SAP's definitive strategy for planning technologies moving forward: What's the word on BPC, BI-IP and SRC?

[Former Member]

Sorry it has been a while since my last blog. I have wanted to write more frequently, but it has just been an extraordinarily busy time. Not that it is any less busy right now mind you, but I know there is still some confusion around what is happening with BPC and NetWeaver BI Integrated Planning (BI-IP). My last blog I wrote touched on this topic, but this was from before SAP acquired Business Objects, so I want to provide an update, and remedy any confusion there might be, by addressing this topic head on, and letting you know what SAP is "officially" doing. This is a pretty long blog, but I want to try and address all the big concerns out there.

In the most simplistic view, SAP recommends all new planning implementations use SAP BPC. You will find this message in every analyst and press article discussing SAP's planning roadmap - it is THE official statement from SAP on planning. This is a common position of the NetWeaver and Financial Performance Management teams within SAP as you'll see below, so if you hear otherwise from someone, feel free to refer them to this blog. You can see just one example of this in a recent interview conducted by "is report" (the article was published 12^th May 2008):

• "In the area of planning we have the strategic product SAP Business Planning and Consolidation".  Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP FPM Solution Management (in response to the question of what are the strategic products SAP has selected going forward).
• "For customers who haven't implemented the tool [BI-IP] yet I recommend considering the advantages of Business Planning and Consolidation".  Gerd Danner, VP NetWeaver Product Management

Well, if it was that easy, I could just stop writing right here. But obviously there are many questions that follow on from this statement, so let me try and address the most common questions or concerns.

What is happening to BI-IP?

BI-IP is not disappearing and continues to be supported by SAP to 2013 (2016 with extended maintenance). For any customers who are currently implementing BI-IP, SAP recommends you continue on your BI-IP project, and evaluate BPC for your future needs. SAP will continue to invest further in BI-IP as a "planning engine" (or "planning framework"), rather than as a planning toolset as it is today. The idea behind this change is that planning applications from SAP can then be developed on top of the planning engine.

Does that mean BPC will sit on top of BI-IP in the future?

Firstly, it is important to understand that BPC has a "dual-stack" release strategy. When SAP acquired OutlookSoft, the product ran completely on a Microsoft platform (Windows Operating System; SQL Server; Analysis Services; Reporting Services; DTS/SSIS, etc). SAP is continuing to invest strategically in the Microsoft based version of BPC to maintain our commitment to customers (the official name is "SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for the Microsoft platform", but it is sometimes unofficially referred to simply with an "M" suffixed after the release name... e.g. BPC 7.0 M, would refer to version 7.0 of BPC running on the Microsoft platform).

While the Microsoft platform is suitable for many customers, there are also a lot of SAP customers who run NetWeaver BI, and want to leverage their NetWeaver BI system. Therefore, since the acquisition of OutlookSoft, SAP has been working on integrating BPC to the NetWeaver BI platform. The official name for this release is "SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver", and is sometimes unofficially reffered to with a "NW" suffix, to indicate the NetWeaver based version of BPC (e.g. BPC 7.0 NW). So, there are 2 flavors of BPC - one based purely on Microsoft technology, and the other that is NetWeaver based. Customers can freely pick which platform they prefer, and SAP is continuing to invest in both versions going forward.

Now the dual-stack release strategy is clear, obviously the pure Microsoft based version of BPC will not have any integration to BI-IP. For the first NetWeaver based version of BPC (BPC 7.0 NW), there will be integration to some aspects of the BI-IP engine. For example, BPC leverages the write-back functions and locking engine of BI-IP, and, under some circumstances, it will also use the same functions for reading data out of a cube too. However, to be perfectly clear - while BPC 7.0 NW does use some of the same the core engine components from BI-IP, BPC 7.0 NW does not use, and there are no future plans to use, aggregation levels/filters/queries/etc.

