BI Transformation Journey – Automated mass conversion from BEx to AO 2.X workbook

[bhargavmalsani_dayanand]

HI All,

As SAP customers are advancing their landscape towards BW/4HANA they will have to transition from their traditional BEx Reporting to the latest SAP Analytics offerings.

please refer to following blog for support and strategies - https://blogs.saphana.com/2017/04/11/sap-bw4hana-and-the-bexit-strategy/ and  https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/13/sap-business-explorer-maintenance-support-policy/

In this blog I would like to highlight one such scenario where the BEx Workbooks would be replaced by SAP Business Objects Analysis for Microsoft Office (referred as AO).

One of the biggest hurdles most customer face today is to Migrate/Convert thousands of BEx workbook to Analysis for office. In the current state of things BEx workbooks has to be converted Manually one workbook after other from Analysis office as there is no Automated Mass conversion utility available.

This challenge provided us with an opportunity to build a utility/service which can help our customers to easily Migrate/Convert their BEx workbook to AO workbooks. We have enhanced the old version of the tool which was presented in https://blogs.sap.com/2014/05/21/migrationservice/ to latest version which can now convert the workbook to AO 2.x.

Installation and Setup:

We have a special install of analysis for office along with our code which will facilitate the conversion. this options will be integrated to the AO ribbon.



Process flow:



Features:

The utility provides the below options

1. Analyse different workbooks in the system  and categories based on number of query /datasource (ds) :

• Simple : 1 ds

• Normal : 2 -5 ds

• complex : 6-15 ds

• very complex : more than 15 ds

 

2. It gets the list of workbooks based on roles and allows user to convert the workbook and save with below options:

a. Options to save to different role.

b. Options to use prefix and suffix.



Current Limitation:

In the current version we only support save to NW platform, we are working on "Save to BI Platform" and will update the blog accordingly.

some of the limitation which are still being worked.

BEx Analyzer object	Analysis object
Styles	The style is not converted. The converted workbook is displayed with the default Analysis style set
Item: List of Conditions	The list is not converted. The conditions are available as BEx conditions in Analysis and can be activated and deactivated with the menu
Item: List of Exceptions	The list is not converted. The exceptions are available as Conditional Formatting in Analysis and can be activated and deactivated with the menu.
VBA API	Customer-specific code is not converted, but it is available in the workbook after the conversion.
Navigation Pane	No conversion. You can use the design panel in Analysis.
Item: Dropdown Box (displaying query views)	No conversion.
Item: Button	No conversion.

 

Developers:

• Bhargav Malsani

• Anish Shah

• Victor Gabriel (old version)

Hopefully this will help our customer to move their BEx workbooks to AO faster and with very less effort.

Thanks for reading ...

If you are interested in the tool and would like us to help you with conversion/migration please reach out to the your SAP Premium Engagement Contact - Engagement Architect/Technical Quality Manager

SAP COE Contacts:

Global/NA contact - Daniel Grovola

 

Thanks,

Bhargav