See how advanced techniques enable you to go beyond standard SAP BW reporting capabilities and extract greater value from your SAP BW system.

• Find out how to ask the right questions and build requirements so that you get what you need from your technical team.
• Apply customer exit variables to determine fiscal period offsets, present specific selection options, and draw better conclusions from the information generated in your SAP BW reports.
• Properly customize and define different types of variables – such as replacement and customer exit – and calculations to increase the flexibility and power of your SAP BW reports.
• Delve into a real-world case study on how to use calculated key figures to determine the extended value of a material based on its current value today.
• Build, execute, and link complex calculations so that your reports generate more detailed analysis and results.
• Discover if, when, and how to use virtual characteristics and key figures (ABAP required) versus calculated or restricted key figures – and understand the performance implications of your decision.
• Tap into expert advice for using replacement path variables to make your reports easier to maintain.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Matt Christensen, PRAGMATEK Consulting Group

Whether you've upgraded to SAP BW 3.5 or are planning a future upgrade, this session provides invaluable instruction for how to leverage the new SAP Information Broadcaster to better schedule and execute the delivery of SAP BW reports. Get real-world advice on how companies are already deriving value from this important tool.

• Drill down into the features and functions of the SAP Information Broadcaster and determine if and how each could enhance your SAP BW reporting environment
• Get step-by-step instruction and demos, infused with real-world advice, for how to set up and operate the SAP Information Broadcaster
• Identify and prepare for hardware and software prerequisites that may change depending upon how you choose to publish and distribute reports (HINT: PDF reports will require a separate PDF engine)
• Understand the key differences between using SAP Information Broadcaster to publish and distribute reports via your in-house e-mail system versus the SAP Enterprise Portal
• Discover how tagging the SAP Information Broadcaster onto your SAP BW process chains further automates your report scheduling and get tips for how to do it right

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Dr. Bjarne Berg, MyITgroup Ltd

Formatting and printing reports is a major challenge. Explore and fully understand the requirements, benefits, and trade-offs of SAP BW and third-party tools available to help you meet your formatting requirements.

• Delve into formatting and printing capabilities and limitations of the SAP BW Business Explorer (BEx), Web Application Designer, Crystal Reports, and additional third-party tools.
• Examine key criteria to help you determine which tool – or combination of tools – best meets your report formatting and printing needs.
• Understand how your choice of tools and their functionality varies depending on your current SAP BW version.
• Assess the capabilities of third-party reporting tools that complement SAP BW, and determine if the benefits are worth the costs.
• Get a clear picture of your out-of-the-box and customization options for Crystal Reports before and after SAP BW 3.2.
• Determine if and when Visual Basic is a desirable option to help you add formatting to your reports.
• Demystify why some BEx formatting and printing techniques that work well for static reports can cause significant problems for analytics.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Penny Silvia, Sapient (formerly BIS)

Now that you understand your options, proceed step-by-step through examples to create attractive, formatted reports using the SAP BW tools you've already invested in. This session draws on real-world examples of how the world's leading SAP BW users successfully create formatted reports.

• Learn the key challenges and requirements when formatting numerical versus graphical reports, and how to address them.
• Walk through demonstrations to add margins, column titles, headings, page breaks, sub-totals, and page numbers to your reports.
• Eliminate unwieldy navigation blocks in all of your BW reports.
• Determine which SAP BW reporting tools are best suited for printing and which are not.
• Explore techniques you can use immediately to build printing options into your reports.
• Gain real-world insights into how you can reduce the number of requests for printed reports by giving your users powerful ways to display and analyze data on screen.
• Learn how to build in key print options to cover logos, headers and footers, unique page sizes, and special fonts.
• Know the pros, cons, and challenges of exporting reports to PDF, including how to overcome print and display limitations.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Penny Silvia, Sapient (formerly BIS)

Often considered the exclusive domain of BW administrators and the IT community, the SAP BW Reporting Agent can be readily leveraged by knowledgeable power users to schedule and automate the running of pre-calculated, offline reports. This session tells you how and when it's appropriate for power users to pre-schedule reports.

