My best guess is that SAP BI is a data warehouse reporting tool. This means that if the data you get from this source is not how you'd like it, you can save it to a file and open it in Office. I'm also guessing that scripts can be scheduled to in it to 'put' data files (.csv, .txt, etc) in file server folders. This would mean that you could build an Access database that attaches to these files and build reports, etc and 'crunch' the data. And you can also get the data over into excel a lot easier. The main upside (imho) to this approach is that more people are able to do spreadsheet and Access database data crunching that with the limited reporting capabilities of native SAP.