My SAP HANA LIVE Customer Experience

Recently, I helped implement SAP HANA LIVE for an Oil company in Houston TX. This was a very interesting implementation for me and I’d like to share my experience. But before I get into the details, I want to cover some of the HANA Live basics.

What is SAP Business Suite?

SAP Business Suite is a set of front end applications like ERP, CRM, SCM, GTS and GRC are used for day to day business operations.

What is SAP HANA Live?

The excitement that HANA has introduced in the workplace, Businesses are left wondering: What’s next from SAP?  SAP responded with SAP HANA Live for Business Suite, and Businesses are enthusiastic and want to know more.

SAP HANA Live is a separate package that comes with predefined SAP HANA content across the SAP Business Suite.

SAP HANA Live not only covers the generic reporting needs of business operations in real time; it also includes a framework to create new content based upon your business’ reporting needs. SAP HANA Live is flexible in that customers can enhance the pre-delivered content by SAP or create their own.

Why would a customer choose SAP HANA Live?

Customers are more focused on ROI on ECC investment – SAP HANA Live provides just that. If customers wants to create a new custom report or modify/enhance existing reports on native ECC it takes lot of time to find right ABAP resources, coding in ABAP, testing and promoting to various stages and finally release it.

With SAP HANA Live all customers have to do is edit existing Virtual models/Views provided by SAP or create new HANA Models or Views to support new development in less time and all is happening in virtual layer and the development is much efficient, faster and no need to know ABAP.

This reduces development time and there by cost of development and support, increases SAP usability by a faster development time. We can easily create cross functional reporting across various SAP modules

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HANA LIVE Advantages:

The following are some of the advantages that clients will see immediately.

• Single Version of the truth
• No need of ETL/ELT
• SAP transactional and OLAP reporting on the same server due to speed and performance of HANA
• The built-in views are configured and tuned for better performance
• SAP ECC/CRM/GRC Clients can be up and running with BOBJ real time RDS reporting solution quickly. Out of the box RDS content comes with BOBJ IDT (Semantic Layer or Universes),Webi /Explorer/Dashboards can be consumed immediately.

SAP HANA Live Architecture:

SAP HANA Live or the Analytical Framework delivers over 1000 views where close 770 of these views are specifically for SAP ECC. The architecture comes in two flavors. One is being sidecar approach and other one is direct approach.i.e.ECC on HANA.

The above diagram shows second option. The content views are divided into three categories:

• Query Views: The views which are exposed for consumption by end user (i.e. reporting).
• Reusable views: Customers can build upon reusable views to create their own custom query views.
• Private Views: Views that are built on top of the tables and not intended to be changed.

My customer experiences with SAP HANA Live:

SAP HANA Live on SAP ECC provided this client the huge opportunity of uncovering new reporting needs that was previously not possible. The onsite team was thrilled to see the new content that was delivered as well as the potential of engineering new reports in less time. SAP HANA Live on SAP ECC bridges the gap between the old way of doing business and the new way of retrieving data at their fingertips. In addition benefit is that these reports can also be deployed on mobile devices. With the addition of SAP HANA Live to the landscape, new doors to the data have been opened. Apart from existing reports, the customer is also looking to enhance the content from FI & CO and Materials Management.

SAP HANA LIVE Security:

The big win for this customer was implementing a security framework on existing content using Analytical Authorization Assistant Tool a separate plugin that needs to be installed on your HANA Studio. This tool helps to create analytical privileges on existing query views and under lying Reusable/private views & tables (if any) and assigns them to roles and roles assigned to users which will give desired security

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Conclusion:

We are still in the process of creating the content as the project is in progress. We will be building security on HANA Live and that will be my next blog. Stay tuned till then and happy blogging. 🙂