Business Objects

Business Objects [also referred to as BO, BOBJ] is part of SAP AG. At the time of the most recent release there were over 46,000 customers worldwide for BusinessObjects XI.

BusinessObjects XI provides a single business intelligence [BI] platform to track, understand, and manage corporate information.

BusinessObjects XI performance management suite includes:

• Information management - access, transform, and integrate data
• Reporting - access, format, and deliver data
• Analytics - self serve query and analysis tools
• BusinessObjects Enterprise XI [BI] platform - manages BI tools, reports, and applications
  

Key Features

• OLAP analysis
• Securely connect and use BI seamlessly within other applications
• Integrates with Microsoft, IBM, and SAP.

Supports

Activity Based Costing - provides clear insight into customer, product, and channel profitability, and is a core component of enterprise performance management [EPM]. The ability of Activity Analysis to accurately determine costs also aids in the costing and cross-charging of shared services like IT, HR, and finance.

Analytics - analytics provide built-in best practices, the ability to link analytics to internal processes and procedures, and the flexibility to extend an application to fit a company's unique business requirements.

Scorecards - helps organizations communicate strategy, manage performance, and provide users with the information needed to make decisions and act with confidence.

Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting - encourages best practice performance management with a closed-loop process that begins with strategic planning, includes rapid budgeting and anticipates change with rolling forecasts.

Consolidation and Reconciliation - consolidate and reconcile corporate finance and deliver coherent management reports to shareholders, compliance and financial management.

Financial Governance - ensure financial business processes can meet corporate compliance requirements worldwide - communications, internal controls, records retention, risk and fraud prevention and transparency/visibility.

Reporting - complete view of current results and variances to align people, processes and technologies around common plans to execute and optimize business strategy.

Profitability - a complete view operational revenues and costs, linking processes to a common view of the business.

Business Objects was acquired by SAP, with the intention of developing greater future integration between SAP's ERP/CRM/HR modules with BI capability. However, in my opinion, SAP has somewhat complicated BO by slicing and dicing a total reporting suites, including dashboards, into several individual components.

Business Objects Product Suite

The Business Objects range includes:

• BusinessObjects XI R2
• BusinessObjects XI 3.1
• Crystal Reports
• Xcelsius
• Dashboard Builder

Product licences are offered with volume step discounts ranging from 10% [3-9 users] to 25% [for 50+ users]

More information on BusinessObjects

NEXT: BusinessObjects XI 3.1

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