One of my big priorities for attending the event this week is to find out more about SAP BPC, especially what other customers are doing with the tool and what successes and/or challenges have been encountered.

I’ve attended product demonstrations, SAP presentations, case studies, and microforums, but I think the most valuable session I attended was this past Monday during the pre-conference day.

David Dixon, who also happens to be presenting at our BPC Seminar starting in June, delivered a session titled, “Mars’ Big-Bet ROI Pay-Off using SAP BPC for real-time global integrated planning told by an IT Executive”.

David detailed Mars’ ROI case study, and how the company integrated the SAP BPC tool with its current SAP Trade and Promotion Management system, as well as its legacy SAP NetWeaver BW reporting environment. The goal of the project was to provide its sales community with quicker access to real-time planning data. He showed a great demo that details both!

Since implementing BPC Mars’ has been able to add real-time calculation and integration, process automation, more usability, and new analysis capabilities to both its annual and rolling plans. Mars has received such high ROI from its implementation; they now have plans to roll the tool out enterprise-wide.

David has definitely worked on his fair share of BPC projects, but from what I could tell, this one seemed more complex than most. It’s reassuring to know that even the most complex and intricate projects can have such outstanding results!

I’m looking forward to a couple more sessions today to wrap up a great week in Orlando!

If you were at Sapphire and happened to attend David's sessions, definitely check him out at our BPC Seminar in Washington DC in June. www.bpcseminar.com

Also for the latest updates on our events, follow me on twitter @AllisonMartin14

This means there are lots of questions as organizations evaluate their next move. 

Three top BPC experts – Scott Cairncross, David Dixon, and Jarrett Bialek of TruQua Enterprises – joined us to take your questions on SAP BPC 10.0 in  the Financials Forum, with a special focus on migrating to BPC 10 and running BPC on HANA.

Follow the entire thread in the Financials Forum archives or read the edited transcript here:

Allison Martin: Welcome to today's discussion thread on BPC 10.0!

Today, we have BPC experts Scott Cairncross, David Dixon and Jarrett Bialek of TruQua Enterprises here to take your questions. TruQua Enterprises will be participating in our upcoming BPC Seminar in Washington D.C in June and also presenting at our SAP Financials event in Amsterdam.

Welcome, Scott, David and Jarrett!

Jarrett Bialek: Thank you Allison, glad to be here and looking forward to some great questions!

Scott Cairncross: Hello All, Welcome to the Q&A forum on Upgrading to BPC 10.0. 

Thanks for posting your questions. Post as many as you like and if we can't get to them during the hour we'll surely follow up and make sure that they are answered and sent to you. 

Thanks, 

Scott Cairncross (scott.cairncross@truqua.com)

David Dixon: Thanks Allison for the introduction!  I see there are a few posts already so we will start replying.  See everyone at the upcoming seminars and conferences!

Best wishes,

David Dixon

RoseParatto: What challenges are being faced when installing BPC 10 NW using FIM and Data Services 4.1?  What should I be considering for a successful installation?

Scott Cairncross: Hi Rose, 

Thanks for your question. Can you clarify? Are you currently using FIM to populate BPC 7.5 NW?

As FIM and Data Services are EIM (Enterprise Information Managememt) tools they would not aid you necessarily in your upgrade process. 

If your question is more related to how FIM interacts with BPC 10.0 NW vs. BPC 7.5 NW, it interacts in very much the same way. The integration templates are still in place and will continue to work to process your data movements between systems. Of course just as with any migration process you will have to do regression testing to make sure that everything is functioning as desired.

Cheers, Scott

David Dixon: Hi Rose,

To add to what Scott responded, Data Services is an underlying component of FIM with a web application interface on top designed to be more user-centric than working directly within Data Services Designer. 

It is an important distinction as there are ways to integrate Data Services into SAP BPC without FIM but this direct integration is custom development (supported by an SAP How-To guide for an earlier version of Data Services) and not SAP standard functionality (as with FIM).  Otherwise, you can always use Data Services to generate files that can be imported and loaded by SAP BPC Data Manager.

If you took the latter approach (Data Services) versus the former (FIM) there will be more migration considerations due to the nature of the integration. More specifically, we did experience issues going from 7.x to 10.0 at one of our clients. In the end, we got it working with a few adjustments and it is heavily being used in a production system. Otherwise, the considerations are as what Scott describes.

Best wishes and have a great day!

