SAP Business warehouse popularly known as SAP BW is SAP's data warehousing solution. For readers here to understand SAP BW better, a data warehouse stores data in a format which is optimized for reporting. A data warehouse can manage data from various sources and provide customized strategic and analytical reports. One may wonder, why is there a need for a report analyzer when SAP R/3 comes pre-configured with thousands of reports. With SAP R/3 one can get realtime transaction based reports as well as periodic reports i.e. monthly, weekly, yearly etc. SAP BW on the other hand provides multidimensional analytical reporting. With SAP business warehouse, one can generate scorecards, what-if analysis, trends etc. BW reports however are not real time but can be generated for one day old SAP data.

So why should one use SAP BW. There may be many reasons why companies go in for SAP BW. Some major advantages of using BW can be

- one common source of strategic reporting
- Reports available by characteristic such as cost center, profit center, material etc as well as by key figures such as actual, budget, units etc.
- SAP BW integrates with R/3 providing drill down features and direct access to transactions. Users can also filter results.

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