OLAP performance issue with Webi

Question

After lots of research I haven't found good information anywhere. We are an SAP shop, run SAP ECC, BW with BWA and for the last couple of years Business Objects as well. Since we are a utility company, our reporting needs for a good majority of our audience is transactional and detail oriented as opposed to analytical. Our biggest concern is poor Webi performance running against OLAP Universes. Currently, we are running BO XI 3.1 SP3, Integration Kit 3.1 and BW 7.01 SP7 and still experience very poor perfomance. Our user community is very frustrated with the timeouts and very slow running queries. They benchmark against popular websites and the performance they see there. We cannot restrict data sets any more than we already have, given the detailed/granular nature of data that the users need. What recommendations do you have for us? We seem to have hit a brick wall and don't want to lose our user base. Please advise.
Thanks

Answer 1

We had a Systems Integrator (who also happens to be an SAP partner) help us with the sizing.
The website benchmarking was more from an end-user perspective and more generic. They are used to getting information very very quickly in the internet driven world and when reports don't perform well they get frustrated.
I understand that there are multiple factors in play here. However, the need to get granular/transactional data is a very real business need and the use of the Webi tool to get the information out from an OLAP universe is a challenge. We are trying to give end-users more power and advocate self-service BI and so haven't popularized the use of Crystal as much. Also, we haven't implemented Advanced Analysis yet. Our belief is that we are using the right tool for the job and have structured our platform to work optimally but given the needs of the users the performance is still very slow and hence the frustration and the question.
Thanks
Edited by: Manoj Kumar on Feb 3, 2011 11:37 AM