Using the Broadcasting Feature to Email Reports in SAP Business ByDesign

This blog provides instructions on how to automatically schedule and email reports in SAP Business ByDesign.

Why it Matters

How many senior level executives within your organization are using SAP Business ByDesign? How many of these are actively reviewing your sales, financials and operation reports in ByDesign? Typically the answer is “not a whole lot!”

In well-run companies, executives make strategic decisions based on data rich and easily comprehensible reports.Typically, executives have their teams provide reports on a daily or weekly schedule, manually pulled from the organization’s ERP system.

What if you could build a report, showing real-time data, delivered directly to your executive’s email on a daily or weekly schedule? Wouldn’t that be awesome?

In SAP Business ByDesign you can – and quite frankly, it’s pretty darn easy to set up.

What is Broadcasting in SAP Business ByDesign?

Broadcasting is a feature in SAP Business ByDesign that will streamline the information flow in your organization by delivering reports directly to any designated email address. Broadcasting reports by e-mail enables business users and decision makers to frequently analyze report data without having to access the ERP system and manually run reports.

Business Scenario

As the VP of Sales, I’m going to request one of my Sales Managers to build a Sales Order Volume Report to be sent to me weekly so that I can review it during our weekly sales meeting.

As the Sales Manager, your first step is to build/review the Sales Order Volume Report in SAP Business ByDesign. You would start by entering all necessary information required in the report, save the View and the Selection.

Now that we have our report, we need to build the Broadcasting schedule so our report is automatically sent out on a weekly basis.

Access the Business Analytics WoC > Broadcasts.

Click New

On the following screen, enter a name for the Broadcast and select the relevant report. In this scenario, this is where you select the Sales Order Volume Report. You’ll select your View and Selection later on.

In the Channel section, enter a subject header and add a message. This will be the subject line and body of your email.

In the Recipients section, you have the option to check the Use Broadcast Bursting checkbox. When checked, this feature allows you to broadcast reports to multiple recipients by e-mail based on an attribute selected. Instead of explicitly defining the e-mail addresses of the recipients within the Broadcast you can define an attribute in the Attribute for Email field that allows the system to determine the appropriate recipients. In order to use this feature email addresses must be maintained in the system for the attribute selected.

For example, I could setup my Sales Volume Report to e-mail the ‘Employee Responsible’ a list of their assigned sales orders. The system would identify the e-mail address assigned to the ‘Employee Responsible’ and ensure it only receives the list of sales orders that employee has been assigned to.

Unlike a normal Broadcast, the entire data set is not necessarily sent to all recipients. The report data is filtered for each recipient based on their e-mail addresses, identified by the values of the attribute you select. This ensures that every recipient only receives the data filtered for their e-mail address.

If you want to send the entire data set to all the recipients you can just create a regular Broadcast by unchecking the Use Broadcast Bursting checkbox.

In our case, we will just stick to regular Broadcast and add one recipient as shown below.

Under Format and Content, select if the report is to be broadcasted as an attachment or as a link.

• If you want to attach a report, use XML or CSV format.
• If you want to send a link, use HTML or URL.

In our case, we will go with an attachment and use the CSV format. Now, this is where we specify the View and Selection we created for the report. The Zip checkbox option will allow you to zip the file. Let’s leave that unchecked.

In the next step, we determine the scheduling for the report. Since we know this will be a weekly occurrence, we select the Periodically radio button.

When selected, the system will display the frequency options to create the schedule. Enter the following:

• Frequency – type in 1 and select Week(s) from the drop down.
• Start – Enter the start date and time for the report to be pushed out.
• End Date – If there will be an end date to the schedule, go ahead and enter it here.
• Day of the Week – Select the day you wish to send out the report.

Here is the full view of the broadcast screen.

Click Save and Close.

Once the Broadcast is scheduled and kicked off all recipients will receive an email. You can check the log and the last Broadcast run in the Broadcast View.

The VP of Sales will now receive an email of the Sales Volume Report each week to be used for analysis and review during the weekly sales meeting.

Hopefully this blog has shown how Broadcasting in SAP Business ByDesign can help you get easier access to critical data by automating reports and report distribution throughout your organization.

For questions or more information about SAP Business ByDesign please contact FMT Consultants.

Written by:

Brijesh Patel, Senior SAP Business ByDesign Consultant

FMT Consultants