Another important distinction to make is that BPC is, intentionally, not directly integrated into the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), but operates in its own namespace in the NetWeaver BI system. This means that you can't use the BPC client/front-end for reading and writing out of an existing InfoProvider in your system. The reason why this was an intentional design decision, is that if BPC was completely integrated into the EDW, with its shared dimensional model, no business users would ever be able to maintain their own applications (like creating their own dimensions or "characteristics" in NetWeaver BI terms) without impacting the whole EDW. Obviously, no IT department would ever want to allow business users to make changes to the entire EDW. Instead, BPC allows the users to modify the structure of the cube, create their own hierarchies and properties of dimensions (or "attributes of characteristics" in NetWeaver lingo), etc - all from within the BPC application, using a very business-user friendly UI that any business analyst would be comfortable with. In contrast, these types of modeling capabilities are not even available in BI-IP. In BI-IP, you have to go into the NetWeaver BI Administrator Workbench (RSA1) to do any real modeling, because all BI-IP modeling is done "on top of" the cubes. BPC on the other hand directly integrates to the underlying InfoCubes/InfoObjects, etc. So, this design approach actually maximizes the flexibility of the solution AND puts all of this power into the hands of the business without reliance on IT! I have to say, we are pretty proud of this functionality too!

In terms of future integration, SAP continues to evaluate the individual features/functions in releases beyond the upcoming 7.0 and 7.0M releases. That means we will evaluate BI-IP capabilities for future BPC releases, but it is not the intention to have BPC leverage every single feature/function provided in BI-IP as soon as possible. Rather, we will be gathering feedback on the BPC 7.0 NW release, prioritizing any enhancement requests, and then evaluating what we might be able to leverage from BI-IP to fulfill those requirements. One topic that we are strongly evaluating is around leveraging FOX functions in BPC - but if and when this would happen is still being discussed.

So BPC won't be a new front-end on top of BI-IP?

No. It is not our intention to just make BPC a front-end tool. BPC is a complete planning application that will leverage some of the core engine components from NetWeaver BI and BI-IP, but it will not become just a front end tool.

But I heard that BPC isn't scalable. Should I choose BI-IP for large deployments?

No, this is not true. There are many customers on the pure Microsoft platform with large deployments of BPC with thousands of users, so it's simply untrue to say that BPC isn't scalable. It is also important to note though the scalability must be evaluated in the context of an application function. BPC is a "Performance Management application" and was never designed to store line item detail - it is not a data warehouse. BPC 7.0 NW will also be available directly on NetWeaver BI in a matter of weeks, and most readers probably already know that the SAP NetWeaver BI platform is highly scalable with many customers publicly lauding its ability to reach Terabyte data volumes (although again it is important to note that regardless of platform, BPC is still not intended to be a data warehouse!). Furthermore, BPC cubes in the NetWeaver BI release will be able to utilize the BI Accelerator to further improve scalability and performance.

When will BPC 7.0 NetWeaver be available and where can I get more information?

BPC 7.0 NW will be available in Ramp Up at the end of July 2008. Ramp Up's do not go for a fixed period of time at SAP, so a precise General Availability (GA) date is not known, however the initial expected length of a Ramp Up is approximately 6 months. In terms of requirements, BPC 7.0 NW will require NetWeaver BI 7.0 Enhancement Package 1, and BPC will technically be installed as an Add-On to the BI system.

Currently, as the product is still not even in Ramp Up yet, little information has been published on the 7.0 release at this point in time. Obviously, as we get into the Ramp Up, this will change and we will begin releasing much more information (to the Ramp Up customers first). If you or a customer you're working at, is looking to implement BPC this year and wants to go with the NetWeaver version, customers should contact their SAP Account Executive, who can ensure they receive answers to their questions. I am also planning on publishing another blog soon to dispel (or confirm) some of the rumors around what BPC 7.0 NW is and is not, so look for that shortly.

I also want to mention here that there will be a migration tool which supports customers who implement BPC 5.1 now (on the Microsoft platform), and later wish to migrate to the NetWeaver version. Obviously, there are very major architectural differences between the releases, so the migration tools will only be able to automate so much (for example, any custom DTS/SSIS tasks would need to be rebuilt manually), but we have been able to automate a significant portion of the migration. As above, more detailed documentation on the migration tools will be forthcoming closer to the release date.

Will there be any migration tools to go from BPS or BI-IP to BPC?

Currently, we are still evaluating the feasibility of such a migration. There are major differences in the way these products work, so an automated migration would be very difficult and would not give you any opportunity to leverage a lot of the additional functionality in BPC. So SAP will continue to evaluate providing such tools in the future, but there are no firm plans in place today to develop these migration tools.