• Get expert criteria for determining which reports are good candidates for offline scheduling and which are not
• Pinpoint and learn to optimize the various Reporting Agent packages that enable you to pre-calculate reports
• Evaluate the pros and cons of pre-calculating reports (HINT: Some drill-down and analytic capabilities may be lost)
• See how creating a variant of the SAP BW Administrator Workbench empowers non-IT users to schedule their own reports
• Identify the technical prerequisites, such as required hot packs between SAP BW 3.0B and later releases, for using Reporting Agent
• Leverage the overlooked features of the Download Scheduler to pull pre-calculated Excel or HTML reports onto your PC desktop

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Jeff LaRusso, Sapient

Regardless of your level of experience with SAP BW, this session offers a wealth of practical advice for how to fully leverage the power of SAP BW ad hoc query functionality.

• Gain insights into how to train and trust your power users and still maintain tight control over security and system performance.
• Understand how ad hoc queries differ from pre-designed certified queries in terms of information access and SAP BW system performance.
• Get tips for helping your users to avoid the three main causes of poor ad hoc query performance.
• Determine when it makes sense to use calculated key figures versus formulas in ad hoc queries.
• Improve the way you govern and control ad hoc queries by parsing out different levels of capabilities to different groups of users, according to need and authorization.
• Discover when it is and is not advisable to run ad hoc queries over the Web, depending on your current version of SAP BW.
• Find out how to certify and generally release ad hoc queries that are useful for the general SAP BW user community.
• Develop clear guidelines and rules of thumb to prevent end-users from designing monster, performance-busting ad hoc queries.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Penny Silvia, Sapient (formerly BIS)

SAP BW 3.5 and beyond introduce new features and tools to expand your reporting options and capabilities. Whether you've already upgraded to SAP BW 3.5, or are considering a future upgrade, you'll need to understand the implication these new development have on your reporting environment.

• Smoothly navigate your upgrade path to SAP BW 3.5, depending on your current release, and prepare for important requirements (HINT: Unicode conversion may be necessary).
• Optimize the new SAP BW 3.5 reporting and analytic capabilities, including Information Broadcaster, SAP BW-BPS, real-time updates from mySAP CRM, Analysis Process Designer, and data mining.
• Get a glimpse into new planned capabilities, including real-time data updates from R/3 and SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, and understand how they will impact your existing SAP BW reporting environment.
• Utilize the Analysis Process Designer (APD) to easily identify hidden or complex data relationships that are significant to your analyses and business decisions.
• Gain insights into how the APD data mining capabilities allow you to create data mining models according to your company’s unique requirements in order to predict trends and answer questions about key business issues.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Penny Silvia, Sapient (formerly BIS)

The Web Application Designer delivers powerful layout and formatting capabilities, including drill-down analytics, which are critical for solutions such as SAP SEM. Yet there are common misconceptions about this tool's capabilities and skill set requirements that often lead to improper or under-utilization.

• Step through a Web Application Designer (WAD) ramp-up process that enables business users to drag-and-drop their way to a great looking Web page
• Review the 10 key Web objects used in the WAD and discern which ones deliver the greatest value to your organization
• Discover how to run multiple queries from different InfoProviders using WAD
• See how WAD can be used to combine key data, reports, and analytics from multiple solutions into a dashboardstyle interface appropriate for high-level business users and managers
• Learn how even a small application of JavaScript and HTML can dramatically expand your organization’s use of WAD to include printing, toolbar customization, cascading style sheets, and troubleshooting
• Overcome critical reporting gotchas and walk through steps for correctly editing back-end code

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Jeff LaRusso, Sapient

Assess where your SAP BW-based reporting activities are optimized and where they are underperforming. Take home strategies to bolster the ease, quality and performance of BW navigation, drill-down, formatting, printing, analytics, and dashboards.

