Hi Friends,
I hope lot of you people are interested in know about how to access the BPC Transient queries using Various Business Objects Reporting tools, Well,
The attached step by step document will guide you in creating reports on top of BPC transient queires,
In this document I used WEBI Report as my tool and created the report against the BPC Transient queries but once the steps are followed properly and the patches are applied every other tool will have visibility to the Transient queries,
Let me know your thoughts,
Thanks,
Anil Pottem
Business scenario
The organization has a requirement to build reporting capabilities which takes advantage of actuals data (which resides in Business Warehouse (BW) specific data models) and combine it with plan/forecast data (which resides in Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) specific models).
This is commonly known as variance reporting.
This reporting capability uses the Business Intelligence (BI) suite of tools which is being used as the corporate standard (e.g. Web Intelligence (WEBI), Advanced Analysis, Crystal).
This how to guide describes how this can be achieved without having to retract the plan/forecast data from BPC into BW.
The advantage of this strategy is:
- No replication of data in the Enterprise Data
Warehouse (EDW) - No additional administration/maintenance of
InfoProviders - Streamline the access and execution of reports
from the BI launch pad - Make use of the full capabilities available in
the BI suite of tools versus what is available in native BPC reporting (Enterprise
Performance Management (EPM)).
Solution overview
SAP BPC is part of the SAP EPM suite and provides consolidated financial reporting processes. It supports planning, budgeting and forecasting capabilities with management and legal consolidation functionality in a single application. You can quickly adjust plans and forecasts, shorten budget cycle times, close the books more quickly, help ensure compliance with regulatory and financial standards, and get the information you need to make more confident decisions. It can be used for business planning (budgeting, sales/revenue planning, expense planning, forecasting), consolidations (inter-company
matching/reconciliation/eliminations, legal consolidations), as well as financial reporting and analysis.
The SAP BPC version for SAP NetWeaver (NW) can be powered by SAP HANA. With in-memory technology offered by HANA, SAP planning and consolidation for SAP NetWeaver can handle large volumes of data easily, supports real-time planning and analysis, enables cross functional detailed planning and shrinks decision cycle time.
The key benefits of SAP BPC (version for SAP NetWeaver, powered by SAP HANA):
- Increased agility: Helps to plan better and act faster with instant insight into all relevant information. Boost performance: Accelerate planning and
consolidation processing, taking advantage of the power of in-memory technology. - Engage everyone: Simplify the input and exploration of data with a next generation mobile interface.
Background
If you’re working with the former BPC NW 7.5 version, you might find that BPC NW integration with BI reporting tools is neither performed in a straight-forward way, nor optimized. With BPC NW 10, the integration process has been dramatically simplified by using a BW Virtual InfoCube and an automatically generated BPC transient query.
Enabling BPC models to allow access to external systems
Step 1:
The first step allowing an external reporting tool access to a BPC InfoCube:
- Open the BPC 10 NW Administration Console and
enable this InfoCube as “Use as source
of data”. - From the BPC Start Page, click the link “Planning and Consolidation Administration”.
- Select the “Model”for which you would like to set the External System Access and click “Edit”.
In this case we have Selected the “OM&A” model:
- Click on the “Features used with the Model” and check the option “Use as Source of Data” and save the model.
- This option will allow external applications to use this model as a data source, (e.g. ODBO provider from EPM add-in, BICS
Interface through BI reporting tools).
BW backend
After enabling the “Use as Source of Data” option on the BPC Administration Console for the models, you’ll notice a virtual provider created for the above selected “OM&A” model and it will be as shown in the below figure with a “_B”.
In general terms, virtual providers represents a logical view - they don’t have any actual master data tables or a fact table; no data
is physically stored in it. They read the data from the source systems only when a query is executed. Meaning that for the generated “OM&A_B” virtual cube, the data is directly taken from the original “OM&A” model once the query is executed.
Transient query
The Business Explorer (BEx) query created by the virtual cube is called a “Transient Query”, this cannot be accessed/edited by the BEx query designer but can be viewed by the BEx query analyzer as shown below:
- Open the BEx analyzer.
- Click on the connect icon as shown in above figure.
- Select the SAP logon system from the available systems as shown below and click “OK”
- Once your login credentials are authenticated, click on the open icon on the top left corner and then click on “Open Query”
Navigate to the InfoAreas section and find the OM&A_B cube from the list of available cubes in the business planning and consolidation info area.
- Transient queries will be named after the info cube technical names as shown above.
- If you try to open the same query using the BEx Query Designer, you’ll get the below listed error as these are transient queries in nature and they aren’t stored physically in the database.
BICS interface using WEBI
(BusinessObjects (BOBJ) tools)
Prerequisites:
Before using this approach, please follow the SAP notes listed below and make sure you have applied these notes on your BW and BOBJ environment.
SAP notes:
- 1857992(This is very important in order to have access to the transient queries)
- 1392259 (This note is to understand the restrictions/limitations if you’re using BPC 7.5 NW)
- 1730125(This note is for the steps to perform through the OLE DB provider)
Once the above SAP note 1857992 has been applied, re-generate the transient query by logging in to BW and using the T-code RSRT as shown in the
below figure (sometimes access the BEx query using the BICS option might be grayed out so it’s recommended to re-generate the transient query):
below figure (sometimes access the BEx query using the BICS option might be grayed out so it’s recommended to re-generate the transient query):
BICS connection
BICS (Business Intelligence Consumer Services) is SAP’s interface for accessing BEx queries. BICS is in fact optimized to handle hierarchies and BW specific features, which significantly improves performance. In Business Objects 4.0, WEBI (and other BI reporting tools) uses the BICS connection to access BEx queries. And in the case of BPC, once we enable the model to be used as source of data, it automatically creates the transient query, which can be accessed by the BICS connection (note: This transient query cannot be edited).