David

Matt: Hi,

What is your advice to clients considering migrating to BPC NW 10.0 vs. using BPC 10.0 on HANA?

Jarrett Bialek: Hello Matt,

I would take note of all your performance pain points and make sure that HANA will address (or plans to address) these issues before making the additonal investment. 

Remember that HANA will help you with read/write times at the db level, however many customer's pain points appear to be backend when they are really how their front-end templates were designed, not enough dialog processes on application servers, not enough application servers, load balancing, poorly performing script logic, abap, or MDX, etc.

HANA will help with large data volumes (writes and reads) and calculation intensive processes.  HANA will be better equipped to handle MDX than the current BPC 10.0 on NW (non-HANA). 

We have also seen dimensions with many members (100,000+) only able to be processed on BPC HANA systems (however, this probably could be addressed as well with custom code on non-HANA systems).

jemathieu: Hi,

We are currently considering a migration from BPC 7.5 NW to BPC 10 NW.

As we have numerous reports based on BO through WEBI, we have one concern : the queries on which WEBI reports are built on the multiprovider created by BPC. If we migrate the current appsets and applications from BPC 7.5 NW to BPC 10 NW using the migration program, will the technical names of the cubes (BPC models) change ?

The answer to this question is important since it will affect our migration strategy since we would want to have the reporting on WEBI to stay stable and not remap everything because technical names have changed.

Thank you for your answers. 

JM

David Dixon: To answer your question:

As part of the migration, you will perform a back up from your 7.5 NW system and a restore to your 10.0 NW system (before running the migration program UJT_MIGRATE_75_TO_10).  The transaction code to do this back up and restore is UJBR.  When you do the restore, there is a checkbox option you will need to flag called "Use Tech Names from Backup Files". 

Make sure you flag this to avoid the issue are concerned with.  Also note that as of EPM 10.0 NW SP5 it is possible to fix the technical names (reference SAP Note 1689814 - "Stabilize InfoCube's technical name in the modeling process").  There are other issues you need to consider in the area of transports and optimizations.

To address another issue related to your question:

As you may or may not be aware there are issues and considerations with the approach you are taking with SAP BusinessObjects integration as it is not yet SAP supported.  SAP provides an ODBO provider to achieve such SAP BusinessObjects BI integration.

The approach in question by-passes SAP BPC security and its Shared Query Engine (which handles logic such as signage, measures and anything MDX related). 

While SAP BEx queries can be created on the underlying SAP BPC generated Multi-Provider and successfully yield database results, the approach goes against the fundamental design principal that SAP BPC generates and manages all of its underlying SAP BW metadata for you.

It's conceptually similar to the approach of building SAP BusinessObjects Universes directly against SAP database tables; while there are working implementations it is not SAP recommended because it it by-passes SAP security and application server intelligence (in this case memory management, conversion exits, caching, etc).

jemathieu:  Hi David,

Thanks for your answer. Concerning the other issues related to my question, most of them we were aware of, and chose to go for it as our business love BPC and...BO.. So we managed to handle security on the BO side and on the BPC side separately. We have a good process to handle this so it does not have much impact. For the shared query engine functionalities, we have workaround solutions for this, especially for YTD purposes.

We are totally aware that it is not SAP supported but on the other hand, business is satisfied and top management rather have a nice WEBI report / dashboards instead of connecting to BPC and open the required reports in Excel. So we assume our choices and do our designs with the issues you mentioned in our minds.

JM

David Dixon: Hello JM,

Thank you for sharing your experiences and rounding out the dialogue! 

Just a point of further clarification is that there is an SAP supported way to integrate SAP BusinessObjects BI (including Universes and Web Intelligence) directly to SAP BPC without having to go down the MultiProvider route.

So you are not forced to use Excel as your reporting tool against SAP BPC data.  You can use Web Intelligence in an SAP supported way that leverages SAP BPC security and Shared Query Engine.

I believe the key decision criteria in going down the route you took is evaluating the SAP BPC ODBO provider versus the various SAP BW connectivity options.  But it sounds like you were aware of all the trade offs involved; I simply wanted to make this important distinction for our audience.

Have a great afternoon!

Cheers,

David

FredericJubier:  Hi Scott,

We are interested to do an "inplace" upgrade of our current system BPC7.5 NW to EPM10.

