SAP BPC 10.1 Unified is available to customers. I am running a project based on Unified environment and facing this new world. For those who are familiar with BPC 7 to 10, everything is very different. Some things are cool, but others demand change the way we were used to think. In my opinion, it is possible to say that BPC 10.1 is in fact a new version of BW-IP (integrated planning), because all IP features are present in this version, while (almost all) the functionalities of BPC are not.
First of all, just a few functionalities are administered through BPC Admin on web. All modeling, calculations, security tasks are done in SAP BW or SAP Query Designer.
In Unified, you have to use InfoObjects as dimensions and Cubes, Multiproviders or DSOs as models, so you don´t have dimensions and models. Specially about the infoobjects, we don´t have a interface to maintain members, other than RSDMD transaction in SAP BW. This transaction opens in web browser, but it is not so good as we had in classic environment. Hierarchy can be edited just in SAP BW through SAP GUI. This is good, but in planning process this should be done by the user in a friendly interface, while now it have to be done by IT directly in SAP BW.
The possibility to use multiproviders is very good, because it makes easier to combine planning data and actual data from SAP ECC and eliminates loading data to SAP BPC. Specially, planning on DSO is very useful because it does not generate delta values, it just updates values on key figures. Key figure models are another great improvement.
In other hand, once you create a data provider (cube, dso ou multiprovider), you have to create a aggregation level (same as in BW-IP). To create a report, you have to create a query over the aggregation level in SAP Query Designer. And then you can create reports in EPM AddIn. Using queries brings some possibilities that don´t exists before, but adds steps to development, making it more complex and hard to maintain.
Another change is that packages are not present. Now you have planning functions (another feature of BW IP) to make calculations. Planning functions can be build with SQL Script directly on Hana, which is, in fact, the greater improvement of this version. The performance is fantastic.
(HANA SQL Script can be used in SAP BPC Classic too and, in my opinion, works better than Unified, making Classic almost perfect).
Well, these are my first impressions about this new version. I will appreciate the comments. Let´s talk...
Samuel
