overview of the business warehouse at the university of tennessee

1

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

2

Today’s Presentation

• Project Background and Status

• Business Warehouse Concepts

• The Payoff

3

Two Projects In One

• Establish:

Legacy Business Warehouse (LBW)

IRIS Business Warehouse (IBW)

4

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)

5

IRIS BW Goal

To provide continuing computer access to

IRIS financial and human resources data for end user query and decision support processing...

6

Develop IRIS Business Warehouse

• Statewide BW Project Team

– Identifies data and reporting needs

• Technical Support Team

– Supports implementation

7

Original Emphasis and Plan

• Implement a Legacy Business Warehouse

• Address an IRIS Business Warehouse following IRIS Go-Live date of

April, 2001

8

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

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

Current Status (Continued)

• Technical Team 2.0B Delta Training Complete

• Initial IRIS R/3 InfoCubes Selected for Activation

Some Important BW Concepts

14

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

15

What is a Data Warehouse?

• A database used solely for reporting and analysis

– Organized by subject area

– Integrated

– Nonvolatile

– Time Variant

16

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

17

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

18

Data Warehouse: Nonvolatile

• Read-only

• User can’t write back

Transaction

Processing

(IRIS)

Warehouse

(BW)

Read

Write

Read

19

Data Warehouse: Time Variant

• To support trend analysis

• Historical data kept at different levels of detail

20

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

21

• 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?

22

• 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

23

BW Terminology

• Like many software products, SAP uses terminology that may be unfamiliar:

– BEx

– Query

– Operational Data Store

– InfoCube

– Key Figures

– Characteristics

– Dimensions

24

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)

25

Queries

• Queries are the

instructions

used to retrieve

data from the

warehouse

• Users can

define their own

queries

Available

Query

26

InfoCube

AvailableInfoCubes

• A subset of a data warehouse

• Designed to:

– Answer specific end-user’s queries

– Provide information for specific analysis

27

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

28

Characteristics

• Describes the

Key Figures

• Typically, data selection criteria such as:

– Department

– Budget Entity

– Fiscal Year

Characteristics

29

Dimensions• A logical

grouping of characteristics within an InfoCube

• An employee dimension might contain:– employee ID– DOB– Academic

Rank– Gender

Dimensions

The Payoff

31

32

33

Questions?