Will BPC allow me to customize a solution as much as I could with BI-IP?

Absolutely. If you wish to do a lot of customization, BPC is an extremely flexible and extensible solution, so you feel totally comfortable that you will be able to tailor the solution to your individual needs. For example, you can create custom stored procedures (or ABAP logic in 7.0 NW) for completely custom planning functions; you create custom ETL tasks (in SSIS in Microsoft, or Process Types in NW); there are exits for custom VBA logic on the front-end; there are API's available completely customized application; and many, many other types of places where you can customize the solution. The great thing about BPC that is so enciting to customers is that end-users don't have to know any of these more technical topics to build an application - they are there if you want them, but you aren't forced to learn them to build powerful applications quickly.

Why would I want to go with BPC instead of BI-IP?

Every single planning product on the market, no matter which vendor it is from, will have its own set of strengths and weaknesses. So you can try and do a side by side feature/function comparison, and you will find there will be a few features and functions in BI-IP that arent in BPC, and this should not be a surprise. On the other hand, SAP obviously acquired OutlookSoft because it contained a lot of additional functionality not found in BI-IP/BPS. I know this better than most as I was the person responsible for the functional and technical analysis of OutlookSoft before the acquisition, and I have had a long NetWeaver and SEM background before this so I know all our existing products in detail too. However, doing feature/function comparisions is really missing the strategic value BPC offers. The most important points to consider are:

• SAP is developing and investing heavily into BPC. As I mentioned, BI-IP as an engine will still be invested in, but for creating planning applications, BPC is the product that SAP is investing in heavily, with a large development team and significant go-to-market focus.
• BPC provides integrated Planning, Reporting and Financial Consolidations. SAP is also investing in BPC as both a planning and consolidation product with excellent financial reporting capabilities. That means BPC is uniquely positioned as a unified solution that is capable of both planning and consolidations and financial reporting in a single system. Even if you arent looking to implement consolidations now, having a single system where you can leverage all of the same master data, metadata, and application artifacts is a huge advantage.
• BPC is administered by Business Experts, not by IT. For any IT owned systems, a very significant pain point for an end user is having to wait for IT to make their requested changes. Because BPC can be maintained by the business, it puts the power back in their hands. This concept is often a hard pill to swallow (at least initially) for IT as it can be a little scary to think of putting this much power into the hands of the business. However, with some reflection, it is evident that if the business doesn't get the changes they want in a timely manner, they just turn to using spreadsheets, and this is much worse! In BPC, the system and data are still centralized, and that gives IT the opportunity to govern and monitor the changes while not becoming a bottleneck during the process. It really is the best of both worlds.
• Fast implementations and best in class usability. BPC really has one of the best user experiences of any product in the market (we will be sure to get some new demos of BPC 7.0 NW onto SDN very soon so you can see this for yourself), and the implementation times for BPC are quite rapid. Faster time to delivery, combined with better usability means happier users and better adoption throughout the business.
• Integration to FPM (Financial Performance Management) suite and Business Objects BI. The 7.0 releases will contain new functionality and the NetWeaver BI integration, but in the future, SAP is also integrating BPC into the overall FPM suite of products (including Strategy Management and Profitability and Cost Management), and the Business Objects BI toolsets.
• Customers continue to validate SAP BPC is the right choice. Everyday we are seeing an unbelievable amount of interest in BPC. There are many independent analysts validating the strategy to go forward with BPC, and we are seeing customers are constantly selecting it as their solution of choice: "SAP reported that over the past several months more than 100 customers worldwide purchased SAP® solutions for enterprise performance management with the intention to replace Hyperion solutions from Oracle." http://www.sap.com/usa/company/press/press.epx?pressid=9100 
• Extensive Product Functionality. There are a lot of capabilities in BPC that are really impressive. To name just a few: Work Status, Business Process Flows, Word and PowerPoint integration, the guided Action Pane across all user interfaces, Data Auditing, Dimension Member formulas that save having to create and maintain multiple Structures, Dynamic Templates for reporting, Books and Distributor/Collector functionality, Park'N'Go for offline planning, tight Excel integration allowing for advanced reports to be created using just Excel without any other client tools.

