Business Server Pages (BSP) support many of your business processes on the Web. Beginning with an introduction to BSP, the author presents five basic steps that will allow you to use BSP functionality in BW. In addition, his downloadable code found on the BW/BI Expert Web site enables you to offer personalization options to your BW users.
Showing posts with label SAP Netweaver 2004s BW/BI Expert. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SAP Netweaver 2004s BW/BI Expert. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Publish SAP BI Content More Easily with SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0
Among the benefits of SAP NetWeaver ’04 is better integration between SAP BI and SAP Enterprise Portal (SAP EP). This overview explains what the integration of SAP BW 3.5 with SAP EP 6.0 Support Stack ’04 (and above) provides.
Quickly Build Impressive Dashboards in SAP BW 3.5
You have a variety of options for creating and maintaining dashboards in SAP BW 3.5 including a new approach that significantly reduces your development efforts. The SAP Business Explorer (BEx) Web Application Designer in SAP BW 3.5 introduces the Web template Web item so you can easily design dashboards that your end users are sure to love.
Data Mining with the Analysis Process Designer in SAP BW 3.5
The Analysis Process Designer (APD) workbench, introduced in BW 3.1 Content (BW 3.0B SP6), allows users to combine numerous transformations into a single data flow. It offers a less technical approach to enhancing subject-oriented, non-volatile data that has already been integrated, cleansed, and transformed in the data warehouse. The author examines current APD features and outlines future plans for integrating it with other data mining functionality in the upcoming BW 3.5 release set for later this year.
Avoid Data Inconsistency in SAP NetWeaver BI in Just 5 Steps
Key Concept |
Typical enterprise data warehouse scenarios involve a large amount of data consolidation, cleansing, and enrichment. These processes create dependencies on data load sequencing and modeling. These dependencies ensure that the dependent data load happens only after the previous data load has finished. |
Consider an organization with multiple source systems feeding master and transactional data to an enterprise data warehouse based on SAP NetWeaver BI. During these data update stages, all the data targets that the system retrieves for consolidation, cleansing, and enrichment need the most current data. This is particularly critical in a single-source data warehouse. When you consolidate or enrich information, you must confirm that all the dependent loads succeeded.
If your enterprise has a single master data chain, the transactional loads can still progress even though the master data chain has failed for some of the master data. This allows inconsistent data to infiltrate your system. To avoid this, you need to set up dependencies in the data load process chain.
However, SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 and earlier releases lack the infrastructure capabilities to set up these dependencies. We developed a five-step process that allows you to set up and track dependencies for critical loads:
Step 1. Become familiar with using the ABAP program process type in transaction RSPC
Step 2. Create a custom table in transaction SE11 to map and store the dependencies
Step 3. Create a custom program to get the dependencies for the data load
Step 4. Create a variant for each dependency you need
Step 5. Run the process chain with the variant you created in step 4
When implemented, the process automatically synchronizes the data loads — using dependencies that you maintain in a custom table — and checks for successful completion of these dependencies in the process chain execution. If a dependent process does not complete successfully, the process blocks the next data load and raises an error.
BEx Information Broadcasting in SAP BW 3.5 Puts Users Front and Center
SAP has expanded the feature set in the latest iteration of SAP BW. Included in the new functionality is BEx Information Broadcasting, which provides a variety of ways for users to disseminate information. This introduction to BEx Information Broadcasting and its front-end tool, the BEx Broadcaster, will give you a head start on putting it to use.
Use SAP NetWeaver BI as an ESA-Oriented Data Source
You can go beyond the traditional use of SAP NetWeaver BI for strategic reporting on aggregated and historic data. Learn how one company created a composite application using a second SAP BW instance as a consolidated data source. The resulting application uses the SAP BW data embedded in a transaction.
