SAP XI/PI - Process Integration

Just when I thought SAP BI is the way to go, my project suddenly requires SAP PI/XI expert. Not as what I imagined it would be, now I have to embrace the SAP PI/XI first before moving to SAP BI. SAP PI/XI once was a very interesting and very much in demand. Basically, it is a middleware application, the most famous one I guess would be IBM WebSphere offering. Things are not looking that well however for SAP PI/XI because the rest of competitors also are just as reliable or much better in the performance area. Also, middleware does not have to be SAP even though you have SAP system in place. As the name suggests, middleware acts as a facilitator of information passing through from one system to another. Let say you have 2 different systems and you need some information to flow from one system to another, middleware would provide this facilities for your requirements (some mapping from SAP XI/PI with external system example as below). Thus, due to demand in this technology, SAP has came up with their own offering, basically to cater SAP customers that need to interface their SAP application with hosts of other external systems. Well, lets be fair here, SAP is a business software expert. Product like this would be an IBM or Sun domain expert and it’s hard for SAP to catch up with these guys. I’ll be positive though, learning new skill set is always exciting. The training will be conducted by SAP Malaysia soon and hopefully I’ll be able to apply the new knowledge gained for the benefits of the project.

Business Intelligence - BI

Business Intelligence is definitely a buzz word nowadays in IT industry. Why not, the big IT guys were swallowing up small time BI vendors like craze (IBM on Cognos, SAP on Business Objects, Oracle on Hyperion). For me, it’s time to plan to acquire the skills in this area or else I’ll be left out. For a start, I have started studying the current implementation in Loders Croklaan for better understanding. Well, it’s not that hard. Have you by any chance use PivotTable in Excel? If you have, it’s basically the same thing. The main objective is trying to make sense a large chunk of data in meaningful format. If you are a CEO, you don’t have time to analyse the data but rather is more interested in glancing the current status in two, three minutes. Then you can make the decision immediately. Sounds good right. That why it’s called Business Intelligence. My job currently pretty much doing the reporting for managers. For instance, recently I just completed a complex report for diesel hedging used in Loders Croklaan US. As you can see below, the report (mind you, this was the report I implemented) only consists of rows and columns which may take some time for managers to digest all the information presented.


Business Intelligence takes this to another level. It will summarize all information presented above to something like below. Nice and easily digested. There you go, from here you can make decision in minutes. Smart right? Well, that’s where I’ll be heading. Taking one step higher to world of intelligence information. Well, some of you might think this all can be done thru excel. Owh no, imagine if you have millions and millions of data. Excel max capacity is 65000 which is useful for small kind of reporting. Imagine you are making sales 1000 per day, one year ->approx 400,000, 2 years? 10 years? See how many amounts of data you can have. Business Intelligence excites me and definitely would be my next direction in SAP world.