What about the Business Objects planning products?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the recommendation for all new planning implementations is BPC. SAP has published a Statement of Direction, which answers this question best:

"In evaluating Business-Objects Planning XI (formerly an SRC Software product) and Business-Objects Planning Extended (formerly an INEA product), it was determined that SAP Business Planning and Consolidation was a superior solution and provided better functionality overall. Customers using Business Objects planning products can migrate to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for all of their planning, budgeting, and forecasting needs. SAP is currently developing offerings to aid with database migration and user authorization conversion and the standard planning methodologies to help with the migration to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation."

Summary

This blog is intended to be the ‘official SAP answers' on this topic. Anybody who contradicts a statement made above may be misinformed, so please direct them to come here and read this blog!

I KNOW there will be lots more detailed questions on how BPC 7.0 NW works, and rest assured that we will be providing more and more information going into the Ramp Up and beyond. However, I hope I was able to clear up any confusion, and this helps answer some of the big questions you might have had.

Cheers,

[Former Member]

Ryan, thank you for taking the time to post this definitive commentary on SAP's planning strategy.  I know there is a lot of confusion in our customer base, and seeing in writing that "SAP recommends all new planning implementations use SAP BPC" really makes it very clear and unambigous what our recommendation is.

[Former Member]

Ryan, I have a question.

We have a lot of customer/vendor/product master records that get allocations/distributions from some higher level entity like customer group etc.

if EDW data in BI cannot be shared, we will have to replicate this data somehow into infoobjects in BPCs namespace, and that is not an easy proposition. What would be your reccomendation here?

[Former Member]

Thank you for the update.

Would love to see something similar on the consolidations side.  BPC vs. SEM-BCS vs. Business Objects Financial Consolidation (Cartesis) and how those products will be positioned for various types of consolidation projects.

[Former Member]

Hi Vijay,

I understand - this is exactly the tradeoff i was describing in the blog.

There are a actually A LOT of different ways to model this in BPC 7 NW, so during the Ramp Up period we will try and come up with some best practice modeling guides and make recommendations on the best approach to take.

We are obviously aware of this need, so even in BPC 7 NW, we begun adding some things into the product to make this easier. That is, we made some enhancements to BPC's Data Manager functionality to better support loading of master data to "BPC Dimensions". We have also made the whole framework very extensible so people can develop their own integration scenarios if they want to. Of course, there are still more things we want to develop to make this even easier, but we have begun work in this area and are very much looking at enhancements here as part of the roadmap. With BPC 7 NW, we have achieved such a tight integration to the NetWeaver platform, that all of these ERP and BI data integration scenarios will become significantly easier.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Thanks for the feedback Christopher. I will definitely forward this message on to my counterpart looking after Consolidations!

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hello Ryan - I understand BPF's (as they exist in BPC5.1) will NOT be available in the BPC7.0 NW release.  Can you confirm this?  Is there functionality that is available in BPC5.1 that will not be available in the NW version?

Thanks,
Pat

[Former Member]

Dear Ryan,
  Nice blog, thanks for clearing the air around the numerous planning applications. How would you suggest a consultant should go ahead if (s)he wantes to get acquainted with the product?

[Former Member]

Ryan,

Thank you very much for sharing this information.Great Work and Good Timing !

I am currently doing assessment for a couple of my clients to implement BPC 7.0 NW and these clients have complex BPS applications running successfully. One of the questions I am faced with is how can we make the BPS Plan Cubes and BPC Plan Cubes interact with each other? Can we create reports using BI front end tools on these two cubes without using BO? For all obvious reasons as you know clients discourage the idea of duplicate objects and duplicate data.What is the best way to bring master data/txn data from old infoobjects/infocubes and BPC objects/cubes together? Please share your vision of this process.

Cheers
Srini

[Former Member]

Hi Pat,

Thats correct. We are actually enhancing BPF's further in the BPC 7 NW release, so they will not be available in the initial release.

We are however working to get the new and improved BPF's into BPC 7 NW as soon as possible (hopefully before the product is even out of Ramp Up!).

There are features from 5.1 that are not in 7.0NW, as well as several new features in 7.0NW that aren't in 5.1. Its too much information to go into in the comments here, but I think this would make a good topic for a future blog, so I will try to work on that soon.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Thanks for the feedback...

