Set Up Users for SAP Biller Direct the Right Way

Look into the user management concept within SAP Biller Direct to understand how to set up users, assign business partners, and provide ongoing enrollment and user registration services. See the fundamental differences between various user types and review recommendations for user management locations either within the SAP system or in a separate database.

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Key Concept

SAP Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM) is a suite of applications that helps companies optimize working capital levels, streamline receivables, and eliminate excess costs for payments. SAP FSCM addresses virtually every process within the cash-to-cash cycle and provides information to corporate employees as well as customers and vendors. All applications make use of the latest SAP NetWeaver technology and are tightly integrated with mySAP ERP Financials and other components.

SAP Biller Direct displays account and invoice information via the Internet and provides electronic payment options and various self-services for end users. It accomplishes this by connecting a Java-based user interface (UI) with an SAP Accounts Receivable (AR) system and displaying business data via the Internet. SAP divided the application between Java and ABAP components, which makes the implementation tricky because consultants need to be familiar with both mySAP ERP Financials and SAP NetWeaver 2004 or SAP NetWeaver 2004s technology.

This is the first part in a series of articles in which I’ll describe aspects of SAP Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM) components, including Biller Direct, Dispute Management, Collections Management, and Credit Management. I’ll describe the architecture of Biller Direct in detail and then focus on the options for setting up user management. Based on experiences from several projects, user management is often the most challenging issue, whether you’ve implemented R/3 or mySAP ERP. This article applies to both systems and is intended for business administrators.

mySAP CRM Analytics Harnesses SAP NetWeaver BI Analytical Capabilities

mySAP CRM Analytics, a group of tools offered with mySAP CRM and SAP NetWeaver BI, can help you optimize your company’s customer data. Learn about the mySAP CRM extraction mechanism and delivered analysis tools you can use with your data. Then, explore the standard tool sets available, including customer analytics, product analytics, sales and service analytics, marketing analytics, and channel analytics.

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Key Concept

mySAP CRM Analytics applies to the package of software tools that supports analysis of mySAP CRM data in SAP NetWeaver BI. These tools also help transfer SAP NetWeaver BI data back into mySAP CRM.

As mySAP CRM installations become more stable, many companies are focusing on how better to take advantage of their investment in CRM software and data. One way to do this is to leverage SAP NetWeaver BI’s analytical power to help make better decisions in relation to CRM business practices, such as marketing sales customer interactions and Web site design. mySAP CRM Analytics is the collection of SAP NetWeaver (mostly SAP NetWeaver BI) tools that help make the most of a mySAP CRM installation. These tools include data mining and other mathematics-based analytical applications, Analysis Process Designer (APD), and delivered applications developed with Visual Composer 7.0. These tool sets can help analysts uncover new business opportunities, improve how to target customers, and in general process information more efficiently.

Layer SAP xApp Analytics on Top of SAP SEM for a Simplified Balanced Scorecard

You can streamline the user interface for Strategic Enterprise Management and Corporate Performance Monitor by adopting the Best Practice Scorecarding application, which is part of SAP xApp Analytics. You then can provide users with graphical views of their key performance indicators via a portal.

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Key Concept

SAP xApp Analytics is delivered as part of mySAP Business Suite. SAP xApp Analytics provides analytics for both general-purpose and industry-specific business processes. FI or CO experts can easily deploy analytics based on predefined models. They can also customize the analytics, or even build new analytic applications, using the visual design environment of the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer tool. The Best Practice Scorecarding xApp is one of the finance-related models belonging to SAP xApp Analytics. It is a special-purpose application, addressing a visualization-related pain point of the current Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) tool. It does not fully exploit the system integration potential of the xApp family to which it belongs, as its main purpose is to communicate exclusively with SEM.

SAP’s Best Practice Scorecarding application, available to users since November 2005, is a portal-based user interface (UI) that provides instant views of various key performance indicators (KPIs). The Best Practice Scorecarding application is part of SAP xApp Analytics available in the form of downloadable Business Packages for SAP NetWeaver Portal. It provides a simplified method for users to assess their performance against the company strategy and goals. I’ll use an example to show you how to install and use it.

What’s New in the BI Back End

Take a peek at the new features in SAP NetWeaver BI, which is part of SAP NetWeaver 2004s.

