Transitioning from SAP S/4HANA Finance (1503, 1602, or 1605) of Suite on SAP HANA - What to do with SAP HANA Live views?

[juergen_butsmann]

Hello everyone!

 

There are still a number of customers around which still have SAP ECC powered by SAP HANA or SAP S/4HANA Finance releases (1503, 1602, or 1605) in place. The virtual data model (VDM) for real-time operational reporting was named SAP HANA Live and the technology the model is built on are native SAP HANA views (mainly SAP HANA Calculation Views). Finally, given the different maintenance windows, these customers will have to move to SAP S/4HANA. The data model for real-time operational reporting is based on ABAP Core Data Services (CDS), however the concept and use cases of the respective functionality is much broader.

With SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics, SAP is not only shipping a large content model (more than 40.000 views in SAP S/4HANA release 2005), the functionality is truly embedded in the end-to-end processes, allowing for fact-based process handling, or insight-to-action handling.

Customers which had extended the VDM to their own needs of course ask, whether they can still proceed with these models in their target system SAP S/4HANA. The answer is: partly yes, but very much restricted.

What is possible with SAP HANA Live in SAP S/4HANA

First of all, for SAP S/4HANA, there are no data model package or design-time applications for SAP HANA Live applicable. All VDM's are either delivered or can be extended using ABAP CDS and there are multiple SAP Fiori applications available, fo designing and prebuilt for the execution of particular analytical needs.

Availability of VDMs in SAP S/4HANA versions

Second, the delivered data models for ECC and SAP S/4HANA Finance are not necessarily working any more, as the data structures have changed a lot in SAP S/4HANA in comparison to these ERP versions. This means, a lot of the data models would simply not work due to missing fields etc. Inn order to find out whether an SAP HANA Live view would still work in SAP S/4HANA, this needs to be tested one-by-one.

The following paragraph will show the steps to be followed to re-use as much as possible from the "old world". The example chosen is the latest 1605 release from SAP S/4HANA Finance as the latest of the predecessor releases of SAP ERPs.

What to do if a customer is on SAP S/4HANA Finance 1605 and wants to re-use existing SAP HANA Live content?

We will describe the procedure for the 4 main cases applicable for this situation

The customer is using SAP HANA Live content for SAP S/4HANA Finance 1605

Recommendation is to use the respective SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics content (from release 1709 or higher).

Some hints and notes for the Finance models:

2131643 - Reporting-Content of SAP Simple Finance add-on 1.0 replaced by SAP Simple Finance, on-premise edition 1503

2242330 - Release Information Note: Analytics for SAP S/4HANA Finance On-Premise-Edition 1602

2148105 - Release Information Note: SAP HANA Live for SAP Simple Finance, On-Premise-Edition 1503

For the transition from ECC to sFIN 1.0 there is no note, what happens with the views in note 2131643 . Note 2242330 explains which CDS Views may be used.

Note-chain 2131643 -> 2242330 works somewhat for SAP S/4HANA, actually a few apps (e.g. APF and HANA Live) disappear in SAP S/4HANA.

The customer has built their own custom SAP HANA Live data models

There are 2 alternatives what to do with these models:

Either re-use the native SAP HANA view models in SAP S/4HANA by capsulating the code into SAP ABAP CDS or create new ABAP CDS models. While the first alternative might be faster to apply, the second approach would help to create an optimized (performance, flexibility, feature-richness) VDM.

In both cases, the typical methods and steps to be followed for this transition are:

1. Check the Virtual Data Model delivered with S/4HANA based on CDS Views and identify if there is already a standard CDS View that can fulfill your requirement. If the standard CDS View is missing only some fields, then CDS View can be easily extended or you can build your own view on top of the existing view and extend it.


2. If there isn't any standard CDS View for the requirement but you know the requirement from the HANA Live view, then you can build the CDS View from scratch in a few days / or longer -> depending on the complexity.


3. A third option would be in the case where the DB tables that were used to build the HANA Calc Views on top are still existing. In this case an option could be to leave the Calculation Views as they are and to encapsulate them with a special CDS View (AMDP). You can refer to this documentation: https://help.sap.com/doc/abapdocu_753_index_htm/7.53/en-US/abenamdp_function_methods.htm

In case there are already custom ABAP CDS views built, these views need to be checked for re-usability in the new release and adapted regarding performance optimization, flexibility, etc., or for available structures to be used instead.

New models can be created in ABAP CDS using the extensibility concept of SAP S/4HANA.

Thanks a lot for your interest!

Yours

Jürgen Butsmann

Solution Management SAP S/4HANA, SAP SE