I think the best starting point would be to attend the BPC 5.1 training course.

It would also be helpful to have some base level NetWeaver BI knowledge if you are looking at consulting in BPC 7 NW too. How much you want to get into NW topics depends on whether you want to be more of a functional consultant (where less NW knowledge is required) vs more of a technical consultant (where NW knowledge can be helpful).

[Former Member]

hello

as some of my customers have invest a lot on Entreprise Portal

I would like to know if the NW stack of BPC will allow to create queries directly (using BeX query designer) in order to publish it in the Portal.

Besides, will it be possible to populate the BPC cube directly from other cubes and DSO (using a process chain)

And last question, will it be possible after all if I design my BW cube as the BPC Cube to create multiprovider in order to make reporting

regards,

Sol

[Former Member]

hello


as some of my customers have invest a lot on Entreprise Portal


I would like to know if the NW stack of BPC will allow to create queries directly (using BeX query designer) in order to publish it in the Portal.


Besides, will it be possible to populate the BPC cube directly from other cubes and DSO (using a process chain)


And last question, will it be possible after all if I design my BW cube as the BPC Cube to create multiprovider in order to make reporting


regards,


Sol

[Former Member]

With regards to this comment in your blog, would you then recommend that any BI IT consultant no longer invests in BPS/IP tech/config education with SAP ?

[Former Member]

Thanks for the excellent blog.  It would be nice to have something similar for CONSOLIDATIONS!

[Former Member]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply. I actually didn't put myself very clearly. I meant what would you suggest to somebody who has been working as a BI (and IP) consultant? 🙂
It seems like BPC is not that much part of BI - excerpts where you mention that "BPC is not intended to be a data warehouse".

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

I am working at a project in an european insurance company finalised to implement SAP GL and SAP BW for Financial and Management Accounting and SAP BPC for Planning, Consolidation and Reporting. I'd like to have some feed back from you on the following subjects:
1) Is SAP BPC 7.0 NW going to be integrated with SAP BW?
2) Should we plan to going trough SAP BPC 5.1 release or would be better to implement the SAP BPC 7.0 Ramp Up release?

Thanks on advance for your help
Norberto

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

Interesting blog.

Since I have a similar question, I thought I would add to Sol's thread than creating one of my own.

My understanding is as follows and would appreciate confirmation / feedback on:
1. BW master data is different and separate from BPC master data, thus it is not possible to integrate BPC cubes with BW Actuals cubes, but requiring reload of not only the transaction data but master data, either mannually or via process chains.
2. Hierarchy are different that BW in that BPC hierarchies are in the dimensions properties and must be a roll up from base members.  Thus there is no equivalent to BW characteristic herarchies where data can sit on a node?  The only work around would be to put a dummy base member to represent the node?
3. Are they plans for BPC to leverage BW master data in the future?  Reloading is not always practical and there are needs for higher level sales and operational type planning that require a significant amount of actual data for allocation / distribution.
4. Suggestions on how to handle realigments since the BPC cubes always get realigned to current view and if data is summarized due to volume issues, realignment, especially below the level of summarization, could get really tricky...

Thanks,
Mary

[Former Member]

Hi Srini,

Unfortunately I can't give an easy "Yes" or "No" answer to this question. The reason is that there are a number of differences in the way BPC stores data to BI. Let me explain, using just ONE difference as an example: the use of "Measure" formulas in BPC. These are somewhat like calculated key figures in a BI system. They specify that balance sheet accounts should take the last periods balance instead of aggregating all periods. They also specify sign transformation logic (for dealing with credit/debit balances).

If you try and access the raw InfoCube data for a BPC cube (the key figure is called "Signed Data"), then your records do not contain the logic that would be applied in the application tier (i.e. through the Measure formulas). So its not that the data would be incorrect if you went to the cube directly, but it would mean that you would be responsible for applying the logic contained in the measure formulas to see the "expected" business results.

Measure formulas are a good thing for the BPC application, since it means we have built-in financial intelligence, but it makes this scenario a bit more complex.

This is just 1 example of something that needs to be worked out. I'm not sure if that example makes sense without more inforation, but I dont want to create a whole new blog in the comments here 🙂

However, what i can say is that I am confident  we can solve these challenges. We can do this either using a BOBJ BI tool for reporting across both sets of data, OR, using Virtual InfoProviders in BI. Virtual InfoProviders should hopefully allow us to either report on BPC and BI data in a BI query; OR; to report on BPC data and BI data in a BPC report.

