Dear aBI – SAP ERP with Crystal Reports and Xcelsius
As part of the BI Expert teams for the “Dear aBI” gives advice on Business Intelligence, here my second set of answers to some of the questions that have been put forward.
Ash from New York is asking the following question:
Dear aBI,
We are in the process of implementing SAP and Businessobjects, and this is my first BOBJ implementation. We have bought BOBJ Edge standard with data integrator. Our requirement is that most of the reports to be dashboard based and highly complex.
What would be the best way to connect to R/3 tables / Views to Xcelsius & Crystal reports?
Thanking you in advance for the expert advice
In general Xcelsius is able to leverage several different datasource, and one of them being Live Office. Live Office allows you to leverage Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence as a source object. In that way you can leverage Live Office leveraging a Crystal Report object connecting to SAP ERP or SAP All in One and leverage the data in Xcelsius.
Here some background material:
- BusinessObjects and SAP Part 4
- BusinessObjects and SAP Part 9 – Xcelsius with Crystal Reports and Live Office
- BusinessObjects and SAP Part 1 of 4 – Creating a Xcelsius Dashboard on top of SAP BI
- BusinessObjects and SAP Part 2 of 4 – Creating a Xcelsius Dashboard on top of SAP BI
- BusinessObjects and SAP Part 3 of 4 – Creating a Xcelsius Dashboard on top of SAP BI
- BusinessObjects and SAP Part 4 of 4 – Creating a Xcelsius Dashboard on top of SAP BI
- Technical Whitepaper
But what if you are interested in leveraging Web Intelligence or SAP BusinessObjects Explorer in combination with your SAP ERP system and you have not implemented SAP BW as your datawarehouse solution ?
In such a situation you can leverage SAP Rapid Marts.
SAP Rapid Marts are best practice blueprints that deliver ETL mappings and initial reporting content for enterprise applications like SAP ERP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle EBS. SAP Rapid Marts are not replacing a datawarehouse solution but you might be in a situation where a complete datawarehouse solution is not required, but instead you require a simple and fast implementation based on a data mart approach which allows you to quickly gain insight into your data.
You can find further details on the available Rapid Marts for SAP here:
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Solution Architecture for SAP ERP
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Solution Architecture for SAP ERP (Recorded Webinar)
- SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts for SAP Solutions
Ash, I hope this answers your question and others find the material useful as well.
For further details on how to submit your questions to the BI Experts take a look at the wiki pages.
Another alternative to quickly leverage BusinessObjects Explorer from ERP is to essentially add a webservice based export feature inform of an additional button to the ALV grid control element (used in >90% of ERP reports). With that all ERP users can easily push any data from any ERP report into BusinessObjects Explorer with the literal "click of a button". A working prototype of how to do this including all necessary code and comprehensive documentation was published on the Innovation center here on SCN, check this link. (and the ALV integration folder in the ZIP file behind the "Get This button".
Very informative blog.
A couple of days after your blog was posted (July 15th) Rapid Marts were released for the mid-market as SAP BusinessObjects Edge Rapid Marts.
Also it seems to me that if the customer has SAP Business All-in-One, the Best Practices for BI package might be helpful. Both from a documentation perspective on how to connect as well as using the provided reports and dashboards as templates to build their own.
Regards,
Dan