Frequently Asked Questions

Questions and answers...

  • Can QuickStarts be used with Microsoft, BusinessObjects, Cognos?

    Although the full QuickStart offering is making use of Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) to enable reporting, (ad-hoc) analytics and the distribution of information the solution can also be run with Microsoft, Cognos and BusinessObjects as front end.

    QuickStart has been build on open technology confirming to the industry standards. This to protect the software investments of our customers as much as possible.

  • Can SAP BW be fitted in with an Enterprise Data Warehouse solution?

    In fact we believe that SAP BW and an Enterprise Data Warehouse go together very well! We have experience with at least 3 customers that use SAP BW next to an Oracle based Data Warehouse. In all those cases the Oracle based Data Warehouse feeds the tactical and strategic Decision support systems and the SAP BW tools plays a role in the operational reporting.

  • Can the Enterprise Data Warehouse also play a role in the application integration issue?

    If the Data Warehouse is build in the classical way with and Operational Data Store (ODS) it can. The story goes that data warehousing has started in the 70ies when banks started to collect their enormous volumes of transaction data in a data base from which these data was delivered to all kind of subsequent systems. The providers of ETL solutions have also recognised this and the leaders like BusinessObjects, Informatica and Data Stage are today also delivering "real-time" components for application integration purposes. Some of those (like Business Objects Data Integrator (BODI)) even have interfaces with messaging tools like IBM Websphere and Tibco.

    NewFrontiers has been involved in the early development and piloting with BODI, at that time called Acta. Our project with HunterDouglas in 2000 was one of the first in Europe were SAP R/3 based Data warehousing and application integration have been succesfully married.

  • Is QuickStart SAP certified?

    To get a solution SAP certified it needs to add value to SAP’s own software (like ERP or Netweaver BI). And QuickStart is 100% build on common, open standard Oracle technology. Or to put it differently there is nothing that SAP can certify.

    But QuickStart is fully Oracle certified and part of the Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) QA cycle. The SAP integrator that is build into OWB could have been certified but it is not very common that these major software vendors (like Oracle, SAP and IBM) certify specific components of each others software. Maybe it is enough to say that by far most SAP environments run on Oracle databases and features which should say enough about the knowledge these companies have of eachothers technology.

  • What is SAP ERP 2005 as compared to R/3 and does Oracle BI and QuickStart run on these new releases?

    SAP ERP 2005 is the successor of SAP R/3.  The company SAP has a vision to deliver a more flexible and open architecture to support SOA through a new technology platform that SAP calls NetWeaver.  SAP ERP 2005 Central Component has been build on the NetWeaver platform.

    To cut it short: the current Oracle BI releases and QuickStart work on SAP ERP (2004 and 2005)!

    Something on SOA (because what SOA or “Service Oriented Architecture” stands for may not always be obvious to a BI user)….

    Definition: “SOA expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. Resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation”.

    In normal English the above means that with SOA software becomes more open (see vision of SAP) and easier to connect specific services to. In our case SAP ERP becomes even easier to connect to and therefore NewFrontiers Oracle BI based vision fits in nicely with SAP’s own vision. To take this one step further many of the SOA based architectures embrace Java. Oracle is actively supporting Java and delivering Java based services for many years now. It looks like from this view point Oracle and SAP are heading in the same direction.

  • What is the impact of SAP R/3 upgrades and patches on the NF QuickStart and Oracle BI?

    Answer given by Patrick Teunissen on 3 January 2007  (was project responsible for SAP R/3 upgrades with HunterDouglas in 1996 and 1998 and coordinator of a series of upgarde with EPSON between 1998 and 2000). Currently director of NewFrontiers.

    Users of any software but certainly SAP R/3 will confirm that upgrades and sometimes the implementation of patches will trigger a significant amount of work. Examples of that work in SAP R/3 are:  “additional configuration”, programme and database conversations”” and most importantly “testing”. Often additional functionality (change work) is added during the upgrade “project” and sometimes hardware is replaced.  

    So although SAP has made R/3 upgrades much easier since the first time I run one back in 1996 (from R/3 release 2.3 to release 3.1) they are often costly. I believe that the introduction of SAP BW (or as it is called nowadays Neatweaver BI) has from an IT perspective only increased the complexity of upgrades. Because whatever you want to look at it SAP BW is a seperate environment (sure for a good reason because the tool is aimed to fill in one of the big Gaps in R/3 that is management reporting). But separate environments need to be realigned, tested etc. again. Sometimes companies have a whole host of custom coded reports (the so called ABAP’s), I will come back to that one later.

    So the question really is:  “is it more work to realign the NF QuickStart and Oracle BI compared to dealing with SAP BW when R/3 is upgraded?” Obviously we believe that this is not the case! Just like it is much faster to start up the NF QuickStart (i.e. up and running within 5 days) and Oracle BI compared to the start up and build of a SAP BW based project. By the way we have recent proof for that because we have just dealt with an SAP upgrade from release 4.6 to SAP ERP 2005 (Dec. 2006), it took as less than 2 days to deal with that (and that was the first time we had to deal with this specific upgrade).

    As promised also something on custom reports aka ABAP’s. The thing with these custom reports is that they are as good as the programmer that wrote them. But in all cases they are written on a certain moment in time optimised for the SAP system run on that moment. That is why ABAP’s require most checking and often updating. Realise that ABAP’s are traditional programms with a beginning at line one (1) and an ending on line whatever (sometimes there are more than 1000 lines).

    With Oracle BI (the Warehouse Builder component aka OWB) the ABAP code is generated. The code will be generated from scratch again when the R/3 system is upgrade taking the fact that the system is upgrade into account. Realise that the code is predictable and as good as the many programmers that have worked on it and that improved the OWB code over the last few years. And a significant part of the input was delivered by NewFrontiers based on our experience with more than 20 customers and best of breed tools. It may sound unbelievable but SAP does not really offer this functionality (competitors of Oracle do like Informatica and BusinessObjects but at higher costs) hence we believe that Oracle BI is even from a technical view point a better alternative when looked at from the view point of future SAP R/3 upgrades.

    Last but not least (just to make sure all has been said): with QuickStart/OWB a maitenance and support fee is paid. With this fee you can be sure that the software will remain working when either Oracle or SAP R/3 is being upgraded. And on top of that the NewFrontiers helpdesk gives “functional” advice on specifics about new SAP releases and changes in the datamodel which we accommodate also in the QuickStarts.

  • What is the most cost effective approach to create a Business Intelligence solution?

    Every BI solutions is build from 3 components; people, hardware, software. The most effective solutions are those were you spend as much as possible on people (preferably your own) and were these people spend as less time as possible on setting up "new" hardware and the configuration of software.

    We have given this thought arms and legs by the development of solutions based on the products of Oracle and Microsoft Excel. Better and extended use of the Database and Excel are often more than enough in over 80% of the business cases!

  • Why should I use any other tools than SAP BW for Information Management when we use R/3 for our transaction processing?

    We have seen SAP BW be used as an extended reporting engine for R/3. In fact we think that SAP BW is functionally not adding too much value to CO/PA and LIS (part of R/3) other than performance benefits. So if standard lists is all you are looking for BW might be sufficient although we think you should always ask the question why you are not solving the need within R/3 since BW does not add to much business value. If you want more at least evaluate alternative solutions.