• Take a critical look at the skill sets and strategies now required to optimize utilization of SAP BW Business Explorer (BEx), Web Application Designer, Information Broadcaster, and Analysis Process Designer (APD).
• Examine the nine key reporting variables, how they should be accounted for when selecting an SAP BW tool for a particular task, and the implications these variables and tool selections pose to users.
• Delve into root causes of reporting challenges, from basic navigation and drill-down, to formatting and printing, to functional analytics and dashboards, and leading strategies for addressing them.
• Determine whether you are making sufficient use of SAP tools and out-of-the-box Business Content across your current SAP BW landscape, and whether you can reduce the need for time-consuming and expensive custom report development.
• Determine if and how rapid application development (RAD) techniques would shorten your report.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Dr. Bjarne Berg, MyITgroup

Identify the most common reporting challenges encountered as data volumes, system activity, number of users, and user experience and expectations grow. Get real-world recommendations for addressing these challenges.

• See how proper uses of aggregates, pre-calculations and hierarchies keeps your SAP BW system performing smoothly as it grows.
• Gain insights into how to set up and continually revise authorizations so that sensitive information is not compromised as you add users to your system.
• Learn the right way to reconcile reports and to ensure that calculations are correct (HINT: Comparing an SAP BW report to a similar R/3 report does not ensure proper reconciliation!).
• Examine the factors that impact data integrity and completeness, including the integrity of the source system and the data massaging and transformation steps that take place before loading into SAP BW.
• Get tips to alleviate your biggest change management headaches, including dealing with difficult users and the proper way to handle report change requests.
• Discover why new reporting requests will require you to reevaluate your current SAP BW data model.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Penny Silvia, Sapient (formerly BIS)

Get practical advice to simplify and customize the creation of financial reports in SAP BW, and ensure that these reports are timely, accurate, and compliant with regulatory guidelines and standards. Leverage SAP BW to generate high-quality, formatted financial reports that meet your company and regulatory requirements.

• Gain insights into how the use of navigational attributes and hierarchies can help you more consistently define and easily create and manage SAP BW financial reports.
• Tap into expert advice to handle specific reporting requirements and variables such as time dependency, version dependency, and currency translations.
• Learn how to use the Report-to-Report Interface (RRI) to help you better drill down to identify the causes of variances and other discrepancies.
• Apply proven, expert techniques to create formatted financial reports in BEx and to handle tough challenges such as structures and formulas.
• Examine and evaluate different methods for creating both predictive reports and historic reports.
• Understand and learn the proper use for multiproviders, and discover why they’re especially critical if you currently use or plan to use SAP SEM or SAP BW-BPS.

• Versions covered: SAP BW 3.2 - 3.5
• Session presented by: Matt Christensen, PRAGMATEK Consulting Group

Tap into a wealth of practical advice to fully leverage the power of SAP BW ad hoc query functionality. Watch this session to:

• Strike the right balance between empowering users and maintaining tight control over security and system performance.
• Understand how ad hoc queries differ from pre-designed certified queries in terms of information access and SAP BW system performance.
• Get tips to overcome the 3 main causes of poor ad hoc query performance.
• Determine when it makes sense to use calculated key figures versus formulas in ad hoc queries.
• Improve the way you govern and control ad hoc queries by parsing out different levels of capabilities to different groups of users.
• Discover when it is and is not advisable to run ad hoc queries over the Web, depending on your current version of SAP BW.
• Find out how to certify and generally release ad hoc queries that may be useful to the general SAP BW user community.
• Develop clear guidelines and rules-of-thumb to avoid designing monster, performance- busting ad hoc queries.
• Evaluate if and when it makes sense to leverage the Analysis Process Designer to analyze the results of ad hoc queries.
• Learn the right way to leverage structures and hierarchies to optimize ad hoc query performance.

• Releases covered: SAP R/3, SAP BW 3.5 | SAP NetWeaver 2004 | SAP NetWeaver 7.0
• Session presented by: Penny Silvia, Knightsbridge Solutions