SBEE Reporting from SAP HANA Live

With SAP HANA live views SAP seems to be taking a big leap into flexible reporting. HANA Live views provide a flexible and great way to run reporting directly out of HANA.  HANA studio offers great features and flexibility to create table joins, transformations/conversions and projections etc. to slice and dice the data within HANA studio.

SAP seems to be setting up a trend where reporting is going to get really agile and essentially there is no need to write ABAP code or transfer data to BW to draw reporting out of SAP. There are host of tools like BO, FIORI, LUMIRA, SBEE available to run the reporting directly out of HANA Views. I am going to talk little bit about SBEE.

SBEE (SAP Smart Business Executive Edition) is a dash boarding tool to run the reporting. SBEE is simple, intuitive tool which can be configured by end user/functional consultant. There is no need for developer to write any code. Primary purpose of SBEE is dashboard reporting for top leaders of organization/various groups. Dashboards like top 5 revenue generating products, top 5 customers, top 5 vendors etc.

SBEE can directly connect to HANA live views and automatically identifies key figures (values), parameters and dimensions (attributes). Dashboards can be configured fairly easily and quickly. Below is the configuration steps to create a SBEE dashboard.

SBEE Configuration Flow

Data Sources: Here source of data is configured. It can be a SAP HANA View or manual KPI entry. Once you select SAP HANA View key figures, dimensions and parameters are automatically selected.

Data Source Configuration

Appropriate HANA live view has to be made available. Host of views are delivered out of the box. Hana studio offers tools to set-up new views as well. One examples is shown below.

HANA Live View Editor

Semantics: Here the dashboard semantics are defined i.e. type of component/report like comparison, table, value etc. Dimensions and key figures are selected and look and feel of the dimensions and key figures is also configured here. This is the step which would consume most of the time.

Semantics Editor

Stories: Components created above are organized under stories. Different components can be added under one story and more than levels can be created like a drill down report.

Stories Editor

Stories Editor

Dashboard: Stories are then assigned to dashboard. Configuration is similar to stories configuration where more than one levels can be configured to arrange the dashboard chronologically.

Dashboard Editor

Dashboard Editor

Few Examples of how the dashboard looks like are:

SBEE is little in-flexible in manner that not much slicing and dicing can be done on data. But, SBEE is meant for dash boarding not for detailed reporting. One thing also to be kept in mind is that in order for the dashboard to have desired output the HANA Live view data has be organized in required manner i.e. data to be displayed should be available in various dimensions and key figures according to the requirement.

For more details you can refer to official SAP content which is very easy to follow.