The New Era of SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA: Taking Advantage of LSA++

The New Era of SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA: Taking Advantage of LSA++
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The New Era of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA: Taking Advantage of The Power of LSA++

The SAP® NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (BW) powered by SAP HANA is a new, powerful BW capability built using in-memory technology that can help you address business issues and solve problems in ways not previously possible. You may be technically ready to implement SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA, but is your organization ready to optimize the performance and value? Sound planning, including thinking about how you manage and model your data, can help you make the most of your investment.

The Pre-HANA World
Before SAP HANA, BW consultants routinely followed a layered, scalable architecture (LSA) methodology for building and structuring the business warehouse. The LSA methodology helped create a standardized approach that organized data by functional area, geography, and other key dimensions. It served as a referenced architecture for comprehensive data warehouse design giving the developers flexible data model layers which allowed for better long term scalability. LSA had several advantages:
It offered a standardized design and implementation methodology.
It structured the data into multiple, progressive layers.
It formed a transparent, service-level-oriented, and scalable base.
It defined key business indicators , such as net sales, within the data model.

LSA used years of SAP experience and best practices to create a common terminology built on enterprise data warehouse (EDW) principles. However, much of the LSA modeling was designed to work within the limitations of the Business Warehouse in the pre-SAP HANA world. When the volumes of information were too big to handle in their entirety, the data had to be aggregated and structured around verticals such as suppliers, partners, and customers creating less transparency across the whole organization.

Life now with SAP HANA
Leveraging SAP HANA as the underlying database for BW removes many o f these data limitations, making it possible to analyze huge blocks of transactional data without aggregations or layers of complex data modeling. The result: better business visibility and performance – but only if companies take advantage of the new capabilities. The unprecedented power of SAP HANA requires companies to rethink their data modeling methodology. As an evolution of LSA, LSA++ approaches data in a new way to take advantage of in-memory capabilities. We are able to simplify many of the complex data layers and optimize SAP NetWeaver BW which creates direct ROI for the value of your SAP HANA investment.

LSA++ Highlights
With LSA++, SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA gives your business more flexibility via a simplified data modelin g approach which supports better decision making decisions and process efficiency. The framework allows for multiple business intelligence (BI) models plus both persistent and virtual data marts. LSA++ structures data by purpose or context with respect to BI requirements, resulting in three categories of data:

Consistent core. EDW context data includes standardized template-based BI and reporting on harmonized, consistent data.
Operational extension. Operational and source context data performs real-time BI on source-level data.
Agile extension. Agile, ad hoc context data includes agile BI on all kinds of data for single use.

The LSA++ model for SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA gives you increased modeling flexibility, decreased load and activation time, and relaxed volume considerations during design. LSA++ also supports comprehensive data content and direct querying throughout the propagation layer.

SAP Services: Expert Planning and Implementation Support
Let SAP Services help you optimize your SAP HANA implementation with the LSA++ methodology. Whether you need initial advisory design or a complete implementation, SAP’s expert planning and installation services can help you streamline and accelerate data modeling.

To learn more about how SAP can help you deliver maximum business benefits, go to www.sap.com/services.

What would be the biggest benefits of LSA++ for your organization?