SAP and Tableau – Business Intelligence for Small Business

When most people think of SAP they think Fortune 500. There is a common belief that SAP customers are large companies that have locations around the world that need an ERP system that costs roughly the same as the GDP of a small European country. It might surprise people that SAP has a small business edition and that 88,000 businesses use it successfully.

Any flavor of SAP (small business or not) is a complex implementation. The act of setting it up and using it can tax most any IT department and for a small business it might mean many months of effort. The last thing any small business executive is going to want to hear after that kind of effort is that they need to do another similar size project to get the information and insight they need out of SAP. While SAP may be good at running your business you will still be left with getting the information you need out of it to make good business decisions.

Our partner, Tableau, has developed connection engines to SAP to alleviate the burdensome effort of a massive BI project. Using Tableau Desktop individuals can connect to the SAP business warehouse, or the new HANA product, and get real-time data out of their SAP system. Using Tableau Server these insights can be shared with the entire company. The setup time is negligible in comparison to other BI suites and Tableau provides lightning fast access.

We can help companies get this kind of project up and in use in as little as a couple weeks. After a small business has spent the kind of money and time to get SAP in place it is a shame that so many implementations stop there. SAP gathers an amazing amount of data that can give executives real insight into how their business is running and what they should be doing to expand.

1 Comment

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  Aspen January 9, 2012 at 9:22 AM

  Wow, your post makes mine look feeble. More power to you!

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