Hire SAP® BI/BO Developer: Benefits and Salaries

The SAP® software system is used to automate the professional activities of representatives of various specializations and industries. Such applications are sharpened for a specific sector and greatly simplify work and communication with other companies’ structural units. SAP® BusinessObject (SAP® BO) is a unified analytical platform for BI solutions, a powerful business analysis tool that allows business’ executives to manage such processes as business planning, data consolidation, analysis, control, risk assessment, reporting, etc.

SAP® BI solution (SAP® Business Intelligence) is a business analysis system that allows for strategic data analysis and support for its management decision-making process. It is designed to provide access to and process information in various systems or databases of organizations and its in-depth analysis. The sources can be information systems, accounting, financial programs, specialized industry solutions, and local sources (for example, Excel or Access files). 

This product allows business owners to solve a wide range of tasks related to the financial sector, business intelligence, etc. The BI system provides a multidimensional analysis of performance results for predicting and planning future business performance. The solution includes creating and publishing customized interactive reports and applications that bring a new awareness level to decision-makers. The system also provides tools and ready-made models for information analysis and reporting, which gives an integrated approach to a justification for smooth decision making.

Having a SAP® BI/BO Developer on Your Team: Pros and Cons

Depending on the goals of implementing the SAP® BI solution, it can be used by various employees who need information stored in the systems for their work – employees of the commercial department, IT departments, marketing, accounting, etc. 

The main advantages of hiring a full-stack SAP® engineer are the following:

  • Comprehensive, integrated solution for analyzing data from various sources, reporting and sharing information in a single environment;
  • Simple and intuitive interface, easy data loading, rich visualization capabilities, powerful search functionality, analysis and comparison of data from different sources;
  • Modern security tools to restrict access and protect data;
  • Management of KPIs based on financial results, accurate forecasting to managing risks, opportunities, and financial impact;
  • Eliminate the cost of creating, developing, and testing reports, increasing the efficiency of building queries and reducing the time for reporting;
  • The ability to scale the solution as the business grows, reducing IT infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership;

However, there are some minor cons of the SAP® BI implementation:

  • The complexity and duration of online analysis of the information given large amounts of data.
  • The impossibility of obtaining business information without the involvement of IT specialists.
  • The complexity of analyzing business information stored in various sources.
  • Inability to effectively compare and analyze historical data.

This component has the potential to expand and adapt to the changing needs of the enterprise. It contains tools and interfaces to improve the extension and enhancement of the business environment extensions and integrate analysis and reporting tools developed by other vendors.

Main SAP® BI/BO Applications

Crystal Reports – advanced reporting and data analytics

  • Beneficial for individual entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized enterprises;
  • Creates dynamic reports using a wide variety of data sources and formats;
  • Offline and online reports accessible from web-apps, computers, and smartphones;

Web Intelligence – custom reporting for analyzing data in a data warehouse

  • Creates basic, medium, and complex reports from transactional data in a database;
  • Can run as a client tool on the BO platform as well as a standalone reporting tool;
  • Rich data exporting capabilities;

Query as a Web Service – development of web services

  • Quickly creates queries and publishes them as web services;
  • BI information can be securely delivered to any application that runs web services;
  • It has a client component that can be used to create queries from universes.

SAP® BusinessObjects Dashboards – a data visualization tool

  • Can help with developing customized dashboards based on the reports;
  • Includes interactive elements such as charts, widgets, and gauges;
  • Gives the ability to explore data and test likely development scenarios;

SAP® Lumira – a robust tool to discover business data

  • Allows to receive information from reliable sources of corporate and personal data;
  • Interactive visualizations and custom analytics applications suite;
  • Provides powerful user interface elements;

SAP® BO Explorer – a self-service tool for business data discovery

  • Designed for accelerated processing of large amounts of data
  • Creates data visualizations and share them across multiple channels;
  • Based on “In-memory” technology;

SAP® BO Developer Roles and Responsibilities

A SAP® BO developer is a developer who is responsible for the design and development of complex reports using SAP BusinessObject tools like Web Intelligence, QaaWS, Rich client, etc. It’s a skilled professional who can assist you with planning an automated report scheduling and publication. They must perform requirement analysis and provide effort estimation. The SAP® BO developer should be able to work with SDLC and QA/Testing tools. A list of typical responsibilities of a SAP® BO developer would include the following:

  • Developing objectives for clients’ businesses according to their needs and demands;
  • Interacting with data analysts and end-users on a daily basis to better understand business requirements;
  • Sharing the project’s status with the rest of the team and the client;
  • Resolving any occurring issues during the process of the project’s execution;
  • Providing an accurate assessment of development time.

You can also take a look at the typical SAP® BO developer resume and SAP® business workflow developer salary below in the article. 

SAP® BI Developer Roles and Responsibilities

A SAP® BI developer focuses on implementation and on-going operations and maintenance of SAP applications and technology. They analyze documents requirements and solutions and give recommendations and analysis of alternatives. A SAP® BI developer should analyze technical problems, issues, processes, and challenges for BW, BOBJ, and HANA from a technical skills perspective.

If you take a look at the resume of SAP® BI consultant developer, you will see that these developers provide professional technical assistance and are able to convert existing reports into the company’s BI set, standard business metrics for the company. A SAP® BI developer resume would typically include the following duties:

  • Setting requirements for BI tools according to each business’s requirements;
  • Adapting business requirements to possible technical solution;
  • Providing reports on data modeling; 
  • Developing technical documentation for the BI tools;
  • Regularly working on the data warehouse design.

You can also check out the typical SAP® business intelligence developer salary further in the article. 

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