Bill Inmon Notes Availability Of SAP R/3 DW White Paper

Bill Inmon, the father of the data warehouse concept, made available a white paper that provides an eye-opening and in-depth review and analysis of the requirements for successful data warehousing with SAP R/3, the leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on the market. Inmon's white paper, entitled "SAP and Data Warehousing," is available through a new web site, BILLINMON.COM, developed as a free data warehousing resource center for Inmon's published content and services.

In the white paper, Inmon asserts that the current version of SAP R/3 is optimized for capture and storage, but lacks in the areas of data access and analysis, which are key to successful decision support. "Many organizations have spent huge amounts of money implementing ERP systems with the expectation that the ERP system was going to solve the information systems problems of the organization as well," Inmon said. "It is simply not the case."

Inmon believes that SAP's current version of Business Information Warehouse (BW), while a welcome addition for R/3 customers, falls short of meeting its customer's data warehousing problems. "While it is certainly encouraging that SAP has created a facility for accessing and analyzing data locked inside R/3, these cubes barely scratch the surface for management's needs for information," Inmon said. "The current release of SAP BW is a good first step in providing the necessary information, but the approach barely provides a sliver of the spectrum of reports that are needed."

In the paper, Inmon concludes that a "more rational approach" for executing a decision support strategy in support of SAP R/3 would be to create a proper foundation of integrated, detailed, historical transaction data. "In order to create this foundation, it is necessary to pull detailed data out of the current release of SAP R/3 and create a data warehouse," Inmon said.

Inmon forecasts that businesses requiring the robust and valuable amount of information that resides in a data warehouse will implement a true data warehouse outside of SAP R/3 by pulling data out of R/3 and integrating the data, or will build a true data warehouse along side their SAP R/3 cubes. "The true SAP R/3 data warehouse architecture will leverage the business investment in best of breed query, OLAP and business intelligence tools without limiting their capabilities," Inmon concluded.

For more information visit http://www.billinmon.com.