To summarize: technically, I believe it should be possible - its just that today, I can't provide you a nice "How To" guide on the recommended way to set it up. We will work with the Ramp Up customers on these scenarios, and we do plan to create such a "how to" guide during the Ramp Up period.

Of course, in addition to a "how to" guide - we will be looking at adding new functionality into the products to make these scenarios even easier. But for the initial BPC 7 NW shipment, we will solve this with "how to" guides.

I hope that helps.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Well, I wouldnt say that its "not that much a part of BI" just because BPC isnt a data warehouse. BPC NW does run completely on the BI system - from the BPC Admin client, you are creating InfoProviders, InfoObjects, Hierarchies, etc, all in the backend NW BI system (without having all the usual complexity involved in doing this work). When you query the system, it is going through the NW BI layers to access the data in the cubes, etc. So BPC is very much tightly integrated to the underlying BI system.

I would still say the BPC 5.1 training is the best place to start with, to begin gaining BPC experience. This way, when you then start looking at BPC 7 NW, you have a good understanding of how BPC already works. Of course, the best scenario is always working on a BPC project 🙂

[Former Member]

Thank you Tara. I have spoken to the consolidations team, and they will hopefully be able to publish something similiar in the next few weeks.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hi Norberto,

1) Yes, BPC 7 NW sits on top of the BW system. All SQL Server, Analysis Services, etc are not required because it integrates directly to NW BI.

2) You can either implement BPC 5.1 today, or apply to get on the ramp-up (we have had A LOT of demand for this already). If the customers long term vision is to be on BPC running on the NetWeaver platform, then there are a few important areas to consider when designing a 5.1 implementation today (for example, if you create any custom SSIS packages or custom stored procedures in SQL Server, these are not going to automatically migrate since they are based completely on the Microsoft technology).

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hi John,

There is obviously a large base of BPS and BI-IP customers existing today, as well as on-going projects, so there is certainly a demand for this skillset! And there is a still a role for IT to play in any system implementation, so this need is not going away. Its just that we are enabling the business to have more control over their own applications (i.e. not control over the EDW).

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hi Sol,

Please take a look at my other comment to Srini - i think this addresses your questions too.

There are A LOT of ways to move the data between BI and BPC since they are integrated to the same platform. BPC has its own Data Manager framework, which sits on top of Process Chains. However, we have actually developed a lot of enhancements here, and the Process Chains that BPC uses are both completely dynamic, as well as extensible if you want to set up your own loading scenarios. We dont use DTP's from BI, although technically you could do it (as always, there are some considerations, but technically it could be done). I think if you have a chance to attend the BPC 7 NW training to see how it works, you probably wont want to use the native BI functionality anymore - you would want to use the BPC Data Manager.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,
Thanks again. You know this is one part where SAP is not very consultant friendly - you cannot learn it on your laptop 🙂 You need to have a customer ready to invest in the system so you too get a chance to learn. I started on BI IP in mid 2006 so I have gained quite some experience there. Lets see when I get to work on a BPC system.
Regarding the training course - were you mentioning those classroom/online courses only or is some free material available as well to get some insight into BPC?

[georg_meier]

In the industry Trade we are struggeling with the complexity and massdata of the planning content. Even IP will need another release to deliver some mayor function. e.g frontend locking, invers formulars, mutlilevel planning vor none comulative KPI like % or , min, max, inventory and so on. So taken that into account with the demand to deal with tons of data in a query can I offer BPC to a customer TODAY. I do not think so 😮

Regards,
Georg

[Former Member]

Thanks a lot for your time to provide such a detailed and very informative response.Thanks for sharing your vision of NW BPC.

I look forward for the "How To" guides for some of these BI Integration Scenarios.

Best Regards
Srini

[Former Member]

Ryan,

Thanks for the excellent blog!

I want to expand on Mary Huang's comments about master data integration between BPC and BI.

1) BPC cubes will be stored in BW under a separate BW namespace and as I think BI would be a better place to do actual vs. plan comparison reporting, how would it make sure that master data in BPC is in sink with BI.