1) Backend migration – steps: I'd like to know the technical steps to convert/migrate DEV, QA and PROD from the backend point of view including the basis tasks if possible. 

2) Frontend migration – steps: There is a conversion tool on the frontend to re-use existing EVDREs reports/templates which can be very useful for a quick win (backward compatibility). Can you elaborate on the topic? Does the performance will improve the time response by executing the same EVDRE in EPM10? MDX query or RSDRI query? 

3) HANA option: One of the reasons to go to EPM10 is the performance gain through the use of HANA. I understand the reporting can be faster but I am not sure if the script logic (default) will automatically beneficiate from HANA. The read time is improve but I am not sure about the Write back with Script Logic. Does customer needs to develop SQL script in native HANA to have the full benefits?

Scott Cairncross: Hi Fred, 

Here are the answers to your questions below: 

1) Backend migration – steps: “I'd like to know the technical steps to convert/migrate DEV, QA and PROD from the backend point of view including the basis tasks if possible."

First off you will need to use the UJBR tool to backup your BPC Application Set... A full backup is required as it will be used later in the migration process.

Your BW system, the platform for BPC 10.0 then needs to be upgraded to BW 7.3 this process varies based on what version you are currently on as well as whether or not you are planning to leverage BW on HANA as well. Doing an upgrade alone would require using the SUM (Software Update Manager) tool to upgrade your system to BW 7.3 if you were not planning a net new install which from your question you do not as it is "inplace". As a part of the BW upgrade you can add the BPC 10.0 components to your upgrade queue (software components CPMBPC, POASBC & optionally HANABPC - if you are using HANA) and upgrade them at once. I typically like to break this up myself to ensure that the platform upgrade was successfull. 

Once your BW system is upgraded to BW 7.3 at that point if you had not upgraded to BPC 10.0 you can then go ahead and do so. The upgrade process is very quick for the BPC related components.

After the upgrade you will then need to restore your Application Set that you backed up from BPC 7.5.

Once you have restored your Application Set at that point you can run the following program.

 UJT_MIGRATE_75_TO_10

Which will take you through the final steps of the backend migration process. 

If you are migrating to BPC on BW on HANA you then need to run the subsequent program. 

BPC_HANA_MIGRATE_FROM_10

There are additinal details on the backend which need to be tended to. If you have BAdI's there are a series of API's that have been updated and those updates need to be incorporated into your code: 

• Get Dimension Members
• Get Current View
• Get Dimensions
• Read Transaction Data
• Write Transaction Data (Write Back)
• Get Metadata
• Process Dimension
• Read Master Data

Most of the other backend nuances are handled by the migration program itself... 

2) Frontend migration – steps: "There is a conversion tool on the frontend to re-use existing EVDREs reports/templates which can be very useful for a quick win (backward compatibility). Can you elaborate on the topic? Does the performance will improve the time response by executing the same EVDRE in EPM10? MDX query or RSDRI query?"

--> There is a conversion tool, yes. EVDRE's post migration will work fine within the EPM Add-In the new and improved BPC 10.0 frontend tool. There is however a series of EV functions that do not work any longer and there are others that should over time simply be migrated to their EPM function counterparts. 

 BPC 7.5 reports may only be built with EV functions. Here is the list of all former BPC 7.5 functions that are backward compatible:

Here is a list of EV functions and their corresponding EPM functions as well as those functions that are now deprecated. 

• evAPD = EPMModelCubeDesc
• evAPP = EPMModelCubeID
• evASD = EPMEnvDatabaseDesc
• evAST = EPMEnvDatabaseID
• evBET = EPMComparison
• evBNV = EPMBook
• evCGP = EPMCommentPartialContext
• evCGT = EPMCommentFullContext
• evCOM = EPMSaveComment
• evCVW = EPMContextMember
• evDES = EPMMemberDesc
• evDIM = EPMDimensionType
• evDNV = EPMDocumentList
• evGET = EPMRetrieveData
• evGTS = EPMScaleData
• evHNV = EPMURL
• evLCK = EPMWorkStatus
• evMBR = EPMSelectMember
• evMNU = EPMExecuteAPI
• evPRO = EPMMemberProperty
• evPRP = EPMDimensionProperty
• evRNG = EPMCellRanges
• evRTI = EPMRefreshTime
• evSND = EPMSaveData
• evSVR = EPMServer
• evTIM = EPMMemberOffset
• evUSR = EPMUser
• OsCLD = EPMDocument

Some former EV functions have been turned into EPM Add-in features and, therefore, are not supported anymore:

• EVEXP (use the new Report Editor instead)
• EVENE
• EVNXP
• EVSET
• EVLST
• EVPXR
• EVHOT (becomes “Quick links” functionality in the EPM add-in)

Regarding your question on Performance, migrating to the new Report Definition concept is really the best way to go to address performance this is something that is being developed and improved where as EVDRE and the other EV functions are simply being supported to help customers transition to the new frontend. 

