SAP Smart Business Service – Create Analytic Content in SAP Cloud Platform without Coding
SAP Smart Business is a framework for exposing strategic (key) and operational performance indicators (KPIs, OPIs) as Fiori applications without the need to write any code.
It can be used by customers, partners and SAP’s development teams for making highly aggregated analytical data accessible via Fiori Launchpad tiles.
Smart Business is released in various flavors depending on the underlying technology platform. Specifically there are the following separate Smart Business shipments:
- Smart Business for Suite on Hana (SoH) delivery
- Smart Business for S/4Hana delivery
- Smart Business in HANA Cloud Platform as a service
In this article, I will focus on Smart Business in HANA Cloud Platform as a service.
Smart Business Service
In line with SAP’s objective to have HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) as Extension Platform, we have published Smart Business as a Service in HCP.
SAP Smart Business Service is a HCP cloud-based solution hosted in HCP account.
As Smart Business is a Business Service in HCP, now it is possible to bring together Analytic Content from multiple Business System be it On-Premise or On-Demand into one single Launchpad irrespective of whatever technology they have implemented in.
We support discovery of analytic content by HANA Calculation Views, S4HANA CDS views and any other technology as long as they support OData.
This service also supports Management by Exception by Alerting users as KPI thresholds are breached.
Smart Business Service Apps
The SAP Smart Business apps are a set of SAP Fiori apps that you use to create and manage SAP Smart Business entities.
SAP Smart Business Service apps are categorized in 3 groups.
- Smart Business Administrator Apps
- Smart Business Modeler Apps
- Smart Business Alerting Apps
Smart Business Administrator Apps
The app under this category is “Configure Business Systems”. The Configure Business Systems app is used to configure the Smart Business destination and service discovery settings. This app is only available to the Admin users of SAP Smart Business.
Smart Business Modeler Apps
These are the core Smart Business apps. There are following apps coming under this category.
- Create KPI
- Create Evaluation
- Configure KPI Tiles
- Configure KPI Drilldown
- Manage KPI Association
- KPI Workspace
- Content Transport
These apps are used to create and manage KPI, Evaluation, Tiles, Drilldown Charts and Tables.
Smart Business Alerting Apps
The app under this category is “Manage Smart Business Alerts”. This app is used to configure and manage alerts for Smart Business.
How KPIs and OPIs are modeled in Smart Business
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Operating Performance Indicators (OPIs) are the central entities of Smart Business.
A KPI could be any key value in the business system having strategic importance, for example, Net Sales of a Company.
An OPI is more of an operational value that one would want to monitor at an operational level, for example, Outstanding Cash Payments.
A KPI or an OPI acts as an abstract entity based on which the more concrete Evaluations are defined. An
Evaluation, such as Net Sales in APJ region is a more concrete entity that defines threshold values against which the main measure defined for the evaluation can be measured against. You have filters or boundary conditions for a KPI and thresholds add the measurement conditions to the KPI.
An evaluation can have several tile representations. Tile can have various representations and is the first entry point for business users. A click on a tile would lead to the drill-down application configured against the tiles’ Evaluation.
Associations can be defined between different KPIs, in case a change in one KPI or OPI will have an impact on the value of the other KPI or OPI.
What’s Next?
Smart Business Service is available in HANA Cloud Platform service section. This is also available in HANA Cloud Platform Trial Landscape.
You can easily subscribe it and start exploring this.
Refer to following articles to know more.
How to Subscribe to SAP Smart Business Service
SAP Smart Business Service Roles
Create Your First Smart Business KPI and Tiles in 10 Minutes
How to create Smart Business Apps using HANA Calculation View and XSOData.
Part 1- Subscribe Smart Business Service
Part 2 – Deploy HANA SHINE and prepare data
Part 3 – Configure Destination and Create Analytic Apps
Note: A complete implementation guide on Smart Business Service is also available at SAP-Press.
Has anyone set-up an example of SAP Smart Business Analytics with the ESPM Application? That would be great to see, I am struggling to connect a java application with OData endpoint: https://espm<trialname>.hanatrial.ondemand.com:443/espm-cloud-web/espm.svc/ to the Smart business interface.
Hi Austin,
You will need to add OData4SAPAnnotations in your Java OData metadata to be able to consume the OData in Smart Business service.
sap:semantics is the annotation required for Smart Business to recognize the Entity set as an entity meant for analytics.
sap-aggregation-role is the annotation required to distinguish the measures and dimensions.
make sure the namespace for “sap” in xmlns:sap is “http://www.sap.com/Protocols/SAPData”.
If you already these information in your odata service and still are not able to read the OData source in Smart Business then can give me more details on the issue you are facing.
Hi,
the link to the trial landscape should be https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com. There is a http:// too much and a double-colon missing.
Thanks Robert. I have corrected it.
Kindly read :
Smart Business in HANA Cloud Platform as a service as
"Smart Business as a Service on SAP Cloud Platform"