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Elangovan
Explorer
In recent years enterprises have realized the need for analytics in their day to day operations and have started spending/exploring on solutions to transform into a data-driven organization. SAP being a prominent player in ERP solutions, have a wide range of analytics products to fulfil these needs. SAP Embedded Analytics is one such concept marketed as a go-to solution to satisfy most of the operational analytics need.

Being a BW / BPC consultant, I have heard some customer, even few fellow consultants say there won't be a need for BW or BPC system since it can be done through Embedded Analytics. Though it is true to some extent and might be possible in future, right now embedded analytics has its own set of use cases that don't interfere much in with BW and BPC realm.

The bitter truth is most of the customer and consultant don’t have a clear picture of Embedded analytics and not sure about its true potential. This leads to underutilizing the product or false commitments to from the sales side.

Would like to start this blog post series with a technical point of view and then move into the bigger picture. Following is the overview of embedded analytics and architecture.

Overview


SAP S/4 HANA Embedded Analytics is Concept, Content and Toolset to enable Embedded (built-in) Analytics and Real-time Operational Reporting. It uses the technology of SAP ABAP Core Data Services (referred to as CDS) to create Virtual Data Models (Representation of operational data). SAP provides 100s of predefined queries and Analytical Applications across multiple modules which can be readily deployed for end-user access.

The selling points of S4 Embedded Analytics are they come pre-installed in the S4 Application and the only activation is needed. So there is no additional license cost and since Fiori can be used as the front end tool, an additional visualization tool can be avoided in most cases. In traditional analytics solutions, the data will be moved from an OLTP system to OLAP solution, thanks to HANA which enables us to do both OLAP and OLTP operations in a single system, this allows us to do the operational reporting directly on S/4HANA application.

Most people misinterpret this information and conclude that a separate OLAP system won't be needed at all. Embedded analytics is suited only for operations analysis, not historical data analysis or data warehousing scenarios.

Apart from operational analytics, embedded analytics is interlinked with multiple data products and integrations scenarios. Hope I will be able to cover most of the scenarios in the upcoming blog posts.

The activation can be done using the below SNOTEs.

2238757 - Error message "Master data read class &1 not actively available" (R7B355) although the read class is active

2289865 - Configuration steps for S/4 HANA Analytics

2106016 - Configuration steps for Design Studio in Distributed sFin or S/4 HANA Environments with a Remote Gateway Server

2356997 - Configuration steps for Design Studio in Distributed S/4HANA Environments with a Remote Gateway Server with UI5 1.44 or newer

 

Architecture




The major components of Embedded analytics are



    • CDS views

    • VDM

    • ODATA services

    • Analytica engine




CDS views are created on top of HANA tables, they are similar to SQL views and can be compared to ABAP from a developer perspective.CDS views can be used to create the following artefacts.



    • View

    • Tables

    • VDMs

    • Annotations

    • APIs

    • Extractors

    • Queries

    • Functions




Other than traditional data modelling CDS supports conceptual modelling and relationship definitions, built-in functions, and extensions.

The major advantage of CDS views is the complex logics are pushed into the database layer. For example, in ABAP the data is loaded into an internal table and the calculations are done in the application layer on top of the internal table. But in CDS views, the calculations are specified within the select statement thus pushing the calculations into the database layer. Since it combines both the features of SQL and ABAP all delivered content within SAP is being transitioned into CDS views. In addition to that its fully integrated with ABAP lifecycle development framework.

CDS Framework has the below components to assist in creating the VDMs,

 



References:

The architecture diagram is referenced from this SAP document

For more details on the business benefits, please refer to this blog post.
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