Key Concept |
| Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that merges SAP’s enterprise application content with the open composition platform SAP NetWeaver. It enables the building of flexible business processes by SAP systems, partners, and stakeholders by making the linking of software components possible. |
Company X, a leading US company, wanted to improve its current manual fax- and email-based process because it took several days for changes to appear in the back-end systems such as mySAP ERP. Company X designs and brands its products and sells them globally. It outsources the production to several hundred contract manufacturers around the world. After creating purchase orders (POs) in mySAP ERP with several dozens of line items, company X issues the POs to the manufacturers. The manufacturers receive the POs to confirm the items. Once they confirm the POs, the manufacturers report the status of the work in progress. The company’s current setup slowed production because internal employees and manufacturers could not see updated data in the back-end systems for several days, or didn’t have access to the information directly.
After preliminary research, company X found no packaged solution that completely fulfilled its requirements. The company decided to combine its existing functionality (mySAP ERP and SAP BW) with SAP Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) by building a custom composite application. The project team decided to use SAP BW for more than reporting and analyzing. It created a separate SAP BW instance to serve as a direct data source for applications.
Company X’s composite application updates the back-end systems through a Web application via SAP Enterprise Portal. It allows its employees and manufacturers to view updated PO data in near real time. This creates an improved and efficient collaborative process with its contract manufacturers.
Like company X, many organizations today face the challenge of integrating existing applications and composing them into new applications. In many cases, businesses are satisfied with their existing system but want to update it to fulfill changing business needs. When you link existing pieces of applications, you can consolidate data from different sources. Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) allows you to keep current IT software while building composite applications. Many companies have switched from a traditional buy and build approach to a buy, compose, and build approach (Figure 1).Query SAP NetWeaver BI’s Metadata and Result Sets More Easily with New XML Web Items
Two new XML Web items are available in the SAP BW 3.5 Web Application Designer that ease XML programming. Learn how they affect your query options.
Key Concept |
| Two XML Web items in SAP BW 3.5 provide programmatic access to query metadata and result sets in an XML output format. This paves the way to making programmatic interaction with and manipulation of Web Application Designer templates easier with XML. |
SAP BW 3.5 includes two Web items that are easily overlooked because their names do not immediately make their function evident. While not necessarily directly applicable to the mainstream user of either Web Application Designer (Web AD) or Web templates in general, these Web items provide important features for making analytically based XML programming efforts easier over the Web. These Web items are unique in that they allow programmatic access to the result data returned by SAP BW 3.5.
By providing XML representation of both structural information and the actual data of a particular query or view, these Web items allow quick access to SAP NetWeaver BI data for browser-based application development. You can use JavaScript to access the data delivered by these Web items. This is particularly handy when the application accessing the SAP NetWeaver BI system requires detailed metadata information (in addition to the data itself).
What's Coming in 2004
SAP BW 3.5 will be a part of the SAP NetWeaver 2004 Ramp-Up in the end of March and unrestricted shipments begin in late 2004. The author explains the features of the updated program, such as an improved business intelligence platform, support for enterprise data warehousing, and new and easier ways to distribute enterprise-wide business intelligence. She also suggests how to upgrade to SAP BW 3.5.
Optimize FI-GL Processing with Intelligent Lookup Tables and Pseudo Delta Loads
Key Concept |
An intelligent lookup table is a DataStore object with data required as a lookup when processing high data volumes. An intelligent lookup table can optimize data processing in a multi-layer business warehouse setup. Usually it is a subset of a large data set containing only the records you need for a particular data load. This subset contains only relevant details corresponding to business logic related to your project. An example of an intelligent lookup table is a DataStore object containing accounting document numbers mapped to vendor codes and purchase order (PO) numbers. During each delta load, this DataStore object contains only those records that relate to the data set that you’re currently processing. |
A purchasing group in a multi-billion dollar corporation wanted to improve its operational reporting capabilities by daily updates of purchasing performance indicators and management dashboards. The operational purchasing group sources and purchases all non-production goods and services including external resources and consultancy. I helped to implement a multi-layer BW data model to fulfill its needs using intelligent lookup tables and a pseudo delta approach.