2) How the mappings between BPC dimensions and BI infoobjects would take place?

3) When you say that data will be stored in BW cubes in BPC 7.0 NW version, are you indicating that data would be stored at 2 places, in BPC layer and also in BI space? Or BPC layer would just act as a buffer.

4) Please confirm that until you guys come up with how to integrate FOX with BPC, all the functionality needs to be built in SQL/MDX.

Thanks again for wonderful blog.

Rahul

[Satyabrata_Basu]

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for very informative and well timed blog.

Is it a correct assumption that SAP BPC 7.0 NW release will be an Add-On product on top of SAP-BI ?

Does it mean that a customer already having SAP-BI (e.g. Enterprise Datawarehouse), can simply install SAP-BPC on top of existing SAP-BI system ? or SAP-BPC still will need to be installed on a separate system ?


Thank you with kind regards...

Satya,

[Former Member]

Hi Satya,

Thanks for your comments.

Your assumptions are both correct. BPC is an add-on, and you can choose to install it on top of an existing BI system (or on a new BI system if you want to have it separate - its up to you).

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Well, if the company you work for has a license, then you can of course install it on your laptop... So its not just project based.

All training material follows the same approach as other SAP products, so are offered through SAP Education (and what you can find on SDN of course).

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hi Rahul,

Thanks for the feedback!

Please take a look through the comments in this blog regarding BI and BPC reporting (e.g. plan/actuals). I mentioned a few considerations, but basically there are A LOT of options available, and it is too big a topic to try and discuss them all in the comments of this blog. So we will look to publish some more information dedicated to this topic soon.

Regarding question 4, you would use the script logic functionality in BPC, as well as dimension member formulas, for the purpose of calculations.

Regards,
Ryan

[Satyabrata_Basu]

Thank you Ryan, for your answer.

Best regards.... Satya.

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,
very good blog, thank you.
Can you clarify whether BI-IP will then be sunsetted, i.e. will standard maintenance terminate like SEM-BCS in 2013?
Thanks,
Christoph

[Former Member]

Hi Christoph,

No, BI-IP is definitely not being sunsetted.

"2013" is when BI-IP, in its current format, will be supported until (this is the same date for all of NetWeaver 7.0, and is also the same date for the BPC 7.0 release too).

Sorry if this caused any confusion.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

In your blog...when you said "This means that you can't use the BPC client/front-end for reading and writing out of an existing InfoProvider in your system. " 

Does that just mean that you would need to create a new multiprovider in BI as a virtual cube to join the BPC cube and BI cube ...OR how exactly can the BPC data manager read BW cubes?

Also, if we load 0PCA cubes from R/3 for actual, would we then turnaround and load data to the BPC cube?  Can delta loads be used if we wanted to load daily?

[Former Member]

Also....will non-IT users be able to build their planning cubes and load them from "actuals" data in BI cubes.   Would this be done in production and how would the BIA be involved in loading data and used in BPC queries?

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

Is it true that BPC is more suited towards Financial Planning. If so, how would you recommend to use BPC for non-financial planning (eg. headcount planning).

Thanks and regards.
Rajendra Tewani

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

Is BPC 7.0 integrated with GRC. How this integration happens.

thanks/regards,

Lokesh Nandula

[Former Member]

Hi,

1) Is there something similiar to characteristic relationships in BPC.
2) Can we have a landscape (dev, qual, prod) and transports functionality in BPC.
3) Can the CV (Current View) in BPC accept '#' values (Hash/ unassigned values)
4) Can we develop input schedules which can exclude some dimensions of an application (something similiar to aggregation levels/planning levels).

thanks/regards,
Lokesh Nandula

[Former Member]

Its a wonderful blog on BPC
as you have mentioned BPC doesnt work as DWH but it posses cubes like BI. I am little confused here? How does BPC takes actual data (for example from SAP ECC).
Regards
Ram

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

I am still a little confused about the future for BI-IP. I have two specific questions:

1.) Will BI-IP continue to be enhanced between now and 2013 or is it in "maintenance only" mode?

2.) Will there be any new versions of BI-IP after 2013?

Thanks,
Ian

[Former Member]

Hi Ryan,

Can we please have some updates from you on BPC 7.0 NW ?

Thanks!!