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Key Concept

SAP NetWeaver 2004s, a minor release of the SAP NetWeaver platform, became available in restricted release in October 2005. SAP now packages its Business Intelligence (BI) software as SAP NetWeaver BI. The latest release of BI is only available as part of SAP NetWeaver 2004s.

In SAP NetWeaver 2004s, BI transitions completely into the SAP NetWeaver landscape and is no longer its own release. The idea of BI encompasses the ability to analyze, plan, and disseminate data through various tools. In addition to improving the core data warehousing features, SAP has enhanced other BI features such as information broadcasting and analytic capabilities. Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) serves to consolidate, clean, and efficiently store data from varied sources.

Several new features and improvements in SAP NetWeaver BI help you tackle your back-end computing challenges. They include an enhanced Operational Data Store object (ODS, now called DataStore object), improvements to SAP NetWeaver BI InfoSets, and high performance analytics (HPA). This overview of SAP NetWeaver BI back-end changes covers what I consider the most useful new features, many of which are major improvements over the prior SAP BW Release 3.5.

What’s New in the BI Front End: Part 1

Learn about the new BEx Report Designer and BI Integrated Planning included in SAP NetWeaver 2004s and see how they fit into the SAP NetWeaver BI data output landscape.

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Key Concept

The BEx Suite consists of reporting and analysis tools to help you create formatted reports (reports with a specific design) to distribute SAP BI data to the decision-makers in your company. You can use these reports both online and offline and even transfer them to PDA

SAP NetWeaver 2004s includes two new front-end tools for the BEx Suite, BEx Report Designer and BI Integrated Planning. BEx Report Designer allows you to create formatted reports (reports containing design and style elements) that you can access via the Web. Examples of formatted reports include income statements for tax forms that contain specific fields in a particular layout.

The other new tool delivered in SAP NetWeaver 2004s, BI Integrated Planning, replaces BW-BPS. This changes the way you perform planning at your company, whether it’s sales planning, profit center planning, or another type of financial planning. You no longer need to have multiple Excel spreadsheets circulating through management levels. This tool leverages SAP BI InfoCubes to store plan data and SAP BI front-end tools to enter and present it.

Figure 1 provides an overview of the new and improved BEx tools SAP NetWeaver 2004s offers. Part 1 of this series contains information about the two new tools. In part 2, I will explain enhancements to existing BEx Suite tools in the SAP NetWeaver 2004s release.

How to Migrate Transformation Logic to SAP NetWeaver 2004s

With SAP NetWeaver 2004s comes a new way of implementing transformation logic. SAP has replaced transfer and update rules with transformations. Learn about their benefits and differences.

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Key Concept

In SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SAP has introduced a new way to transform data that replaces the widely used transfer and update rules in the previous BW releases. New in SAP NetWeaver 2004s is an item called transformations. Transformations serve the same purpose as BW’s transfer and update rules — consolidating, cleansing, and integrating data. However, the major benefits of transformations include a new graphical user interface, the introduction of end routines and expert routines, and an easy-to-implement unit of measure (UOM) conversion. Users who have implemented significant custom transformation logic have to migrate to ABAP Objects as part of their upgrade to SAP NetWeaver 2004s functionality.

Most SAP NetWeaver BI customers use routines to transform data such as unit of measure (UOM) conversions and lookups against master data tables in update and transfer rules. In the BI capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SAP has introduced transformations, a new method for applying business and technical logic to data. Transformations replace transfer and update rules. Once you decide to migrate, you need to understand how to perform this migration. I will provide guidance and examples to enable the migration to the new transformation process.

You may choose to execute a technical upgrade and preserve the objects built with BW 3.x. Transaction RSA1OLD allows you to continue working with 3.x objects. Thus, you have the option to migrate to newer objects when your project timeline and budget permit. In other words, upgrading to SAP NetWeaver 2004s does not mandate you to use the concepts introduced in the new release and your investment in this area of SAP BW thus far does not go to waste. However, migrating your objects to the new transformation process has some distinct advantages.

Custom Program Grants Users Easy Access to Both BEx Analyzer 3.x and SAP NetWeaver 2004s

When migrating to SAP NetWeaver 2004s, your users may want to access both the new and legacy versions of BEx Analyzer until they get used to the new program. However, users accessing BEx Analyzer via single-sign on with transaction RRMX cannot choose which version of BEx Analyzer to launch. Use ABAP code to add a selection screen so users can choose their version of BEx Analyzer.

