You are here: CenterView \ Getting the Most Out of SAP BW

Getting the Most Out of SAP BW

Corda® CenterView™ Gives Companies a Comprehensive View of SAP BW Data

Companies that invest in SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) make a tremendous investment in the value of their information. Although SAP BW makes a wealth of information available to these companies, many find it difficult to take advantage of their data. Decision makers need data in an easily accessible and comprehensible format, and that format requires a layer between SAP BW and the end user. Corda® CenterView™ integrates with SAP BW, providing an easy-tounderstand, personalized, and secure dashboard view of the data to any end user with an Internet browser, including users with mobile devices.

CenterView Dashboards—Mining All the Data

CenterView software creates a performance dashboard that provides insight about a company’s data. Decision makers need this insight to see trends, perform analysis, compare results, and get the business intelligence necessary to make informed decisions.

CenterView provides advanced, customizable graphs, charts, and viewing options that are not available through SAP BW. In addition, CenterView dashboards can pull data from any data source, including spreadsheets, flat files, and virtually any database, so companies who don’t keep all their data in SAP BW can rely on CenterView to combine data from SAP BW with data from other sources and display it all in the same dashboard.

To connect to SAP BW and other online analytical processing (OLAP) systems, CenterView comes with a standards-based XMLA (extensible markup language for analysis) connector. Companies with SAP BW can customize CenterView so that they can view their most essential data in the chart or graph formats intuitively.

Flexibility to Mold Information to the Users Who Need It

Of course, one size doesn’t fit all—even within the same company. A decision maker in human resources relies on different data than a marketing decision maker. Companies can create dashboards to present different data to different users from the same SAP BW source. CenterView’s strong and flexible security provides role-based authentication so companies can determine who sees what based on their roles. This control also means they can provide employees with access to specific statistics from SAP BW without providing an SAP BW login.

CenterView’s robust architecture also makes it scalable. Even if a company has a very large number of data records and end users, CenterView can still query the data source and provide right-time information to those users. CenterView’s patented Datafunnel™ technology uses a smart querying system and caching to provide the highest performance.

Working Integrations of CenterView and SAP BW

A number of companies have successfully implemented Corda solutions with their SAP BWs. These companies are a few examples:

Macnica. Macnica is a leading global IT provider headquartered in Japan with offices in North America. Macnica used Corda’s products and technologies to create B3 Smart, a data visualization and publishing solution. B3 Smart gathers data from numerous backend systems, including SAP BW, through a custom connector that Macnica created, and it presents this data in a visual format as a portal, a business console, or a custom reporting solution. To learn more about B3 Smart, visit http://wsp.macnica.co.jp/en/b3smart.html.
Old Dominion Freight Line. Old Dominion Freight Line, a global leader in transportation solutions, uses the XMLA connector to pull data from millions of records stored in its SAP BW cube environment. Old Dominion uses Corda CenterView to view transportation units and data, and to monitor world-wide views of company data.
Old Dominion Freight Line. Old Dominion Freight Line, a global leader in transportation solutions, uses the XMLA connector to pull data from millions of records stored in its SAP BW cube environment. Old Dominion uses Corda CenterView to view transportation units and data, and to monitor world-wide views of company data.

CenterView Connectivity Architecture

CenterView, Corda’s performance dashboard solution, connects directly with OLAP databases, like SAP BW, using XMLA and Corda’s patented Datafunnel™ technology. This connectivity lets Corda customers pull critical data from OLAP cubes and deliver it in a visual format to users’ desktops.

To view the CenterView dashboard, and by extension the valuable data housed in an OLAP cube or warehouse, users need only a browser on their computers. When a company implements CenterView as a front end for SAP BW, it suddenly becomes easy to support a multiple operating system environment and still get data to the end users who need it. In addition, CenterView also supports a number of operating systems for multiple devices, like the Blackberry, so SAP BW data truly becomes available at almost any place and time a decision maker needs it most.

CenterView issues MDX queries to the database using XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) formed as XMLA. OLAP databases parse out and execute the queries from the protocol information. The XMLA connector also receives the responses from the database and returns results to CenterView as XML. Corda’s XMLA connector uses library code from an open-source project called Rex (http://sourceforge.net/projects/whex) to facilitate this communication and XML parsing of the results.

To use CenterView with SAP BW, SAP BW administrators need to know how to do the following:

Enable SAP BW’s XMLA support at the SAP BW server. Instructions are online at http://help.sap.com/javadocs/NW04/current/bi/docs/connectors/ xmla_howto.html.
Make navigational attributes and related dimensions available to OLE DB or thirdparty application MDX queries. After a query is created, developers can use the BEX interface to select “OLEDB for OLAP.” After doing this once, the application can construct MDX queries to query the OLAP cube much like the BEX tool’s capability.

CenterView and SAP BW—A Natural Combination

SAP BW is one of the most powerful and extensive OLAP database solutions on the market. Corda CenterView provides superior solutions for business performance management and data visualization. Together, they are an outstanding combination. CenterView has achieved a solid integration with SAP BW and other OLAP systems, but that doesn’t mean Corda has stopped working. Corda continues to actively pursue relationships with partners and customers to further tighten technical integration and provide companies with the insight they need to fully reap the benefits of their SAP BW investments.