Can ASUG Members influence SAP? ASUG Influence Council Success Story, SAP Best Practices for Business Warehouse with BusinessObjects

[TammyPowlas]

In 2011, the America's SAP User Group (ASUG) BI Community and Small Medium Enterprises ASUG Special Interest Group launched an ASUG Influence Council for a packaged analytics offering, called SAP Best Practices for Business Warehousing with BusinessObjects, with the goal to evaluate and improve the content. This package combines out-of-the-box reports and dashboards that are free of charge, suitable for either prototyping, kick starting a new Business Intelligence project, or complementing an existing Business Intelligence implementation.

The Influence Council was promoted during an ASUG kick-off webcast.  Interest was high and we had participation from both large and small companies, across all industries.

Work began in two waves. The first wave evaluated layout, content and usefulness of reports and dashboards. The following findings summarize the overwhelmingly positive feedback obtained:

• 64% of reports (18) have a higher than average layout rating or a spot on layout

• Content rating in 47% of reports (13) is higher than average or perfect

• Majority of reports (17) have a higher than average usefulness rating or are considered very useful

(source: SAP)

Wave 2’s goal was to improve reports that came out of wave 1 with huge variances in ratings and/or below average ratings. Outcome: The group suggested 45 improvements that were added to SAP’s development pipeline.

SAP used this feedback in a new package to be released called SAP rapid-deployment solution for BI Adoption. With this package SAP addresses deployment scenarios for SAP ERP, SAP BW and SAP HANA customers and provides guidelines for architecture and choice of visualization tools, catering to SAP’s mid-market customers.

For the Business Warehousing reporting content in this package SAP used analytics from SAP Best Practices for Business Warehousing. Reports that made it into the new package were checked against feedback received from the Influence Council and 29 adaptations were implemented.

Report	Comment
Manufacturing Cycle Time	Additional user prompts needed for MRP controller, material type, profit center
Manufacturing Cycle Time	Enable drill-down starting from plant in chart on top right
Manufacturing Cycle Time	Calculate actual lead time in days from factory calendar
Manufacturing Cycle Time	Document which tables / table fields data is pulled from
Manufacturing Cycle Time	Document how to customize KPIs
Manufacturing Cycle Time	Document what Top 5 is based on (cycle time, total production etc.)
Profitability Analysis	Additional user prompts needed for sales organization, distribution channel, division, sales office, sales employee, top 10 / 50 / 100 customers, customer account group, customer hierarchy
Profitability Analysis	Remove user prompt redundancy
Profitability Analysis	Include add. KPI gross margin / customer. On secondary axis include CM% - this will differentiate between high margin and low percent vs high margin high percent  (supplies the volume side of the equation). Share of top 10 to overall cm / Do top 10 customers generate x% of revenue
Profitability Analysis	Trade Bottom 10 Customer chart against pie chart showing gross margin per sales office for Top 10 Customers, add. ability to toggle between revenue and contribution margin per sales office
Profitability Analysis	Include add. KPIs revenue, gross margin and gross margin %, no. of transactions in table
Profitability Analysis	Limit table output to Top 10 Customers, adapt layout to accommodate data for Top 10 Customers on one page
AP Open Items	Additional user prompts needed for top 10 / 25 vendors, dollar threshold for open items included in list, vendor categories (account group), cost center of document included in list
AP Open Items	Additional user prompt needed for fiscal year
AP Open Items	Add information about ageing, discounts to list display
AP Open Items	Show summary per vendor in list, provide option to expand list to all open items per vendor ➕
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Display information by sales office, bar chart may be more appropriate
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Add information about profitability per sales office
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Sales employee criteria may not be used to track sales, better: Differentiate between inside sales, outside sales and sales reps (3rd party) levering category on sales order
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Add information about profitability per customer
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Consider customer hierarchies; i.e. customers with multiple sold-tos
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Additional user prompts needed for dollar threshold for sales data included in list, customer categories (account group, classification by line of business), sales office, account manager
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Enable drill-down capability for period detail ➕
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Additional user prompts needed for sales office, product group
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Value drives the analysis not UoM. Sales volume, specifically by UoM, is difficult to interpret by period. Better: No. of sales order line items
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Aggregate information on corporate level, enable drill-down to sales office, account manager
Sales Analysis (delivery/Quotation)	Enable comparison this year to date vs. last year to date
ALL REPORTS	Add time characteristics and all Org related prompts
ALL REPORTS	Enable Query stripping

Source: Uwe Palm, SAP

So as an ASUG Member, do you think you can influence SAP?

ASUG has applications for ASUG Influence Council for Design Studio. If you are an ASUG member click here for more information about joining (ASUG Logon required).

Special thanks to SAP's uwe.palm for providing the details and engaging with ASUG.