Creating a BICS connection
- Login to the Business Objects CMC (Central Management Console).
- Navigate to the Connections Tab as shown below:
- Click on create a new connection and the connection wizard will show up fill all the necessary fields to create the connection. Use the SSO as the authentication method as you don’t want the BOBJ server to prompt you for authentication, as shown below:
- Click on “save” once all the necessary fields are populated.
- The new created connection will show up under the Common Connections as shown below:
Create WEBI report on top of the BPC transient query
- Log on to the BI launch pad using your credentials.
- Launch the Web Intelligence Application from the BI launch pad.
- Once the Web Intelligence Application is clicked from any of the above two locations, the tool will launch and then click on “New” as shown below :
- Select “BEx” in the data source list and click “OK”:
- The pre-defined OLAP connection created previously will show up. All the BEx queries that have access to the BICS connectivity will show up once you start expanding the info areas node.
- Search for the OM&A_B Cube and then select the appropriate transient query with “_B name” to it and click on “OK”.
- The selected BEx query in the above figure should open and show all the characteristics and key figures as shown below:
- Once the characteristics and key figures are dragged in to the results pane of the report, click on “Run Query” on the top corner of the query panel, as shown above.
- The report will be generated using the business objects WEB intelligence reporting tool, as shown in the below figure:
Scenario
“I want to create a prototype to compare the data that is generated by WEBI against the data that exists in the BW BPC cubes.”
In the above mentioned case using the same OM&A model, the data that the WEBI is retrieving from the BPC transient provider is the same as the data that exists in the BW and the data that the EPM tool retrieves.
BOBJ WEBI report against BW raw data
Step 1:
Select the BICS connection that is created in the above section. (Refer to the section for Creating A BICS Connection).
Step 2:
Follow the steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 from the section ‘Create WEBI report on top of the BPC transient query.’
Step 3:
Select the below listed characteristics as shown in the figure:
Note: Here is
some information about the display of the BPC data model objects in the query panel:
some information about the display of the BPC data model objects in the query panel:
- Cost element (actual dimension)
- Flat dimension structure
- Hierarchical representation (name parent 1 comes
from the dimension in the BPC admin console) - Properties of dimension
Select “COST_ELEMENT” and drag and drop it from the objects pane in to the result objects pane. Click on the down word arrow bottom on the top right hand corner and select the cost element (we’re doing this to limit the dataset, which helps us for comparison purpose).
Follow the same steps as above, drag and drop all the below listed fields and select the filters as mentioned below:
- VERSION: Filter data for actual
- TIME: Filter data for all months of the year 2013
(select all individual months) - COST_CENTER: Filter data for 100486 (CS&E
Management Services) - CURRENCY: Filter data for LC (Local Currency)
- PARTNER_COSTCTR
- PARTNER_COSTCTR _Key
- PARTNER_COSTCTR _Text
- COST_CENTER_Key
- COST_CENTER_Text
- AUDIT_TRAIL_Key
- VERSION_Key
- COST_ELEMENT_Key
- COST_ELEMENT_Text
- After adding dimensions, add measures to the above list from the list of available objects from the left side as shown below:
- Once all the objects are dropped into the result objects pane, click the “RUN QUERY” button on the top right hand side as shown in the above figure.
- The query will run and the below image below will pop up on the screen:
- After successful completion of the query, the data will be displayed as shown below:
- The report will show you the list of available objects on the left pane and the tabular report on the report pane.
Data validation
- Connect to the BW system and open the info area for BPC as shown below:
- Login in to the BW system
- Enter the T-Code RSA1 and it’ll show you the list of available info areas:
- Right click on the Data Model OM&A_B virtual cube and select the option called “Display Data”.
- After the screen is displayed, click on “Select Characteristics” and “Key Figures” from the list as shown below:
- Once done selecting the characteristics and key figures, click on “OK” as shown above.
- The next screen will appear with the list of selected objects.
- Apply the below listed filters to the dataset, as done in the WEBI report in-order to validate the dataset and to also limite it:
- COST_ELEMENT_Key = ALLOC_DOLLAR
- COST_CENTER_Key = 100486
- TIME = 2013 Jan, 2013 Feb, 2013 March, 2013 April, 2013 May,
- 2013 June, 2013 July, 2013 Aug, 2013 Sep
- AUDIT_TRAIL_Key = Input
- VERSION_Key = ACTUAL
- CURRENCY = LOCAL CURRENCY (LC)
After applying the filters, click on the “Fld Selection for Output”, select all objects, click on the execute button and then click the execute button again
- Once executed, the query will run in the backgroundand display the data as shown below:
Note: The data in the above figure is arranged based on the WEBI report that we’ve created.
- Manually compare the number of records that BW has returned against the number of records that the WEBI report has returned.
- Note:
if a script is written in script logic to suppress the zeros in the dataset, then WEBI won’t show the line item that has zero values in it as it will be
automatically configured in transient query and we cannot change that option.This is a limitation. - The dataset with respective decimal values from the WEBI report should match the dataset that was pulled from the backend BW database.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Any changes to the BPC data models will be updated automatically in the virtual cube and transient BEx query.
- Security applicable to the BPC data models is adhered to the virtual cube and transient BEx query
- Minimum performance impact.
- No maintenance required.
Cons:
- Cannot change the objects from the transient BEx query.
- Re-generation of the BEx query is needed when the changes occur in BPC models (RSRT).
- Any user defined objects at the report level can be impacted with changes in the BPC models.
- Limited visibility to create any new measures at the report level.
Hope this is helpful to all of you who are looking for solution.
Thanks,
Anil Pottem