Rapid Marts have been around for many years, but with the most recent release it seems worth a revisit and an introduction to newcomers to SAP Rapid Marts. In this blog we will cover what they are, when you should consider using them, what do they look like, what is required to use SAP Rapid Marts, and how to install them.
Basics of SAP Rapid Marts
SAP Rapid Marts are rapid deployment solutions for data marts based on SAP ECC subject areas. They provide extraction jobs from ECC, data models for the extracted data, relevant semantic layers and delivered reports. Each SAP Rapid Mart provides between 15-20 reports are there are 12 delivered rapid marts. The following details each rapid mart and what is delivered:
Financial
General Ledger: posting audits and control, financial statement analysis, cost of sales accounting, profit center accounting, financial hierarchies, new and old GL support.
Accounts Receivable: aged receivables, configurable periods, largest balances, customer payments, clearing versus invoices, dunning and credit, short term cash flow, department workload.
Accounts Payable: open payables, configurable periods, payment history, po/invoice reconciliation, checks issued, short-term cash outflow, department workload, financial effectiveness, purchasing document assignment.
Cost Center: cost allocations, plan-actual-variance, cost center hierarchies, internal orders, fiscal and reporting periods, cost commitment analysis, cost details planning.
Fixed Assets: asset balance and transaction detail analysis, asset trend and summary analysis, post asset depreciation analysis, asset performance, fixed asset value, public sector fund and grant center.
Operational
Sales: bookings, returns, lifetime sales, delivery efficiency, delivery service levels, margins, discounting, backlogs, shipment handling, sales order pricing.
Inventory: daily trends, stock turnover/outages, batch management, inventory allocation, stock level optimization, expenditure, replenishment, make-to-order status, inventory valuation, historical daily balances.
Purchasing: PO ranked listings, cycle times, purchasing performance, PO history, PO status, vendor performance, price analysis, exception reporting, purchasing document confirmation, PO related partner analysis.
Manufacturing
Plant Maintenance: bad actors, life time performance, maintenance hours, planning efficiency, material consumption, damage analysis, downtime, MTBR and MTTR.
Production Planning: bill of material explosion, routing explosion, where used, capacity planning, cost analysis, yield analysis, lead time, MRP requirements, historical BOM analysis.
Project Systems: project costs, plan-actual-variance, earned value, progress analysis, material reservations, capacity planning, project schedules, project elements.
Human Capital Management
Human Resources: employee benefits, eligibility and enrollment, salary comparisons, EEO comparable worth, employee pay history, turnover analysis, employee events, vacation reporting.
You can get details on each of the SAP Rapid Marts listed above in the product documentation. This is available at http://help.sap.com/boall_en/. Select Rapid Marts, select 4.0, then select the Rapid Mart you are interested in. The product documentation includes details for all reports and content included with each Rapid Mart.
SAP Rapid Marts assume that you will do some customization, adding a field to a report, customizing the report layout, extracting additional data from SAP. Depending upon the project, SAP Rapid Marts deliver from 70-80% of what is needed, and the remainder is customized specific to the project.
When you should use them
SAP Rapid Marts when you are looking for departmental solutions to specific subject area and you want to have a quick implementation
time starting with the default reports delivered by SAP. SAP Rapid Marts do not replace the need for a enterprise data warehousing strategy or enterprise solutions such as SAP Business Warehouse.
What they look like
Watch this 5 minute video on SAP Rapid Marts. The video shows the reports in the sales rapid marts and the extraction, transformation, load jobs in SAP Data Services. This demo uses SAP HANA as the database, but Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are also supported.
How to install them
This 3 part eLearning series walks through a complete installation of SAP Rapid Marts. These videos have voice explanation and explain all phases of the installation. Including the ETL jobs in SAP Data Services, semantic layer, and reporting setup in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform. Thanks to patrick.krivens who did an awesome job of recording and explaining the installation!
SAP Rapid Marts installation: part 1
SAP Rapid Marts installation:part 2
SAP Rapid Marts installation: part 3
What has been your experience with SAP Rapid Marts? You may remember that SAP used to offer Rapid Marts for non-SAP data. If you need a rapid mart for other ERP applications, check out Rapid Decisions. These rapid marts still use SAP Data Services and the semantic layer in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence, but provide the extraction and rapid mart for non-SAP ERP applications.
