Data warehousing with SAP business warehouse : Discussing SAP-Centria NGL Pilot2 Project and Experts’ Insights from CGI Suomi Oy, Fujitsu Finland Oy and Neomore Consulting Oy

How can one derive meaningful information from a huge set of raw data? This project provided an overall picture of data warehousing with SAP Business Warehouse (BW) systems. That is, how data is being gathered, the processes this data goes through to become understandable information, and the biggest challenges being faced during this processing and solution suggestions. The aim of this thesis was to explain data warehousing procedures, from data collection till querying, with SAP BW/4HANA from the experiences gathered from SAP-Centria Next-Gen Lab Bike Sharing Project. This project gives insight into data warehousing, its meaning, benefits and its elements. The author also carried out qualitative research using a semi-structured interview. The purpose of the interview was to gain insights into the essence of data warehousing and how SAP BW systems are used to meet the requirements of data warehousing. For this purpose, senior SAP BW consultants whose expertise area also covers helping organizations with implementation and support of the SAP BW systems were interviewed. Topics discussed included needs for Data Warehousing, implementation definition and developments, SAP BW processes, challenges faced, solution suggestions and if from past experiences clients have used information generated from data analysis to organizations’ advantages. Gaining experts’ insights through the interview helped to see the correlation between the NGL Pilot2 data warehousing tasks and real-work experiences. This project also discussed the biggest challenges students faced during the NGL Pilot2 program and challenges from the experts’ perspectives with respect to Data Warehousing using SAP BW systems. The project gave solution suggestions to these problems. Other theoretical materials intended for this project included reports from the Pilot2 project in the Next-Gen Lab, scholarly books and online resources, relative to the subject matter