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Key Concept

BEx Analyzer in SAP NetWeaver 2004s has changed substantially. It is now more integrated into Microsoft Excel. Some new features include the direct use of Excel formulas and formatting and the ability to build applications with the new Design Toolbar. Therefore, you cannot open workbooks saved in the new BEx Analyzer release in the older legacy version (commonly called 3.x), and you must migrate workbooks created in 3.x to use them in SAP NetWeaver 2004s. To ease the upgrade and migration process to SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SAP provides and supports both versions of BEx Analyzer. Most users choose to use both versions to adjust to the new version and wait for the technical team to migrate existing 3.x query objects to SAP NetWeaver 2004s. Also, many SAP implementations support multiple BI clients, involving a combination of BW 3.x and SAP NetWeaver 2004s.

The SAP NetWeaver 2004s SAPGUI front end provides two versions of BEx Analyzer: the 3.x legacy version and the SAP NetWeaver 2004s version. Users may run queries created under either version with either tool, although they can only edit queries with the version in which they were created.

While users grow accustomed to the new version of BEx Analyzer, they probably want to access both versions of the program. However, in SAP NetWeaver 2004s, the only way to specify which version of BEx Analyzer starts with transaction RRMX is by a global setting on the SAP NetWeaver 2004s version (Figure 1). You can access this setting only after you launch BEx Analyzer in SAP NetWeaver 2004s.

How to Migrate to the New DataSource Concept in SAP NetWeaver 2004s

A new data flow concept has been introduced in SAP NetWeaver 2004s. SAP still supports the existing classic 3.x data flow, which allows customers to migrate as their needs warrant. Although the migration is not required, it presents a host of new capabilities.

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Key Concept

A DataSource can only exist in one of two states: emulation and migration. An emulated DataSource technically remains a 3.x DataSource. A migrated DataSource is an emulated DataSource that has been technically migrated to SAP NetWeaver 2004s, which allows it greater functionality and data staging mechanisms.

The new BI capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 2004s contain a tremendous amount of new functionality. SAP introduced a series of major changes in the data staging area, changing extensively the way it maps, transforms, and physically loads data into the SAP NetWeaver system. It rearchitected this area and frequently refers to it as SAP NetWeaver 2004s’s new data flow.

Included in this new data flow is a new DataSource concept, changes in InfoPackages, a new data agent called the data transfer process (DTP), the removal of the InfoSource as a mandatory data staging layer, and the consolidation of all data transformations into a single object called BI transformations. While this one topic area certainly contains a lot of material to cover, I’m going to focus on the new DataSource concept in this article and how to migrate to it.

Compared to the classic approach in 3.x, I summarize the changes to DataSources in the BI capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 2004s as follows: The Persistent Staging Area (PSA) is now mandatory for all data loads and is also tied to the DataSource. The two terms are now virtually interchangeable.

Data Upload Feature Enhances Sarbanes-Oxley Consolidations Compliance

SAP NetWeaver 2004s includes automatic data uploading functionality that replaces the Microsoft Excel-based method. It features a new consolidated process using Real-Time InfoCubes and Real-Time DataStore objects.

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Key Concept

The data basis defines the data model for a Business Consolidation system. The data basis is created in the Consolidation Workbench and is a combination of characteristics and key figures. The relationship between the characteristics and key figures, and the construction of the data streams for the collection and storage of data, are also part of the data basis. For example, it defines the posting level of the data that you can retrieve and the components from which you can upload data that are standard in SAP NetWeaver 2004s.

The most recent improvement to the consolidations process in Strategic Enterprise Management-Business Consolidation system (SEM-BCS) enhances compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Starting with SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SEM-BCS has moved from an interfacing uploading process for financial data to an integrated uploading process. This was the final step in the four following major areas requiring IT support for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley:

• The uploading or collection process to consolidate the data
  
  
• The specific business rules that are applied to the data to generate the consolidated reports
  
  
• The process that is followed for the consolidation itself
  
  
• The reporting aspect of consolidations

The last three items are activities that SEM-BCS has accomplished for a number of years, so I’ll concentrate on the first one. An SAP system now can offer consolidation functionality that generates consistent and validated information from multiple source systems via SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI).

I’ll take you through a demo of the new upload process, which ensures accuracy and reduces reporting cycle time to meet increasingly short deadlines. In addition, it provides a full audit trail capability and the ability to generate the reports required for internal and external auditors.