What are Transient Providers? See if you have BW inside your ERP System

SAP’s definition is as follows:

“InfoProvider that allows analysis and reporting with BI Tools (including BW OLAP functionalities) on top of an application (SAP Business Suite).  It is not modeled in Data Warehousing Workbench of BW and the data is not replicated”

With enhancement package 5, you have the capability of activating a BI client inside your ERP system.  This will provide you the capability of reporting on tables inside your ERP system to some of the BusinessObjects tools.  The source of the data is a classic SAP InfoSet, which must be client independent.

Once you have activated the BI client inside ECC, you can go to RSA1 inside your ERP system.  See  Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: BW inside ERP

Note that the actual data used in the transient providers is not stored in the InfoObjects.

Figure 2: Source: SAP, Ingo Hilgefort

Figure 2 shows that the Direct Access/BICS method is used.  This will give you capability to expose classic infoset to BI system – direct line, no data modeling involved, only expose infoset and create a BEx Query on top of InfoSet – no data provider or modeling is necessary.  Tools such as Dashboards, Analysis Office, Crystal for Enterprise are available for reporting in your ECC system.

Visit this page for more information on system landscape types.

Here are the steps to do this:

1) Activate the BI Client in your ECC system (note you must be on enhancement package 5)

Run program RSRTS_ACTIVATE_R3IS to activate the BI client

2) Create your InfoSet using the SQ02 transaction inside ECC (must be a Global / client independent infoset)

3) Set the property of the InfoSet to release using transaction SQBWPROP

You will be prompted for a Workbench transport.

4) Create a BusinessExplorer Query against this InfoSet.  This will serve as a datasource to the BI/BusinessObjects Tools

5) Run your choice of BusinessObjects tools shown in Figure 2 using the BEx Query from Step 4 as a data source.

This example uses BusinessObjects Analysis Edition for MS Office.  See below.

Figure 3

Figure 3 shows the BEx Query is the data source to Analysis Office.  The BEx Query was created against the classic ECC InfoSet.

Interested in learning more?  We will be covering this at ASUG Annual Conference 2012 in May.