Business Development Report: ERP, BI, Data Analysis and SAP Systems

This report delves into the realms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI), exploring their functionalities and significance in modern business operations. The report begins by outlining the functional areas of a manufacturing company and explains how ERP systems integrate these areas to streamline business processes and ensure data integrity. It highlights the benefits of ERP systems, such as reduced costs, improved efficiency, and enhanced collaboration. The report then introduces SAP Business One, an integrated ERP solution for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), emphasizing its role in simplifying business complexity and fostering growth. The discussion then transitions to master data and transactional data, differentiating between core, unchanging data and the data generated from daily operations. The role of customer and material master data within SAP systems is also discussed. The second part of the report focuses on Business Intelligence (BI) and its role in strategic decision-making, sales improvement, and operational efficiency. It contrasts databases with data warehouses, explaining their respective uses and structures. The report also outlines various techniques used for data warehousing and data mining, including association rule mining, graph mining, and big data analytics. Finally, it introduces SAP HANA, a relational database management system designed for in-memory data processing and advanced analytics, showcasing its benefits in terms of portability, reduced complexity, and flexibility.

SAP Assignment1 1

SAP Assignment1 2
PART 1: Enterprise Resource Planning
Question 1
Historically, companies usually organize themselves according to a set of functional areas, each of
which offers support for business processes and operations (Jiang, 2009). Functional areas in an
organization may depend on the type of business. In a manufacturing company, the following serve
as main functional areas:
i) Production – production department is involved in manufacturing the products of a company.
It is where inputs (raw materials) are effectively and efficiently converted into finished
outputs (products) through a series of production processes.
ii) Sales and Marketing - sales and marketing department will be involved in generating profits
through the sales of the manufactured products. It is also involved with achieving set targets
linked to developing new markets, brand-awareness and increasing sales
iii) Finance – concerned with the accounting, planning, auditing, organizing company finances
and generating financial reports. This department manages company inflows and outflows,
monitors and supports aims and objectives to reduce costs and improve profitability
iv) Human resources – responsible for enrolling the right people – with required qualifications,
and skills. It is also involved in staff training activities and supports the continuous
professional development of all company employees
v) Administration – is concerned with company management that perform administrative
functions. It comprises both low level to senior level administrators. They serve company
customers by giving satisfying customer experiences and maintaining customer relationships.
Question 2
According to Oracle (2017), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems refers to tools and
software’s used by business organizations to integrate daily business functions such as sales, finance,
production, procurement and administration.
 By integrating a business functional areas, ERP systems combine together and describe
business processes and facilitate data flow between functional areas.
 By collecting and maintaining shared transactional data from various departments in an
organization, ERP systems eradicate mismatched data and provide data integrity
 Through the use of a common database and defined data structures, ERP systems offer data
access from several actions by means of shared concepts.
ERP systems provide efficient business processes by providing the following benefits (Rand 2017)
i) Low operational and management costs by providing integrated systems
ii) Improve efficiency via common user views and experience in all functions
iii) Enhance collaboration through information sharing
iv) Enhance business insights through real-time generated reports
v) Reduced risks by allowing data consistency and integrity
Question 3

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Systems, Applications and Products (SAP) develops SAP Business One, which is an easily available
and integrated (ERP) that combines the main business sectors in an organization.
It offers a single solution(integrated software) that makes more efficient all business processes
including Operations, Sales , Production, Planning, Logistics Human Capital Management , and
makes available information that is real-time, and expands business performance (SAP 2017).
The application is also developed to allow growth in small to enterprises (SMEs) and also enable
growth with large companies and facilitates their operations and allows better management through
the singular integrated one tool.
SAP lessens businesses complexity by generating fresh opportunities for expansion. This way
businesses are able to growth and innovate, and gain a competitive advantage. SAP is able to
generate real- time data, and hence reduce redundancy which create a better and effective work setting
for all staff.
Question 4
Master data refers to the core data that is essential to operations in a particular business section and
remains unchanged for a long period of time (Rouse 2012). It refers to main organizational entities
utilized by a number of departments in an organization and deposited in diverse systems. In addition,
master data symbolizes organizational units where business relations are fulfilled and key components
where analysis takes place (Business Insider 2011).
Master data is robust, and not recorded in the form of transactions, it is used by many systems that
define key business units and may include data about products, business clients, inventory,
employees, suppliers etc.
On the other hand, transactional data are the elements that support daily operations in a business in
areas such as service management, sales, purchasing, billing, accounts, order management and more.
It is data that is created and updated within daily operations and includes payment methods, discounts,
price, time and place. The diagram below illustrates the difference between both Master and
transaction data in an organization.
Figure 1: Master vs. Transactional data. (Source: Business Insider 2011)
Question 5
SAP master record is often centrally located across as shown in Figure 2 below.

