When it comes to handling large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) responsibilities, there are many companies that have already decided that SAP is the right solution for them. It allows them the capability to warehouse information, analyse key business decisions and lead the organisation in a forward-thinking direction.
It can also be quite cumbersome, though. If you've already been using SAP in your office, you know this - much of the data analysis process is tedious and manual, and reporting through SAP's Business Objects product for business intelligence (BI) can be challenging.
Fortunately, you don't have to run your business using SAP alone. By bringing Qlik BI software into the fold, you can reach an entirely new level of capability. You get access to your businesses data held in SAP and other systems with theanalytical prowess of Qlik.
How Qlik changes the BI paradigm
While SAP still dominates in the ERP space, it has moved out of Gartner's Leaders Quadrant for business intelligence platforms some time ago. Mainly due to its complexity to use, maintain and update, and the great deal of manual effort required to gather all the data you need and get to work. ABAP queries, SAP BW and module reports take users part way to the insights they need but have serious shortcomings. It's difficult to interact with SAP across its entire dataset, or even across multiple dimensions within tables. Conducting reporting and analysis across tables and integrating data from other systems are also extremely challenging.
The good news is that adding Qlik's leading BI software into the mix can make the entire process far easier. Unlike SAP and Business Objects, Qlik is extremely intuitive and easy to use and maintain. Qlik incorporates two certified SAP Connectors one Powered by SAP NetWeaver and the other for integration with SAP HANA so incorporating SAP data and structures is easy. This provides intuitive self-serve dashboards and reporting of SAP, R/3, mySAP, SAP BW, HANA and BEX queries with data from non-SAP systems. All of this data is available to users with a single click in a rapid, flexible way.
Check out our Inside SAP Dashboard
We've been working with SAP data and the Qlik business analytics platform for over thirteen years. As a result, we've developed a number of industry specific best-practice business analytics dashboards using Qlik to integrate efficiently with SAP data. Our Inside SAP Dashboard based on Qlik delivers extraordinarily sophisticated, interactive analysis and consolidated view of performance across customer, financial, sales and distribution data from SAP and non-SAP data sources. We find by using the Inside SAP Dashboard, BI projects are significantly fast tracked while user adoption is increased by leveraging the learnings of others. Our customers like Amcor, Toro and many others have been typically up and running within 30 days.
To learn more about how we've improved business analytics and reporting using Qlik alongside SAP, check out this case study of our work at global packaging giant, Orora.