SAP for beginners: Data Integrations, Data Services

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5 min readAug 25, 2017

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Whether you are using million dollar supercomputer or an inexpensive laptop, the data you can get out is only as good as the information you put in. Computers can do some pretty amazing things, but they cannot decide which information is valuable and how the data you collect will impact your future business decisions.

That is why data integration is such an important part of the modern business world. Data integration allows information to be easily shared between platforms and makes it easier for management teams to make strategic decisions that will help business grow and thrive.

For many years, SAP has been a leader in data integration business. SAP has long been considered the gold standard in data integration, taking extracted data from accounting applications, and uploading it to a number of different tools. If you are interested to read about SAP, there’s a wonderful course on SAPVARSITY called SAP for beginners. You should check that out.

Thus extracted, the data is now more valuable than ever. The uploaded data can be used in consolidation, forecasting, analysis, and planning, making it easieer for business owners and managers to make smart decisions and increasee the value of data they collect. SAP uses a number of different techniques to take accounting data and make it more useful for business decision makers. The adapters built into SAP can extract data directly from a general ledger system and bring it into consolidation, planning, and analysis tools where it is needed.

The use of these adapters is welcome news for many in the tech community. SAP has certainly made progress through the years, and many things have changed and improved over time.With every new SAP release, the company has built on the past success and incorporated recomendations to make the product even better. These improvements have in turn made the tool even more useful for SAP developers, client adminstrator, and non-technical members of the corporate management teams everywhere.

It was not that long ago that developers and programmers had only one choice when their bosses told them to integrate accounting data into the rest of the company’s sytems — A dreaded flat file. Anyone with technical background has at least a passing knowledge of what a flat file is and how it works, but that does not make working with it any easier. Infact, working with a flat file is so tedious, and time consuming that a job often got passd down from one low-level programmer to the next.

In those days, if you wanted to know which programmer was the new kid on the block, all you had to do is seek out to the one sweating over the flat file. Most enterprise developers and programmers are certainly welcomed in the first adapters introduced by SAP. and they are still continuing to use these adapters till day.

These adapters used by the newest versions of the SAP are better than ever, and will help to releive the drudrey and manual entry that one typiied the flat file experience. Of course, some flat belly devleopers, old timer programmers, and A-level experts, still prefer to use flat files for data integrations. But, its those eschew the adapters make life easier for the rest of the tech community.

No matter what your feelins on the subject, there is no doubt that the existence of SAP updates have made it a lot of easier for SAP developers in a lot of ways. The history of data integration world is a long and fascinating one. SAP has been in the forefront of data integration process from the beginning and perhaps the first to recognize the need for software to be created on one platform to be used in another.

Through the years, SAP has used a number of products that make data integrations seamlessly possible and the resulting integrated data as useful as possible.

First there was SAP BODS, Businss Objects — SAP BO Data Services. This is powerful, and at that time a state-of-the-art data integration tools that came packaged into the SAP sales from the earliest data of the 21st century till a few years earlier. Although, SAP’s nameplate, BODS was actually a OEM product that was rebranded and repackaged.

SAP is a workhorse and a staple of data integration world, but it now has been retired from SAP suite. Support ended some time ago, and most of the developers have moved to newer and more capable alternatives. One of the alternatives is the Financial Data Quality Management or FDM tool. This SAP product is one of the most popular integration tools for loading data into SAP BO Data Services (BODS). This tool takes care of Information Stewardship.

Over the years, all of the tools have been valuable in helping both techies and non-techies make the most of the data their employers gather. Data mining is an integral part of the modern business landscape, but making sense of the data is not always easy.The availabilty of the tools and adapters that help to automate the process and provide business leaders with information they need to make smart strategic decisions. Apparently, it is not hard for someone to learn SAP.

These days, the Data Integrators is one of the most popular tools in the market. It has become the standard for some of the best know business in the world. Like BODS, and Information Steward, Oracle has many tools like ODI and that’s the tech gaint’s main data integration tool. SAP has been quick to rebrand many startup’s products, and the rest is history. Once a startup is accquired, we can build custom fits and build all of its out-of-the-box APIs.

Like earlier data integration tools, ODI helps business owners and managers make sense of data they collect, transferring raw accounting data into useful information that can be used throughout the company. The world of data integration has undergone enormous changes throughout the years, and this powerful and useful proces is still evolving to meet the needs of future businesses.

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