SAP Drinks its own Champagne when it comes to SCN Reporting

[Former Member]

SAP Drinks its own Champagne when it comes to SCN Reporting:

Introduction:  As SCN moves to Jive 5.0, we will use BI 4.0 ‘SAP BO Dashboard (Xcelsius)’, ‘SAP Crystal Reports’, ‘SAP BO Explorer’ and SAP HANA to get our data faster.

In a recent Jive 5 and SCN: The Right Content to the Right Person at the Right Time from Mark Yolton (SVP SCN), you would have come to know of our plans to migrate the core of our current SCN social media platform to the Jive Social Business System.

Moving to Jive does not mean we will have to move to a new reporting system as it does not have any direct impact on the reporting system.

From a reporting stand point, when we switch from one platform to another we could face the following challenges:

1. There could be additional information that is available in the new platform which will have to be captured.
2. Some of the information which is available in the old platform might not be available in the new platform.
3. The way in which the information was captured in the old platform can change when you switch to the new platform.

Based on the above reasons, there is an effort involved to see if all the information captured is available. If it is available, then it should be in the  right order and format.

We felt that it would be better to put our efforts into getting a new reporting system which can provide us with better capabilities when moved to Jive, rather than trying to make the old reporting system capture all of the information. Therefore,   for SCN reporting we plan to move from our current SAP BW system to SAP HANA wherein SAP BO products will be at the front end (internally dubbed “Project BI@SCN”).

In SAP BO Front end, we use three tool’s ‘SAP BO Dashboard (Xcelsius)’, ‘SAP Crystal Reports’ and ‘SAP BO Explorer’.

1. SAP BO Dashboard (Xcelsius): It will be used to create Executive dashboards that provide all the high level information for the Top Management.
2. SAP Crystal Reports:  It will be used to provide detailed information which is essential for the various line managers for day-day management and operations.
3. SAP BO Explorer: It can be used by the Top Management or Line Manager to drill down/roll up/ break up the data based on their own filter condition, instead of waiting for an ad hoc query to be specified and run by the Reporting team for them.

By moving to HANA, the performance of the reporting system will improve drastically. Queries that run for hours in BW system will only take minutes to be processed in the new HANA system.

I welcome your questions and comments on this topic.