Hi Syed
Before answering your questions, I would like to know which step is taking long time. Creating index or deleting index. And how many cubes are involved in the variant.
If deleting index is taking long time, your questions are right and below is the answer.
1. Is this good/possible to do by taking out from daily run?
Don't remove the step from the process chain, because index deletion and creation is very much important to important for data load performance, but you could create a separate process chain which has only delete index step with which you could save some time
2. Will this actually improve performance?
This will not improve performance. On the other hand, this will decrease the performance
3. Will the reporting/reports be impacted then?
Reports will have impact if you haven't create index after loading the data. Since index plays a main role in data selection
4. If we plan to run some other time then will in impact the data in info providers
This is what I would recommend. You are right. you can delete index before any process chains starts, but after business hours.
If index creation job is taking long time, then you should help from Basis team as well as this will be impacted by DB configurations.
Let us know first which is creating issue. Then we will discuss further
Regards
Karthik