[Former Member]

Ram,

BPC 7.0 NW uses different master data and different cubes than BW even though both resides in BI.  Basically you would need to load / reload data from R/3 or BW, both master data and transaction data.

Mary

[Former Member]

Lokesh,

2) in BPC 7.0 NW, there are now transport mechanism managed by BI.  In BPC 5.x and 7.0M, move from development to QA to Prod is managed by backing up and restoring your app set.

3) No.  BPC cannot handle # since it requires you to plan on base memebers of all dimensions.   Thus no node level planning or planning on material group directly if you dimension / base member is material number.  The way BPC planning applications get around this is to create a dummy member to represent the node / group and plan against that base member which represent a more aggregated level.

Not absolute sure about 1) and 4) in view of the upcoming rampup for BPC 7.0 NW.

Hope this helps.
Mary

[Former Member]

Hi Greg,

You would need to read BPC PCA cubes either directly from R/3 or via cube to cube loads from BW PCA cube.  You would also need to load all relevant master data into BPC dimensions (almost equivalent to InfoObject) from R/3 or BW. 

Some issues that might need to be worked through are:
1. BPC does not have the equivalent concept of compound infoObjects so depending on how your 0account and 0Profit_ctr are set up, you may have additional challenges if you have multiple controlling areas or charts of accounts that does not have 1-1 equivalency.

2. Hierarchy concepts are fairly different from SAP/BW versus BPC.  In BPC, hierarchies are attributes of dimensions and are not time dependent.  Multiple hierarchies are represented by multiple hierarchical attributes but there may be performance implication if you have too many hierarchical attributes.    In R/3 and BW, you can have time dependency of master data and also time dependent hierarchies.  If you only load deltas and had a significant realigment or reorganization, there could be some challenges to get comparable reporting.  If you use PCA for a more brand type profit center analysis, there could be some issues to work thorugh and maybe some complete reloads with reorganization / realignment.

3) you need to decide how you are going to handle the qty key figure (if used).  BPC does not have the concept of quantity and with a single key figure, the common practice is to use a statiscal account to represent quantities.  Unit conversion is not an issue for PCA but in Sales or Profitability, it could also be an issue to work through and/or translating an key figure model concept of the R/3 extractor to an accounts model of BPC.

Hope this helps.
Mary

[Former Member]

Hi Greg,

Someone who has access to BPC Administration would be able to build their own applications (which could be created as BPC cubes in BPC namespace in BPC 7.0 NW). 

I think they have control over loading data from flat files sources but not sure how process chains and others are kicked off from loading BI Actuals Cube in BPC 7.0 NW. 

Hope this helps,
Mary

[Former Member]

Sorry,

In first line of previous post, reload rather than read.   I think somehow I inadvertedly deleted the 'lo'.

[Former Member]

Hi Sanchita,

Sorry - i have just been so flat out I havent had a chance to respond. I will try and update any open questions now...

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hey Ram,

Thanks for your feedback and sorry about the delay in responding.

Another way to think of BPC not being a DWH, but using BI is to take SEM, for example. It was not built to be a datawarehouse either, but also used BI cubes. We use the underlying BI technology in a different way to SEM, but conceptually this is what i meant.

Regards,
Ryan

[Former Member]

Hi Lokesh,

Sorry about the delay in responding.

1) Is there something similiar to characteristic relationships in BPC.
In BPC 7.0 NW, there is some functionality for "validations". This is designed to "check" whether the records are valid based on rules, but it does not currently allow you to change the record (e.g. by filling in an "empty" dimension). So this is somewhat similar to characteristic relationships, but not identical.


2) Can we have a landscape (dev, qual, prod) and transports functionality in BPC.
As Mary said, yes transports are being introduced in BPC 7.0 NW, and in the BPC MS products, you use the BackUp/Restore function.


3) Can the CV (Current View) in BPC accept '#' values (Hash/ unassigned values)
Not directly, but as Mary said, you can just create a member (characteristic value) called "unassigned" if you want to.

4) Can we develop input schedules which can exclude some dimensions of an application (something similiar to aggregation levels/planning levels).
No - your request must be fully qualified in BPC so all dimensions must be addressed. However, as above, if one is just not relevant, you can use the "unassigned" member for that dimension.

Regards,
Ryan