The SAP Business and Technology Review

The Change Challenge
by Michael Nadeau

Business Objects, Home Depot, and the BI/Analytics Dream House
by Joshua Greenbaum

SAP’s plan to acquire Business Objects is all about putting the power of business intelligence into the hands of the user.

Master Data Management: Is It Inevitable?
by Adolf Allesch

Sooner or later, all companies looking to solve important business issues with SAP software will have to deal with the state of their master data. This is a good thing.

SOA Success: When IT Enables the Business
by Puneet Suppal

When IT reshapes its role in the enterprise as an enabler of creative change, business users can take charge of their processes.

Sony Pictures Entertainment Greenlights SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0
by John Parker

Keeping track of and reporting on all the costs that go into making movies was a complicated task for Sony Pictures Entertainment. It had to gather information from numerous sources and then generate reports for all the stakeholders and for corporate headquarters. An upgrade to SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 made the task much more manageable.

4 Steps to a World-Class COE for Midsized Businesses
by Yosh Eisbart

You don’t need the resources of a Fortune 500 company to have an effective SAP center of excellence (COE). Following this advice will allow you to build a COE that matches your requirements and budget.

Printing Billions: How SAP APO Helps Valpak Market North America
by Evan J. Albright

The numbers involved in Valpak’s direct mail coupon business would give any planner gray hair. The company sends out 20 billion offers in 500 million mailings each year, which are broken down into groupings of 10,000 recipients. To meet the demand, the company built a state-of-the-art plant. To forecast and plan production, it turned to SAP APO.

Special Report on Upgrades

Optimizing the Network for SAP NetWeaver Applications
by Ron Carovano

The performance of your applications depends as much on your network as it does on the software setup and configuration. A number of bottlenecks can occur, especially if you are sending data globally. One way to reduce those bottlenecks is to use an application delivery controller.

SAP Extends Functionality for Identity Management
A Harmonized Approach to Managing a Heterogeneous Landscape

Opening a Window into Government
by Evan J. Albright

Officials in Sedgwick County, Kansas, didn’t shy away from taxpayer demands for more transparency into government. They went to work and built a portal that lets county staff and residents see just how well their government is working.