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Figure 2: SAP Master Data & the Organizational Hierachy (Source: SAP Master Data)
Master data is centrally located and shared across all functions and processed to eliminate data
duplication. This usually avoids data redundancy (Otto & Schmidt 2017). Figure 3 below shows
Customer Master Data file centrally located for easier access and uniformity across all the data with
regards to customers.
Figure 3:Centrally located Customer master data (Source: SAP ABAP 2011)
Question 6
The customer master data comprises of information about business transactions and how they
are recorded and implemented by the system (SAP ABAP 2011). It also contains all the
information about the company customers.
Material master data encompasses data necessary to describe and control material. It
incorporates, accounting, sales data, purchasing, production and other functional areas. All the
information your company needs to manage a material is stored in a data record in the material
master, sorted by various different criteria (SAP AG 2001).
Material master is complex because it issued by many procedures and each procedure uses the
material in a different way. Each procedure, therefore, requires data about the material that may
or may not be needed by other processes. To manage such data, the material master classifies it
into different group views, each of which is appropriate to one or more processes hence creating
the complexity.
PART 2: Business Intelligence and Enterprise Resource Planning
Question 1

SAP Assignment1 5
Business intelligence (BI) is an emerging technology usually applied to analyse data and present it as
action-based information to enable business managers and end users to make strategic and informed
decisions (Nedelcu 2013). It includes tools and software’s in a business, used to collect complex
business data and summarize it into reports. Business intelligence helps a company identify profitable
customers, or to know product performance. The importance of business intelligence for a business
includes
i) Strategic decisions - Business intelligence enables a company see detailed, current data on all
aspects of the business including financial, production and customer data. This information
allows management to make fact-based decisions for better operations.
ii) Improved sale methods - BI is valued as an asset to a corporation's sales as it provides access
to sales patterns, customer preferences and new markets.
iii) Increased opportunities – BI helps organizations evaluate capabilities, make comparisons
relative to strengths and weaknesses against competitors and identify patterns and market
trends and make changes to gain a competitive advantage
iv) Increases business operational efficiency
Business Intelligence can only be derived from data warehouses and data marts. Database
applications can only perform simple functionalities including data transactions, recording and
summarization, data cleansing. Data warehouses on the other hand are made to perform analytics
Question 2
A database is a collection of logically related information and uses Online Transactional Processing
(OLTP), it is optimized for write operations while a data ware house is a large data collection amassed
from various sources within a company, and uses Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) (Cardon
2016).
Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) – is described by short numerous online transactions such
as update, insert and delete. OLTP systems facilitate speedy processing of queries, maintains data
uprightness in several environments. OLTP databases hold current and detailed data, and the schema
that store the transactions are usually in the 3NF.
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) - is described by little transactions that involves complex
queries comprising of aggregations. OLAP database systems measure response with effectiveness and
are used for data mining. OLAP databases are grouped and contain past data, stored in form of multi-
dimensional schemas.
Question 3
Techniques that can be used for data warehousing and data mining include the following:

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i) Association rule mining – include processes that are meant to discover regular patterns,
associations, correlations, or structures from data sets
ii) Database segmentation and clustering - the ability of several servers or instances to
connecting to a single database
iii) Graph mining - extracting useful hidden information from large databases
iv) Social network analysis – involves the progression of examining social data structures
by using networks and graphs. It describes connected structures including individuals,
or devices in a network and the links between them.
v) Text and web analytics – refers to implementation of techniques that help solve
business problems via text analysis
vi) Sentimental analysis - involves using natural language processing, computational
linguistics, text analysis, and biometrics to extract, identify and quantify information.
vii) Big data analytics - examining large data sets to discover hidden patterns, unidentified
correlations, trends, customer preferences to help make informed decisions
Question 4
Developed by SAP, SAP HANA is a relational database management system with in-memory and
column-oriented features. Its main function is to store and retrieve data as demanded by different
applications.
In addition, SAP HANA performs cutting-edge analytics including predictive analytics, spatial
processing, graph processing, text search and analytics, streaming assessments (SAP HANA 2017).
HANA can be installed on-premise or in the cloud from a number of cloud service providers
SAP HANA as an in-memory data platform allows business processes, acceleration, delivers
additional business intelligence, and simplifies ICT department functions
By providing the foundation for all your data needs, SAP HANA eliminates the load of maintaining
distinct systems and stored data in order to make better informed business decisions in the new
digital era.
Key benefits include portability, reduces complexity and is flexible.

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