By Andrea Haynes, SAPexperts

Perhaps your company has metricmania, a condition described by Mico Yuk as the need to get too many metrics into an Xcelsius dashboard. Mico, co-founder of Benchmarkers Business Intelligence and founder of EverythingXcelsius.com, wanted to be sure attendees at the SAPinsider seminar, Xcelsius  Dashboards Bootcamp, did not confuse a report with a dashboard. This is apparently a common occurrence, as another speaker made the same point later. She advised attendees to ask some questions early on to be sure that the person requesting a dashboard doesn’t actually need a report.

Here are five ways she said you can identify if it is a report: Are there 3+ levels of drilldown needed? Are there no key performance indicators (KPIs) but only metrics? Does the stakeholder want to see thousands of rows of data, to use the data for analysis, or to manipulate raw data? If the answer to those questions is yes, then she said it’s definitely not a dashboard. The key, she said, is that a dashboard answers a question. She added that it is OK to put a link to a report in a dashboard.

Later the other speaker talking about the difference between a dashboard and a report recalled a client who wanted an entire financial statement displayed on the dashboard. He encouraged that client to use summaries instead.
The boot camp is co-located with the Reporting & Analytics 2011, Managing Your SAP Projects 2011, and Outsourcing 2001 conferences at the Mirage in Las Vegas.

By Andrea Haynes, SAPexperts

BI Expert author Gaurav Sukhija recently consulted for a Fortune 100 technology company to help it decide which archiving method would best suit its needs. He says the client had multiple SAP R/3 environments that were being retired and was moving to an SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) environment. As part of the initiative, the client wanted to archive existing data from the R/3 environments.

In his BI Expert article “Use the Information Life Cycle to Determine Your Archiving Strategy” Gaurav takes you through the analysis required to choose that right archiving method. He writes that the tried and tested SAP Archive Development Kit (ADK) may be the most appropriate method for storing data that is infrequently required. The newer method of Near-Line Storage (NLS) is often best suited for relatively new data. The hybrid approach of ADK with NLS can prove to be the best bet when there is a need for diverse storage and retrieval capabilities. You make the choice, he notes, based on these factors:

 1. The extent of the need for online retrieval 

 2. The duration (how old the data is) and the size of the historical data

3. The extent of response time during retrieval for historical reporting/analysis

4. User comfort, cost, and readiness for change

As for his technology client, it chose ADK for archiving and is now implementing it.
Gaurav, who is a senior SAP BW/BI consultant with Infosys Technologies Limited, has been consulting in the SAP Business Intelligence and data warehousing domain for Fortune 100 clients for close to seven years. He started his career during the SAP BW 3.x days and has over the years worked on several BW, BI, and BusinessObjects assignments. These include life cycle implementation projects, development, upgrade and support projects. He has worked in several capacities in leadership, data modeling and techno-functional roles with focus on the high tech manufacturing sector. He has also served as a trainer on SAP NetWeaver BW within Infosys. His areas of expertise include data modeling, data warehousing, and enterprise reporting. In his spare time, he enjoys going on hiking trips with his wife and indulging in tennis and swimming. He also enjoys different cuisines and likes experimenting with food.