3) HANA option: "One of the reason to go to EPM10 is the performance gain through the use of HANA. I understand the reporting can be faster but I am not sure if the script logic (default) will automatically beneficiate from HANA. The read time is improve but I am not sure about the Write back with Script Logic. Does customer needs to develop SQL script in native HANA to have the full benefits?"

Script logic is currently not enhanced in BPC on HANA however based on the blogs from EPM Solution Management and discussions with development I believe we will being enhancements in this area. 

Remember that not only is read performance improved with HANA, write performance is improved as well. The fact that dimension ID's are no longer stored in the DB which SAP says provids an 80% performance improvement for BW cube data loads which BPC gets inherently with HANA. Because of this fact that the Dimensions of the Cubes are no longer physically present we get simpler modeling and faster structural changes as a direct result. 

Also processing of MDX Measure Formulas was pushed down into the HANA database to improve read times which is very helpful as well. 

Hopefully this covers your BIG question... :)

Cheers, Scott

Benjamin Tan: One of the concerns of upgrading to NW10 from NW7.5 is that we have many reports/input schedules that are heavy with vba and ev_functions.  To rebuild them will take a lot of time and effort, an exercise we had once during the mirgration from MS7.5 to NW7.5 a while back. 

I saw that BPC 10 comes with a tool to help migrate the report, but I heard it may not work with all reports. 

What's your experience in this area and what advice/recommendation you may have? Thank You!

Jarrett: Hello Benjamin,

You are correct with all of your assumptions.  It will help and speed up the upgrade given that you have already addressed the non-supported MS functions with your migration from MS to NW. 

Here is a quick list of functions that are no longer supported when going from 7.5 -> 10.0:
EVEXP (use the new Report Editor instead)
EVENE
EVNXP
EVSET
EVLST
EVPXR
EVHOT (becomes “Quick Links” functionality in the EPM add-in)

Other functions are still supported, but renamed like: evPRO -> EPMMemberProperty, you don't necessarily have to update all of these, but might be wise to in case a future support pack breaks the depricated functions.

Also, anywhere you use EVMNU functions will have to be re-written using EPMExecuteAPI.

This could be a good excuse to consolidate many of your reports to minimize the effort, but anywhere the above non-supported functions are used, the reports will have to be touched.  What I have seen done is a program that goes through and updates all the vba, however this was to update over 1000 reports so the programming effort was justified.

deepesh100: What is the recommended option to migrate from BPC 7.0 NW to 10.0 NW?

7.0 -> 7.5 -> 10.0 or start from scratch with 10.0 system?

Scott Cairncross: Hi Deepesh, 

This really depends on your business requirements. If you are planning to do planning process re-engineering or change your existing set of functionality then a new implementation would make sense. Otherwise a migration is in order and the "double-hop" you outline above is the right path forward. The move from BPC 7.0 to BPC 7.5 is straight-forward and the path from BPC 7.5 to BPC 10.0 I explained in response to Fred's question... 

MarkSellnow: Does BPC 10.0 support multiple languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese) in menu screens?" 

Scott Cairncross: The following languages are supported in the EPM Add-In:

Bulgarian
Chinese
Chinese trad.
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbo-Croatian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

I hope that this answers your question. 

Cheers, Scott

Allison Martin: Thanks to all who posted questions and followed the discussion!

That wraps up today’s forum – thanks for joining us, and thank you, again, to our experts – Scott Cairncross, David Dixon and Jarrett Bialek of TruQua Enterprises for taking these questions today.

Thank you all - and I’m looking forward to seeing Scott, David and Jarrett in person at Financials 2013 in Amsterdam and then in Washington D.C at the BPC Seminar  

hanks again to David Dixon, Scott Cairncross, and Jarrett Bialek for some great advice today.

A full summary of the forum will be posted on Insider Learning Network tomorrow, and you can post your questions here in the Financials Forum at any time.

