HANA Optimized BW Content – ASUG Webcast Part 1

SAP’s Brian Wood and Natascha Marenfield gave this ASUG webcast last month.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Business Content is part of the BW offering. It gives value immediately and “shortens time to value”.

It can be customized in one way or another

However it has grown the application suite over years – data models like ECC/Finance/Controlling – those data models aren’t harmonized.

SAP wants to builds models that are harmonized across applications

They want to provide a baseline for your development

Going forward with HANA to have the ability to add real-time or near real-time data to analysis within BW

It provides a framework for real-time and historical data analysis

It includes best practices for mixed scenarios – BW InfoProviders & custom HANA views

Parts of business suite are not transparent – implements semantics of suite and provides transparency

Business content is at help.sap.com web site

Smart Data Access allows you to see data in another system without loading to BW – use within BW on HANA

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Figure 2 shows the goal of new business content: to provide a baseline for benefits for both business users and IT

Business users get a baseline that allows for flexible and real-time analytics as well as traditional historical reporting

It provides a higher level of detail in HANA

It has the ability to create complex new key figures

Predictive library, text analysis library, business function libraries are not in a typical relational database management system

It combines departmental data with enterprise data as well

BW workspaces give business users ability to upload their data and join that with enterprise data

It provides patterns for sustainable architecture – LSA updated for BW on HANA

HANA analysis processes in BW that allow you to leverage predictive library

Figure 3: Source: SAP

What are main considerations for design? New business content optimized – follows LSA++ for BW on HANA

New content provides a higher level of detail like line items

It contains some mixed scenarios with both HANA and BW capabilities – customers get an idea of how use technology for their content area

It provides some optimized transformations and push down to HANA engine

It offers more flexibility in data acquisition and reporting

They want to use consolidated InfoObjects – been around in business content for a while. The older content areas haven‘t included

They took those InfoObjects in that model for harmonizing master data

Only visible if you turn on a special business function – own namespace – /IMO/

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Figure 4 shows patterns for mixed scenarios and how to take advantage of HANA database underneath

Customer has BW on HANA and also uses HANA to do real time reporting of key figures loaded to HANA via SLT – the BW can give him the benefit of real time reporting data

An example is a line item point of sale system to analyze shopping basket during campaigns

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Figure 5 shows the architecture for consumption of HANA, using a virtual provider – let HANA analytical view – use it in a query and use it in a query

Security is handled by BW

SAP said it passes data through BW world in a transparent way

Figure 6: Source: SAP

For “last and past” the idea is that customer uploads historical data in BW system in the finance area and wants data real-time. They built idea of customer loads data in HANA for real-time – via extractor of data in BW side