 71 percent. In addition, companies that used the best practices lowered their TCO by 11 percent. SAP Press recently published this study as Enhanced Project Success Through SAP Best Practices — International Benchmarking Study.

Despite limited budgets and timelines, small and mid-sized companies can run SAP BI. SAP provides reusable SAP Best Practices that offer a step-by-step approach for self-study, evaluation, and implementation, as well as project team and end-user training. SAP Best Practices for BI includes documentation and preconfigured content, such as user roles, to develop reports that meet the needs of specific processes for small to mid-sized businesses (for example, sales, manufacturing, and Customer Relationship Management [CRM] reporting). Although companies of all sizes can use SAP Best Practices, we assume that small and mid-sized companies benefit the most because they allow even inexperienced consultants to come up to speed quickly.

SAP developed Best Practices for BI based on existing BI business content. SAP Best Practices for BI explains which business content objects you need to activate for which purposes and how to activate them. Furthermore, the documentation describes how to enhance business content or create custom objects to meet specific needs. You can use the generic SAP Best Practices for BI CD on top of all industry solutions. In addition, SAP continuously develops BI Best Practices for industries, such as Analytics for Chemicals or High Tech, which it delivers with the relevant industry solution (for example, SAP Best Practices for High Tech).

An SAP Best Practices package consists of Building Blocks, which are small, flexible, and transparent pieces of functionality that develop and deliver the technical methodology for SAP Best Practices. SAP delivers Building Blocks as documentation units on a documentation CD.