For a full, deep dive on BPC, I invite you to join us at our upcoming 3-day BPC Seminar, starting in June in Washington, DC, June 18-20, and then coming to Copenhagen and Orlando. You can get all the information on locations, dates and full agenda – including sessions from Scott and David - at www.bpcseminar.com.

Thanks again for joining us, and I hope to see you in person at one of our events soon!

One of the big areas that customers seem to be focusing on is how to outline a more comprehensive financial reporting strategy. Carsten Hilker, who is a Solution Manager in the Line of Business team focusing on Performance Management at SAP is delivering a session that really dives down into the different reporting options in SAP, titled "A guide to the latest SAP reporting capabilities and their impact on financial reporting strategies"

Listen in as Carsten outlines some of the key factors organizations need to consider when developing its financial reporting strategy. He also discusses some of the most recent trends in the financial reporting space, including SAP HANA, mobility, and data analytics.

Listen here or read the transcript below. And thanks again to Carsten for taking the time to speak with me.

For more information on the SAP Financials 2013 event in Amsterdam, visit our website at www.sapfinancials2013.com and follow me on twitter @AllisonMartin14

 _________________________________________________

Interview with  SAP's Carsten Hilker: Financials 2013 preview 

Allison Martin, Financials 2013: Hi, my name is Allison Martin with SAPinsider and I am the conference producer of the SAPinsider Financials event.

I am joined today by Carsten Hilker who is a Solution Manager on the Line-of-Business Finance team at SAP, and is also a very well-known speaker at our Financials events.

To start off, would you mind giving us a bit of background on yourself and how long you’ve been working in the area of SAP financials?

Carsten Hilker, SAP: Sure. I’ve worked with SAP ERP CO and FI predominately since the ‘90s, initially as a consultant implementing  finance and more and more all the modules of CO. And subsequently I joined SAP directly and worked in various solution management roles — right now within line-of-business finance, focusing on Performance Management on our CO modules and our EPM modules.

Allison:  Thanks so much again for joining us. The purpose of today’s podcast is to really help listeners get a better understanding of the financial reporting capabilities in SAP, a topic that you’re presenting on at our event in Amsterdam in a few weeks.

What would you say are some of the key factors that an organization really needs to consider when developing its financial reporting strategy?

Carsten: Well, it’s not the same anymore, right? Ten years ago was easy. There was a module and every module included some master data, some configuration, some transaction process and capability, and reporting. Reporting was part of the module.

And since then we all kind of got to appreciate a BW system where we’re able to basically pull data out and bring it together from different modules, from different applications. We had the initial reporting, front-end on tops, maybe something like BEx or something.

A couple of years ago we merged with BusinessObjects and we’ve got now their entire BusinessObjects BI toolset that ranges from dashboards to line-item explorers to formatted reporting.

That also serves different kinds of people. At the beginning it was one report and it didn’t matter if you are a regular person, analyst, a manager, or an executive. You looked at the same kind of data.

And today you have a choice. So there are more choices for our customers to say, “Well, what do I need to deliver? Who do I need to deliver the information for? And how do I have to deliver it?”

So now we’re talking about access mechanisms like mobile -- mobile devices, little phones, iPads. They all have different real estate on there, and so different ways of bringing information to a customer are available today. Many of these now have to be delivered on the desktop or on the mobile as well. And some of this information sits in the cloud. So, many, many more choices and decisions to take.

I think people need to be aware of what the capabilities of the solutions are. People need to come up with what’s important to them: Who are they going to develop these reports for? What kinds of roles are they delivering information for? What kind of personas fit behind that? And then I also have to take a pragmatic approach. There’s so much there and it will not stop developing – in visualizations especially --  and predefined analytics will just be more and more in demand.

So go with something, make it work, and then if there’s additional need, see what else you can do. But there are many, many more choices than 10 ten years ago.

Allison: As you mentioned, we know that there are more than a few options for performing financial reporting in SAP.

Can you provide a brief overview of those options and which ones you’ve seen to be the most adopted by SAP customers?

Carsten: Sure. I think mass adoption really came with, BW first, right? People always had those standard reports that I mentioned and the end users are using them or continue to use them. But BW, I guess, put a different spin on it and often became the corporate report, let’s say, distribution mechanism. So we’ve seen that widely adopted.

