Arwold Koelewijn SAP Business Intelligence

HERUG2017 Day 5, Amsterdam, 13 April 2017

Last month (April 2017) I had the pleasure to attend the Higher Education & Research User Group (HERUG) conference in Amsterdam.

I was also an presenter at two sessions. On Tuesday I was presenting together with Pieter-Jan Aartsen of the UvA about the project we did with the implementation of the IMR.
Partly this has been described in this blog.

On Wednesday I had the pleasure to be presenting together with Masood Nazir of the UvA about the project we did concerning the implementation of the evaluation reports.

Both of the presentations can be downloaded from the Herug site: Developing management dashboards for University of Amsterdam and Quality evaluation reports with SAP Design Studio.

I also visited some interesting sessions myself and got in touch with useful contacts.

To conclude: It was a very interesting conference.

SAP Lumira is a great tool with a lot of possibilities. However, when it comes to the integration in an existing environment, there remain a few inconveniences.

Imagine an existing environment where several connected applications have been built with SAP Design Studio, based on SAP BW, which is reached through a SAP Netweaver portal, using single sign on.

Ideally, users should be able to work with Lumira desktop and easily access BW BEx query data, for which they are authorized already anyway. Unfortunately, single sign on is not supported in this case(!), thus Business Analyst are required to log on to retrieve the data. It is possible to make a connection to HANA views, single sign on supported, but HANA views need to be built and maintained as well, and require sometimes additional license fee.

Thus if you want to use your SAP Businesswarehouse with SAP Lumira, what are the options?
1. Give users passwords they can use to log on to the system (but they have already been spoiled with singe sign on and will have to do this every time from now on)
2. No access to BW query’s directly, so they can only use downloaded excel data, and data cannot be refreshed automatically

So no great choiches there.

Then when the business analyst has finished his story, based on several datasources, and wants to share his report, another challenge arises. To be able to share the report, he/she must save it on the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform, for which single sign on is not supported either. Also, the BusinessObjects platform is not the nicest looking environment, so in general it is better to keep business users away there.

An solution for the latter is to let the consuming business users access the report through an link. This can be organized for example using a consistent naming convention for the reports. But unfortunately these cannot be managed easily.

At the moment, SAP is working on Lumira 2.0. The vision of SAP is to have a better integration between SAP Design Studio and Lumira desktop. This sounds very promising. Hopefully single sign on will be working then as well in all the environments.

So for now the question is what to do. For the users to make better use of the datawarehouse, a tool as Lumira is essential. Unfortunately, the current version is not benefitting from the potential unique selling point it can have over its competitors, namely perfect integration within the platform.

To conclude: great visualizations and analyses can be done with Lumira desktop, but perfect integration on the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform has not been realized yet.

This week I brought a report live that uses the International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) as the guideline in presenting information. Although this report can only be considered as a small baby step, still the benefits of using standards are clear.

In the begin of this year I was at the book launch of the book: SAP BO Design Studio – The Comprehensive Guide. At this book launch, Dr Rolf Hichert presented his SUCCESS formula on IBCS. He didn’t send his audience away empty handed, everybody got his poster with the SUCCESS principles explained. For me, the best place to have a poster like this is at the project site since it can be inspiring.

Then after the summer, a change to the quarterly management reports is required. With a glance at the SUCCESS poster, this is an opportunity to standardize the look and feel of this report in a consistent language using IBCS as guideline.

The end result of the management report is in the form of a word document. So very pragmatic it was decided that the datawarehouse will deliver per chapter the mandatory tables and graphs in an automated way, formatted according to the IBCS guidelines. The users will use a screen capture tool to copy and paste them in the Word document and will then add commentary and explanation to the figures in the Word document.

With a strict deadline for this 3^rd Quarter report, a small project team was formed, and priorities were set.

The steps to deliver this report were basically the same as any other report. In addition, I made a mock up in Word and Excel following the IBCS guidelines , to see how it would turn out. I also investigated the use of the graphomate add on, which is a very beautiful tool to use, but in this stage not feasible to procure. So in the end I used the standard graph components of Design Studio, and a SDK  customizable table component to meet the special formatting requirements.

The IBCS guidelines had a positive impact on speeding up the process. Especially in the design phase, in the translation of the list of required topics into graphs and tables, it really helped to have clear guidelines.

So far, the reactions in general have been positive. The report has been brought live last week, and will be used in the coming period more intensively. The end product will be used in the quarterly management meetings. Hopefully these small steps in using IBCS guidelines will be appreciated and embraced by the organization.

To conclude: with limited amount of time and resources, a consistent and clear management report was build using the IBCS guidelines

Last month SAP has announced the next generation of SAP Business Warehouse, BW/4HANA.

This logical step in the evolution of the Business Warehouse is completely dedicated to the HANA platform, and as such, can do without millions lines of coding to support other databases.
Also, it has unloaded the heritage of previous SAP BW versions by allowing only 4 building blocks (Composite Provider, Open ODS View, InfoObject and Datastore Object), instead of the 15 that are mostly used these days.

I think this is a good step towards simplicity and this will have huge benefits in development and maintenance. Of course, this level of simplicity can today already be achieved by BWonHANA (release 7.5), but this is without the benefit of efficient coding in the background.

Obviously, for customers considering moving to this new version, it is always a good advice to choose the moment well. Not too soon, because then there will be too many bugs that need to be fixed. But also not too late, because you will want to benefit from the improvements as soon as possible.
Nevertheless, the move towards SAP BW/4HANA will be inevitable, if you want to continue doing datawarehousing with SAP, since the future developments will focus on this platform.

So with this in mind, and since BW/4HANA will only allow 4 building blocks, it is sound advice to consider using only the allowed building blocks in new developments. And if possible, migrate the current datamodels to the new objects.

To conclude: the next step in the evolution of SAP BW is here!