Thursday, December 20, 2007

View Your Profit and Loss Data and Analyze Your Investments Using Visual Composer

See how two applications of Visual Composer, the Profit Center Accounting dashboard and the Investment Approval template, work in conjunction with SAP ERP financial functions. Discover the elements of their user interfaces and see how they can help your company evaluate its financial data.


Key Concept

Visual Composer is a part of the EP usage type of SAP NetWeaver 2004s. It offers new user interfaces to analytical and reporting applications through Adobe flex technology. The application is compiled as a Flash “movie” with the look and feel of an animated Web site. Visual Composer provides a code-free modeling environment enabling the application developer to use various data sources, such as SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence queries, Business Application Programming Interfaces, or Web services, and to link them together modeling the data flow between them.

Visual Composer is a composition environment aimed at delivering reporting and actionable analytical applications using various data sources such as Business Intelligence (BI) or ERP systems. It includes pre-configured business content packages showing best practices that companies can adapt or modify. I’ll describe two of the Financials-related applications to show how they work.

The first is based on BI queries and shows a manager dashboard that extracts Profit Center Accounting (PCA) data. This application targets commonly used key performance indicators (KPIs) for the management of a profit center, such as profit or return on investment (ROI). The second application focuses on the Investment Management (IM) module and communicates directly with SAP ERP 2005, demonstrating the ability of Visual Composer to consume sources of information other than BI queries. After describing these two applications, I’ll answer some frequently asked questions about Visual Composer.

To provide the functionality, you need to implement the business packages into the Portal and then activate the required BI content associated with the business packages in the related BI systems. Depending on their level of expertise, financial functional experts may need to enlist the help of the IT department for some of the steps.

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