Since April of this year my team and I have worked on 10+ BPC 10 on HANA proof of concepts. These customers see HANA as the platform of the future for integrated business planning and are looking to make the investment now. They are also excited about the BPC 10 on HANA enhancements scheduled on our EPM Roadmap such as mobile device and dimension member formula support. These customers plan at a detailed level and would like to increase performance as much as possible. With the completion of these POC’s some of the customers have since started a project to upgrade from their current BPC 7.x environments to BPC 10 on HANA or at least put it in their short term plan.
Here are some reasons why:
- Imagine that your lite optimization process went from 45 minutes in BPC 7.5 NetWeaver to 28 seconds with BPC on HANA. That is what we have seen internally. Lite optimizations are crucial to ensuring acceptable reporting performance with BPC 7.5 during peak write back operations or data loads at month or quarter end. With BPC 10 on HANA, this piece of standard maintenance is now a non-issue since HANA optimized infocubes only have one fact table and perform a database table compression only.
- What if loading 1 million transaction records from a flat file decreased from 42 minutes with BPC 10 “Classic” to 8 minutes with BPC on HANA using the standard import package. Or loading 3 million records decreased from taking 4 hours and 51 minutes to 25 minutes. That is what we have seen internally. Again, this will allow for more time analyzing the data in BPC and less time loading it from SAP or other source systems.
- Copying data from one category to another is a common practice in BPC for comparisons between alternatives as an aid in decision-making during planning. We have seen the time it takes to copy 1.5 million records from one category to another decrease from 12 minutes in BPC 10 “Classic” to 6 minutes with BPC on HANA. Cutting this time is half means a more agile planning process and increased time available for analysis.
- We have also noticed a 50% or greater increase in back end calculation time through fiddler when running reports in BPC on HANA vs. BPC “Classic”. Of course Excel functions such as formatting or formulas still occur on the client tier.
- With consideration that BPC 10 SP06 to SP08 was focused on improved query performance, we saw plenty of that. Below are a few examples from our most recent POC against a customer’s planning application with 25 million records. The times represent end to end times, in seconds.
We are currently working with 8 customers who are scheduled to go live Q4 of this year or early 2013 and there is excitement amongst are customer base as momentum continues to build. After optimizing many of the key pieces of the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation application with SAP HANA, the focus will quickly move to extending the solution with new innovations targeted to make planning and consolidation activities a more agile process.
Looking forward to seeing you @SAPTechEd Las Vegas, Oct 15-19 in session AP266 - Realtime data in SAP Planning and Consolidation, Powered by SAP HANA or @SAPinsider Reporting & Analytics Oct 29-31 in the EPM Labs.
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