This setup provides a capability to implement complex business logic when moving line items to the second level. At the same time, it substantially speeds up data processing time — 30 million transaction lines used to run for three days in the old setup, but with the intelligent lookup tables it took 26 hours.
The project requirements included complex filtering logic for invoices and purchase orders. The project team and I used a multi-layered BW setup to ensure the solution is scalable and reusable. First, all documents are loaded to the first level because projects other than this one might use them. Second-level DataStore objects contain only project-related documents with certain business logic applied. On the third level, the BW system aggregates data in the reporting InfoCubes.
Open Hub Transformation Meets Complex Business Requirements
Key Concept |
Open hub allows BW to act as a source to distribute data to systems outside of BW. It extracts data from BW’s InfoCubes, DataStore objects (formerly operational data store [ODS] objects), and master data. It then sends that data to external destinations as either a relational database table or a flat file. Transforming data in open hub requires ABAP coding in the form of a custom Business Add-In (BAdI). |
The nature of many IT organizations dictates that information needs to flow not only into the BW system, but also out of BW into other systems. For example, your sales team needs BW data to feed a third-party transactional system. This system tracks and maintains shipping orders on a monthly basis. The third-party package has specific data storage requirements. To get the data out of BW into this third-party shipping system, you can use open hub. However, open hub extracts data in its current form. You often need to translate the data to comply with the third-party system’s data requirements, such as a five-digit material number or a leading zero at the beginning of each field. To satisfy these requirements, use custom ABAP code in the open hub transformation Business Add-In (BAdI).
In my example, SAP has a four-character alphanumeric plant field 0PLANT, but the third-party system requires a five-character numeric field for plant. During extraction, you must convert the plant field. Open hub transformation can perform the translation in just three steps: Set up the InfoSpoke, configure open hub transformation, and write custom ABAP code.
Effectively Gather BW Functional Requirements
Key Concept |
When developing any data warehouse solution, it helps to have a set of documents that you can complete to define and set the scope of development. These documents act as a template that the members of the project team and the business can fill out to provide a clear and repeatable process for requirements gathering. This should allow you to identify gaps as early as possible in the design process. |
One of the biggest and most important challenges in any implementation is gathering and understanding the end user and process team functional requirements. These functional requirements represent the scope of analysis needs and expectations (both now and in the future) of the end user. These typically involve all of the following:
- Business reasons for the project and business questions answered by the implementation
- Critical success factors for the implementation
- Source systems that are involved and the scope of information needed from each
- Intended audience and stakeholders and their analysis needs
- Any major transformation that is needed in order to provide the information
- Security requirements to prevent unauthorized use
This process involves one seemingly simple task: Find out exactly what the end users’ analysis requirements are, both now and in the future, and build the BW system to these requirements. Although simple in concept, in practice gathering and reaching a clear understanding and agreement on a complete set of BW functional requirements is not always so simple.
Use Selective Deletion to Substitute InfoCube Characteristic Values
Key Concept |
The InfoCube is a model of a specific business scenario, so its content reflects the business environment. From time to time, BW teams are required to adjust an InfoCube’s content to a changed business environment. Substituting characteristic values to update the InfoCube is one such adjustment. |
From time to time, BW teams are required to substitute the characteristic values of an InfoCube to adjust content based on a changed business situation. For example, you might have to substitute values caused by changes to the business environment such as a sales manager substitution, changes in product hierarchies, or data inconsistency.
In many cases, users choose to fully reload their data. However, this involves a long InfoCube downtime during which you delete incorrect data and load new data. Then the system recalculates aggregates. The InfoCube is unavailable during this process and the larger the InfoCube, the longer the downtime.
I propose two other approaches for substituting InfoCube characteristic values. The first is substitution with selective deletion. The second is substitution with reverse load, which I’ll explain in my other article in the July/August 2007 BW/BI Expert. In many cases they are much more effective compared to the traditional method.
Most of the routine situations are associated with static data InfoCubes that have been left unchanged for a long time. For instance, a sales budget InfoCube contains target monthly sales key figures for customer managers. The BW team prepares this InfoCube at the beginning of each year and leaves it alone all year. This InfoCube is usually used for plan-fact comparison reports.
