The short answer
If your company runs on Microsoft, put your SAP data in Microsoft Fabric and report on it in Power BI. Simplement Roundhouse™ moves it there in real time from ECC and S/4HANA: any SAP data you select, raw tables included, in your own Fabric tenant. Your people keep the tools they already know.
SAP Datasphere and SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) take the other road: your SAP data stays in SAP’s cloud, modelled in SAP’s tools and reported in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).
Side by side
| Simplement + Microsoft Fabric + Power BI | SAP Datasphere / SAP Business Data Cloud | SAP BO / BW | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your SAP data lives | Your Microsoft Fabric tenant: OneLake, Fabric SQL or mirrored tables | SAP’s cloud, inside an SAP subscription | SAP BW, run by IT |
| What your people report in | Power BI, Excel and the Microsoft tools they already use | SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) | BO reports, built by IT |
| How fresh | Real time: a change saved in SAP pushes to Fabric | Set by the replication your team configures | Batch loads |
| At S/4HANA go-live | Existing reports keep running: S/4HANA compatibility views merge ECC and S/4 data | Reports are rebuilt in SAP’s tools | Reports are rebuilt |
| Answers, not tables | Business Ledger on top: a live ledger people and agents can ask questions of |
Why Microsoft Fabric and Power BI win for SAP companies
Your people already know the tools
Power BI and Excel are already on every desk. Datasphere and SAC are new tools to learn, staff and support. How many Datasphere experts do you know? Do you want to pay for their on-the-job training?
You hired talent with expectations. Give them great tools.
All of your SAP data, not a packaged subset
Roundhouse moves any SAP data you select: Sales Orders, General Ledger, Inventory, Accounts Receivable, MRP, Production Order status, HR. That includes text and cluster data from tables like RFBLG, STXL, PCL2, PCLX and MDTC (MRP). Your raw SAP tables always arrive, so analysts can answer the question nobody planned a report for.
Real time, pushed from SAP
Saving a change in SAP pushes to Microsoft Fabric, then updates reports when refreshed. Roundhouse delivers three ways, at the same time: to Fabric OneLake, mirrored into Fabric SQL, and streaming to Power BI and Dataverse. No coding, no SAP changes, no delays. Everything moves through the SAP application layer, compliant with SAP Note 3255746.
Your data, in your tenant
Data never leaves customer control. Pick the database, configure for governance, use SAP security if desired, and select only the data you need to keep storage costs down.
SAP and everything else, in one place
Fabric holds your SAP data next to the rest of the business. If you have multiple SAP systems, Roundhouse moves data from all of them and merges it into one target for easy reporting, with extensive currency conversion and exchange rate experience for consolidated financial reporting.
Start on ECC now, carry it to S/4HANA
You don’t have to wait for S/4HANA. Move ECC data in real time now, then use S/4HANA compatibility views to merge data from both systems into the same reports. During the migration you’ll catch errors, cancellations, A/P issues and Master Data gaps easily, and your reports are already running at go-live.
Answers, not tables
Add the Business Ledger on top of Roundhouse and the Assembler builds a live ledger of the business that people and agents can ask questions of. What happened is SAP’s own values, drillable to the SAP document number. You still get every raw SAP table in Fabric.
Where SAP Datasphere and BDC fit
Datasphere and Business Data Cloud are SAP’s plan for SAP data: keep it in SAP, model it in Datasphere, report on it in SAC. For a company that runs on SAP’s tools alone, that is one road.
For a company that runs on Microsoft, it means a second data platform, a second reporting tool and a second set of skills, next to the Microsoft estate you already own. With Simplement, SAP data joins the platform your business already runs on.
You don’t have to switch everything at once. Simplement runs in parallel with what you have today: feed any SAP data to Fabric and Power BI, and retire BO and BW like our customers.
Leaving SAP BO and BW
Business Objects was created in 1990, Business Warehouse in 1998. Both require time-consuming steps for IT. If data isn’t in BW reports, getting to it is slow and costly. Simplement delivers all SAP data, so any data can be reviewed with ease, and analysts who know SQL can build their own dashboards and exception reports.
SAP-first since 1998
Simplement focuses on helping SAP businesses make great decisions by empowering analysts and data consumers. Roundhouse supports SAP on Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase ASE and more, with an intuitive browser interface that is easy to install, use and integrate. Simplement Report Ready Information (RRI) solutions and preconfigured Power BI and Fabric templates cover General Ledger, Inventory, Accounts Receivable, Sales Orders, MRP and more, ready to modify for quick deployment.