What we see less now, but growing, is, I think, all the BI tools. People put more emphasis, companies put more emphasis, on the information that needs to be delivered -- not just data in a spreadsheet or a list format -- and focusing on the users. So it’s a very, very fast-growing segment. There’s still a lot of room to grow for our customers to adopt these kinds of technologies.

And I think the latest is really analytics. If you look at it up to now, we gave the customers a good number of choices in regards to tools to put this information together, right? We had the underlying transaction systems, we had the way to store the data, like COPA or BW, and we put those front-ends on top that allow you to generate a report.

Now there’s a lot of emphasis on predefining reports and purposeful reports so our customers don’t have to do it. We can share the best practices across our customers and also make this available quicker and faster. And these technologies are often based on our own solutions, so some of them are dashboards or predefined reporting.

You will see more and more analytics, especially based on HANA, because now we can do more things with them. I think this is where the adoption is the lowest just because it is the latest and greatest and newest area, and we will see a lot of adoption there – and I think also the highest business value. There are studies out from analysts like Ovum that say a dollar invested in analytics, predefined analytics, gives you a return of ten dollars. So there are not many more areas where we can achieve a similar high ROI.

So a lot from the old world, lots to transform, lots more to do on visualization and really bringing really information to people, instead of just reports.

Allison: I know you had mentioned analytics, and there does currently seem to be a lot of buzz around mobility and analytics in the market.

Can you briefly discuss what you see to be the driving factors behind this?

Carsten: Sure. I think the number one thing is that we as private people, as consumers, we are used to getting information now in different ways. We’re used to getting them in a very effective way. Logging into Yahoo Stocks is a perfect example. We have this on our phones, we might have it on our iPad. I click on it, I see my top five stocks, I see the trends, the current price, and maybe some information to it. I don’t need to log on to any system anymore. I don’t have to VPN in, put a secure access code and wait until the systems boots and starts — it’s just there.

I think what would drives a lot about this mobile thing is the way that we are able in our private lives to access information and use it.

And it’s both: It’s being on the road, being away, being mobile anywhere, anytime; but the second thing is really the user experience of these mobile applications. So that’s, I think, a lot of what’s driving the bus behind mobile.

With it, I think, also comes a renewal of the functionality. In the past we often looked at ERP or other systems as transaction processing systems. The focus was on entering one transaction with all the data that was required. And today we do much more. These mobile applications support processes, or maybe process steps. They bring together information maybe from different kinds of modules or maybe even use different capabilities.

You can capture travel expenses because your phone has a camera, and you can capture this. There’s no scanning anymore. So the technology and what we experience in our private lives now drives the demand and the renewal of the applications that we have in our business suite.

And with it comes analytics, right? We don’t want to pull up a report anymore that’s list-based. We don’t want to sort it manually and put a filter on it and create a graphic, and then start all over and create the next aspect. We want this to come out of the box.

I want to be able to, for example, look at the fishbone chart that tells me that these are the five customers I lose money with. I want to see waterfall chart to see out of the revenue that I make, what are the largest cost components, so if I want to change one I know I go after the largest. I want to have modeling and simulation capabilities within these graphics to say, “What if I change this? What’s the impact so I can find out what the impact would be before I enact it?”

So a lot of I think development on the mobile side, on the analytics side, lots more to come.

But what’s key already is that those companies that decide to go for solutions with a mobile analytics, they typically have a high ROI and that can extend to user satisfaction as well. And that sometimes may be more of a  soft factor, but a really important factor.

Allison:  And finally, another hot topic with regards to financial reporting is SAP HANA.

What opportunities does this provide for reporting and how can customers leverage it?

Carsten: That’s actually a good one because I think not many people know that you can use SAP HANA with ERP levels as low as 4.6C, which is basically everyone within SAP. And I think that’s really important.

What differentiates the different release levels is what you can do. If you run 4.6C, you can replicate the data onto an SAP HANA database and you can basically leverage it for faster reporting. You can put BusinessObjects BI on top of it, Explorer for example, perfect for COPA analysis. All line items, all dimensions are there, instant response time — and with 4.6C.

Now the second scenario would be where you have an accelerator. So for example, you have reporting in ERP, CO reporting, FI reporting, COPA reporting — you want that to be faster, or maybe even transactions or processes would be faster, like month-end allocations, top-down allocations, these kinds of things. Similar things, so you can basically replicate the data from your ERP system onto SAP HANA. And if you’re on ECC 6.0 to 6.5 and higher, you can basically then read that data that sits on HANA and you accelerate your ERP reporting and your ERP processes.