Use Selective Deletion to Substitute InfoCube Characteristic Values
Key Concept |
The InfoCube is a model of a specific business scenario, so its content reflects the business environment. From time to time, BW teams are required to adjust an InfoCube’s content to a changed business environment. Substituting characteristic values to update the InfoCube is one such adjustment. |
From time to time, BW teams are required to substitute the characteristic values of an InfoCube to adjust content based on a changed business situation. For example, you might have to substitute values caused by changes to the business environment such as a sales manager substitution, changes in product hierarchies, or data inconsistency.
In many cases, users choose to fully reload their data. However, this involves a long InfoCube downtime during which you delete incorrect data and load new data. Then the system recalculates aggregates. The InfoCube is unavailable during this process and the larger the InfoCube, the longer the downtime.
I propose two other approaches for substituting InfoCube characteristic values. The first is substitution with selective deletion. The second is substitution with reverse load, which I’ll explain in my other article in the July/August 2007 BW/BI Expert. In many cases they are much more effective compared to the traditional method.
Most of the routine situations are associated with static data InfoCubes that have been left unchanged for a long time. For instance, a sales budget InfoCube contains target monthly sales key figures for customer managers. The BW team prepares this InfoCube at the beginning of each year and leaves it alone all year. This InfoCube is usually used for plan-fact comparison reports.
Use Reverse Loading to Substitute InfoCube Characteristic Values
Key Concept |
A characteristic is an object that presents the elementary dimension component in the BW star schema model such as customer, product, company, or sales organization. Key figures of an InfoCube relate to characteristics that supply additional information to each key figure. |
Many business scenarios, such as updating inconsistent data, require you to substitute InfoCube characteristic values. In this article, I’ll discuss a technique that involves a reverse load. See my July/August 2007 BW/BI Expert article “Avoid Full Data Reload: Use Selective Deletion to Substitute InfoCube Characteristic Values” for steps outlining the procedure of selective deletion and for a table outlining when you might want to use each technique.
Rolling Off Data from Data Targets: Which Process Is Right for You?
Evaluate several processes that allow you to delete data in BW, including archiving, selective deletion, delete and change log requests, and deletion of Persistent Staging Area data and master data.
Key Concept |
| Rolling off data from a data target means deleting data from a data target in a rolling manner. Instead of simply deleting all the data at once, you can roll off the oldest parts at a set interval of time. |
Sizing is one of the most important aspects of BW design. When a data target grows too big, performance often deteriorates. You can manage performance for data targets with large volumes by partitioning, compressing, or aggregating. However, you still need to manage the size of data targets because BW does not have enough room to keep the history of your source systems. Therefore, you must devise a strategy to roll off data from your data targets.
In a typical data warehouse environment, you must keep historical data from three months to 10 years depending on the data target’s granularity. For a data target with calendar day granularity, usually the retention period is three months to a year. For a data target with calendar month granularity, the retention period can be longer — three to five years. For a data target with calendar year granularity, you may keep up to 10 years of data.
BW contains no clear-cut functionality to automate the process of rolling off data from data targets. I will show you how to use BW’s tools to design a solution to roll data off from data targets seamlessly and automatically. There are no specific requirements or prerequisites other than those I’ll explain later.
The process you choose depends on your data target (master data, ODS, or Info-Cube) and your update mode. Possible update modes include delta, pseudo-delta (full, but with selections to force delta), or full. Use pseudo-delta when it is impossible to create a generic delta extractor — instead, write code in the InfoPackage selections to get updated data only. Let’s explore the functionality that BW provides to roll off data from data targets.
