When the IRS or other tax and regulatory agencies call, are you ready? There was a time in the SAP world that being “audit ready” meant implementing SAP DART before archiving. But for many companies, being audit data ready means having a process in place to enable them to respond at a moment’s notice to requirements and information requests from a dizzying array of tax authorities and regulatory regimes. It is an issue that impacts the bottom line: a multi-national company might expect to pay millions in penalties, simply
because of their inability to report in a timely manner.

Being audit data ready isn’t easy under any circumstances – it takes deep expertise with SAP and the technology solutions available. DART was originally developed to address the need for IRS data extracts, but businesses with complex operations working in multiple tax and regulatory environments – and sometimes multiple SAP systems – often need greater flexibility than DART enhancements can handle efficiently. These companies need to have it both ways – a standardized, repeatable process to index tax-related data, and the ability to respond efficiently to ad hoc requests.

For companies with complex or high-volume audit needs, Dolphin offers a suite of options, from traditional DART for SAP, to ‘on-the-fly’ audit data extraction, delivered in a format the auditors can use to get the job done quickly and effectively.  Learn how companies running SAP are meeting their challenge.

In a searchSAP.com story, editor Courtney Bjorlin reports that many users are upset about the cost of improving SAP NetWeaver BW performance with its BW Accelerator. In the article, Dolphin’s CEO Werner Hopf offers insight into how to assess your own needs for speeding up queries, and into the need to make your choices in the context of your company’s information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. The article states:

“BWA is a necessary ingredient once you reach a certain size,” Hopf said, “but implementing ILM and archiving can dramatically improve query performance. A good strategy is to implement nearline storage first and then decide whether query performance justifies a BWA purchase. Organizations may find they can postpone a BWA purchase, or, when using nearline in conjunction with a BWA, at least reduce the sizing of BWA, he said. BWA and Dolphin’s work can also be complementary solutions, where a customer using a BWA can lower the total cost of ownership and maintain performance by incorporating nearline storage.”

Learn more about Dolphin’s approach to speeding up SAP NetWeaver BW queries — while containing cost and risk — here.

Business Intelligence (BI) and other data-driven BI applications such as SAP NetWeaver BW help businesses improve transactions and manage massive data volumes.  But technology infrastructure limits how fast you can analyze and get the information you need to make well-informed business decisions.  The higher data volumes you manage and analyze, the longer it takes to get information — the performance/cost ratio becomes a factor that cannot be ignored.  How do you keep performance high while managing costs? Dolphin is seeing success applying innovative nearline storage for BW applications.  Download Dolphin’s whitepaper at  http://pages.dolphin-corp.com/BWArchivingWP.html to learn more.