How to Ensure that BPC Displays Only Uploaded Records for Planning

SAP BPC has been used for various planning application purposes- Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Sales Planning, Marketing Planning along with various financial planning processes like Cash  Flow Planning, Budgeting etc.

We all know that BPC Model/Application/Cube supports Account Modelling. When a default report is created, you get all the possible intersections of master data available for planning. More often than not, most of these combinations are undesirable for planning and there are always ways identified to display the right plannable combinations. I am going to talk about a quick approach to achieve the same via an hypothetical scenario.

Company XYZ Ltd deploys SAP APO for Demand Planning and to release the demand to supply department. However, they cannot have their on field sales representatives access the SAP APO system to enter forecast. Most of them do not have SAP GUI installed and the only way they can access and input plan numbers is via Excel files. This is where BPC comes into picture.

SAP APO sends over the following records to enable Sales representatives to enter the forecast:

This data is converted to account model after being extracted from APO in staging DSO/Cube and will appear as follows:

We will assume that we have a simple Planning model which will comprise of the following dimensions:

The mapping will be 1:1. The transformation file will be as follows:

DATASRC=*STR(APO_UPLOAD)

PRODUCT=ZPRDCT

CUSTOMER=ZCUST

REGION=ZREGION

KEYFIGURE=ZBPC_KF

TIME=ZMONTH

UNIT=ZUNIT

SIGNEDDATA=ZSIGN_DATA

When you validate and process the transformation file, the number of records being processed will be shown as 12 which is expected. It is time to have a DM package to be created to load data from DSO into the model. Once DM Package is executed successfully, the log will show the submit count as 12.

Now when you create an input schedule, you will get all sorts of combinations based on the members of the dimension:

This is quite an undesirable output as the planning combinations are already coming over from the planning systems and you do not need to have any additional planning combinations. You therefore could use following under “Options” to take care of those:

Also notice that the records against SALES_REP_FORECAST show blank and not zero. This means that BPC does not load zero records by default. As a result, on selecting the above option- you will have the following output:

The output is undesirable in either of the case. It really bothered me and I started looking into various options and settings and got no clue until I found the following setting in SPRO in the underlying BW system and click on “Execute” icon:

Enter the name of the environment in the next screen:

Click on the “Create” icon in the next screen as shown:

In the next screen enter the parameter as follows:

Click “OK” and save it. Relogin into EPM addin and refresh the data. The output would now show as follows:

Keep in mind that- these settings are at the Environment level and will be applicable to all the models in that environment. You can reset this setting by changing the value to “0” from “1”.