If you’re not on ERP EHP 5 yet, you can apply a downward compatible kernel, and you can achieve the same functionality. The kernel is just there so that basically the ERP system can communicate with HANA. So it can read the data from there.

So this is how you can accelerate reporting. What it does is basically, today companies have a lot of workarounds in place because no one can read the entire amount of data that sits there. So they  replicate data into smaller buckets that they can process.

But there’s often a compromise in regards to depth of data. You don’t have all the line items eventually. You don’t have all the dimensions. You might not have all the time lines available, so maybe you have just current period, this business unit, and maybe just a subsegment of the data. And that’s a limitation because it means people need to jump between different reports, just so the performance works, and it means also that you never have the complete picture. So any of these kinds of restrictions go away.

So now reporting is based on HANA, you have access to all the data, line items ever reposted, all the dimensions and the fields within. There’s no aggregation necessary. There’s no duplication of reporting. Objects, let’s just say, you can sometimes just use one report. So very, very different world, and with something like Explorer, for example, you can put a self-service user interface on top of it, so a user can basically explore all of the data. So very, very different world compared to the past.

And I think the last aspect is that with SAP HANA now we have a solution available called SAP HANA Live, and that basically is HANA data on top of a virtual data model that is more, let’s say, end-user applicable. So if you want to generate your reports based on ERP data, because that’s what sits on HANA, you can do this yourself. You don’t have to be a BW expert anymore to do these kinds of things. And you have access directly to ERP data -- you don’t have to replicate it onto BW first. You can run it directly from there.

There are some predefined reports available. There will be more and more available in that area called SAP HANA Live. So substantial changes in regards to what we have to offer and how reporting can take place.

Allison:  Thanks so much for all of this wonderful information. And thank you so much for your time today. I look forward to hearing you present at the upcoming Financials 2013 event in Amsterdam.

Carsten: You’re very welcome. Have a great day.

The purpose of the podcast is to really help listeners get a better understanding of financial dashboards in SAP.

Listen in as Anurag outlines some of the key ingredients of a financial dashboard such as how it visually represents an organizations KPIs, and provides a consistent and single version of truth across an organization.  He also goes into detail regarding a few tools available in SAP for building a financial dashboard.

Listen here: http://bit.ly/ZvV9rt

Thanks again to Anuarg for taking the time to speak with me. For more information on the SAPInsider Financials event in Amsterdam, visit our website at www.sapfinancials2013.com and follow me on twitter @AllisonMartin14

Look forward to seeing everyone at the event!

Outside of being totally entertaining, James and Rolf gave some great insights into how adding more collaborative source-to-pay processes (which extends to suppliers both large and small) can be extremely helpful in achieving sustainable savings and increasing profitability.  

A recent study done by McKinnsey found that “Networked enterprises were 50% more likely than their peers to have increased sales, higher profit  margins, gain market share, and be a market leader.” Collaboration and the new technology that support it is growing every day, just look at the impact of these trends in our personal lives with sites such as Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter and LinkedIn.

So what does all this mean for SAP and Ariba? It means that they need to keep up with the changing times, and based on the recent roadmap they presented, it certainly looks as though they are.  

SAP’s roadmap for procurement includes 3 main areas of customer focused investments:

1. Delivering Network Value
2. Extending Applications Leadership
3. Improving Infrastructure and Scalability.

They have a number of tools set in place to achieve these three goals including Ariba Network 2.0 , Ariba Pay, SAP TM integration for all collaborative portions of the process, SAP SNC integration which includes planned purchasing, work order / services collaboration and inventory sharing.  They also have new processes for application integration such as Ariba Sourcing with SRM/MM on HANA, Ariba SIPM to MDG, SAP BusinessOne, SAP Invoice Mgmt. and Supplier Lifecycle Mgmt. Improvements.

In summary, the combination of SAP and Ariba allows SAP to offers what appears to be the most comprehensive, end-to-end spend management portfolio, from spend analysis, to sourcing and contract management and procure-to-pay, across all consumption models. Whether a company is running their processes in the Cloud, on premise, or on a mobile device (or a combination of all 3), SAP and Ariba have the solutions to support them.

I’m looking forward to seeing how customers react to all the new technology and functionality SAP and Ariba are putting into place.

-Allison