Empower Your End Users with Accurate BW Reports
Key Concept |
A class is a type of ABAP program. In the context of my solution, I use the class to change the cell contents of the results table. More specifically, the class changes the cell content of the status characteristic. Instead of displaying the key code from the status ODS object, the table interface passes an image string that converts to an icon in the Web application. In my example, BW creates a report to display the characteristic value as a traffic light icon (for example, a green traffic light instead of displaying the number 10). This helps the end users visualize the data in a more intuitive way. |
End users at my company often ask, “How recent is the data that I see in my report?” They want to know when BW extracted data from its source systems. If you have developed Web-based reports, you may have seen the “status of data” information that you can include as part of a text element Web item.
However, this information has a number of limitations. First, users only see the information after they access the report. If you have not loaded the data into BW since the users last looked at the report, they can’t realize it until they’ve spent time to open the report. Secondly, complex BW system architecture involving ODS objects, Info- Cubes, and MultiProviders can make the SAP standard “status of data” option misleading.
For example, a MultiProvider can have many different InfoCubes from which it can access data. A BEx query built on this MultiProvider might only access data from some of these underlying InfoCubes. The SAP standard “status of data” information displays the date/time of the underlying InfoCube loaded the longest time ago. For example, InfoCube A was loaded on January 1, 2005, at 9:00, InfoCube B on January 9, 2005, at 7:00, and InfoCube C on January 9, 2005, at 9:00. Because InfoCube A contains no key figures for this BEx query, but is part of the MultiCube, the date and time that the user sees are incorrect (Figure 1).Save Time and Resources by Managing Excel Workbook Growth
Key Concept |
One major side effect of using workbooks in Excel is the history effect, or workbook growth. Excel creates history traces in its files even if you turn off the change management feature. As a result, your files keep growing when you save the Excel file either locally or on the BW server. The problem does not relate to SAP BW, so this applies to all of your Excel files. |
A lot of companies use BW for Sales and Distribution (SD) reporting. Imagine a salesperson not connected to high-speed Internet or dial-in connection. When that person executes a workbook report, the BW server first transmits the workbook and secondly refreshes the data. So whenever he downloads a workbook, he has to wait for the data to refresh. Modifying workbooks creates historical data that consumes lots of system resources. I’ll explain how to get rid of that historical data to speed up your system.
First, I’ll show you an example of how the data accumulates. Then I’ll explain how to isolate huge workbooks that don’t contain a lot of data and how to reduce their size using a third-party tool of your choice. This should reduce the strain on your servers and make BEx Broadcaster run faster.
How to Copy Process Chains
Everybody who creates process chains comes to a point at which they want to copy a process chain. There are many reasons: because copying makes it quicker, you want to make only small changes from an existing chain to another, or you want to test a process chain and modify it to look at different scenarios without having to destroy the original.
Modify BW-BPS Web Interfaces with JavaScript to Include Fixed and Scrolling Columns
Key Concept |
The standard Business Planning and Simulation (BPS) interface toolset allows the insertion of JavaScript-based commands directly into the Web interface for customization. Existing BPS Web interface customization tools do not provide specific formatting capabilities for overall presentation. In the case of layouts presenting large numbers of columns and rows, the standard presentation does not allow certain columns or rows of a layout to be fixed (or “frozen”) and other columns or rows to scroll. The incorporation of JavaScript commands into the BPS Web interface allows you to customize the Web presentation to include enhanced scrolling capability. |
SAP BW-Business Planning and Simulation (BPS) provides tools via transaction BPS_WB that allow you to customize BPS planning applications that you want to present to the end user via a Web session. SAP provides standard Web interface development tools such as function buttons, tab strips, and containers for specific objects. However, the standard solution does not provide a number of custom effects. You can achieve some of these effects by using JavaScript-based commands to enhance your scrolling abilities.
We’ll present a brief example to explain different scrolling capabilities and limitations and then show you the three phases of work you need to undertake to implement the capabilities you want to have. We’ll also show you the logic of the scrolling solution.
We have provided JavaScript commands in the code available at the Downloads section of BWExpertOnline.com. You can easily incorporate these commands into most Web interfaces during the Web interface configuration. The use of this modification code technique is applicable to all BW-BPS Web Interface Builder functionality found within BW-BPS 3.5 through BW-BPS 6.0.
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