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Overview of theBusiness Warehouse
at the University of Tennessee
BW Technical TeamJohn Jarrard
Jackie Swingle, Jackie Daste, Daniel Dooley (consultant),David Goforth, Ed Johnson, Lynn Sterling
December 6, 2000
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Today’s Presentation
• Project Background and Status
• Business Warehouse Concepts
• The Payoff
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Two Projects In One
• Establish:
Legacy Business Warehouse (LBW)
IRIS Business Warehouse (IBW)
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LBW Goal
To provide continuing computer access to legacy master and detailed data not planned for conversion to UT’s IRIS system
(OLTP, Active R/3)
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IRIS BW Goal
To provide continuing computer access to
IRIS financial and human resources data for end user query and decision support processing...
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Develop IRIS Business Warehouse
• Statewide BW Project Team
– Identifies data and reporting needs
• Technical Support Team
– Supports implementation
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Original Emphasis and Plan
• Implement a Legacy Business Warehouse
• Address an IRIS Business Warehouse following IRIS Go-Live date of
April, 2001
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New Emphasis and Plan
• Cut our teeth on
Legacy Business Warehouse
• Implement the IRIS Business Warehouse concurrent with the IRIS Go-Live date of April, 2001
– i.e., Management Information System component of IRIS
Revised
Plan
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Why the Change?
• Continued availability of mainframe
• Recognition of robust query and Decision Support System (DSS) capabilities of BW
• More effective use of consulting resources
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New Schedule and Plan
• Continue to convert legacy data sources to LBW
• Initiate IRIS Business Warehouse Project in November, 2000 for
Go-Live with IRIS R/3
• Complete legacy conversion post IRIS
Go-Live
Go-Live
April, 2001
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Current Status
• Significant progress on 3 of 4 legacy data sources planned for LBW
– Payroll History
– Employee Database
– General Ledger Database
– Financial Activity
• Business Warehouse servers installed
• Upgrade to BW 2.0B Completed
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Current Status (Continued)
• Technical Team 2.0B Delta Training Complete
• Initial IRIS R/3 InfoCubes Selected for Activation
Some Important BW Concepts
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The Goal: Decision Support
• Originally, paper reports produced by programmers
• About 1980, copy data from paper reports to spreadsheets
• Today, user access to data with analysis and formatting as needed
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What is a Data Warehouse?
• A database used solely for reporting and analysis
– Organized by subject area
– Integrated
– Nonvolatile
– Time Variant
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Data Warehouse: Subject Oriented
• Organized into subject areas versus transactions or data entry
Athletic Event System
Cultural Event SystemHR System
Employee Participation in UT EventsSubject Area
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Data Warehouse: Integrated
• Data coming into the warehouse is modified to assign a common coding scheme
Athletic Event SystemCultural Event System
Employee Participation in UT EventsSubject Area
Department code:9999999
Department code:xxxxxxx Department code:
xxxx99.99
Department Code:
Common Code or mapping of the various source codes
HR System
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Data Warehouse: Nonvolatile
• Read-only
• User can’t write back
Transaction
Processing
(IRIS)
Warehouse
(BW)
Read
Write
Read
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Data Warehouse: Time Variant
• To support trend analysis
• Historical data kept at different levels of detail
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Business Information Warehouse (BW)
• A separate application (add on)
• Is independent from SAP R/3. Has its own release and shipment cycle
• SAP R/3 runs the day-to-day business
• BW is used to support business decisions by providing:
– Information analysis
– Reporting capabilities
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• Integrated with SAP IRIS
• Delivered business content
• Support using existing knowledge base
– BASIS
– ABAP
• Comprehensive tool set
– Extraction
– Administration
– Query
Why BW as UT’s Solution?
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• Goal is to make relevant information available to selected user roles
• Assists with:– information deployment– data presentation and analysis– data warehouse management– data extraction and transformation
• BW is delivered with many pre-configured and extendable intelligence tools:– 48+ InfoCubes– 166+ queries– 182+ workbooks
BW Business Content
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BW Terminology
• Like many software products, SAP uses terminology that may be unfamiliar:
– BEx
– Query
– Operational Data Store
– InfoCube
– Key Figures
– Characteristics
– Dimensions
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BEx Analyzer
• An Excel based, interactive environment
• Serves as the reporting environment for end users
• Allows user to manipulate query output as a document
• Used to:
– Define queries
– Execute queries
– Analyze data
– Save queries (in workbooks)
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Queries
• Queries are the
instructions
used to retrieve
data from the
warehouse
• Users can
define their own
queries
Available
Query
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InfoCube
AvailableInfoCubes
• A subset of a data warehouse
• Designed to:
– Answer specific end-user’s queries
– Provide information for specific analysis
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Key FiguresKey Figures | available selected
• Quantifiable data
• Is the lowest level of detail
• Example:
– non-calculated:
Sick Leave Taken
Annual Leave Taken
Personal Leave Taken
– calculated:
Total Leave Taken
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Characteristics
• Describes the
Key Figures
• Typically, data selection criteria such as:
– Department
– Budget Entity
– Fiscal Year
Characteristics
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Dimensions• A logical
grouping of characteristics within an InfoCube
• An employee dimension might contain:– employee ID– DOB– Academic
Rank– Gender
Dimensions
The Payoff
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Questions?
