Introduction

The terms business analytics and business intelligence are often used interchangeably. Though they may at first seem similar, each has unique objectives and approaches. Business intelligence (BI) uses transactional and historical data to determine trends, analyze what has happened in a business, and report on outcomes. Business analytics, in contrast, creates a performance management framework and then uses data to drive predictive assessment, often via data mining, statistical modelling, and scenario analysis. And while the need for business intelligence is usually recognized and addressed, few organizations have yet recognized the need to integrate analytics into the corporate culture.

The result, if analytics are considered at all, is too often a fragmented and disjointed processes like that illustrated in Figure 1. Here analytical applications and business processes fail to interact – leading to both data-management and cultural challenges throughout the BI environment.

Figure 1: Typical BI and advanced analytics architecture

Disadvantages of current analytic frameworks

Siloed applications and processes

Analytical applications are designed to answer specific questions, but often have scarce or tenuous links to other business areas – so output from an analytic application may not be reflected in financial forecasts or operations. For example, a campaign management application generates optimized campaigns for a particular product. The resulting increased demand, however, may not be linked to inventory management and forecasting applications – resulting in an out-of-stock situation on a particular promotional product.

And analytic insights may not link to a business’s strategic plan. For example, suppose an analytic application identifies a market opportunity for a new product, but that opportunity may not be incorporated into the strategic plan. Conversely, analysis might identify a promising new market opportunity for an existing product – at the same time the strategic plan is phasing out that very product.

Meanwhile, a lack of write-back mechanisms may mean that insights from analytic applications are not automatically captured in transactional systems, making it difficult to close the loop from insight to action.

Finally, with multiple, disjointed systems comes significant additional costs for maintenance, plus significant time and effort required to reconcile data.

Inconsistent data

A lack of consistent data definitions and business rules across BI and analytic applications – say from supply chain analytics to financial analytics – makes it difficult to compare and act on results. For example, a company’s sales and commercial departments may define “sales revenue” differently, compromising data aggregation and analysis.

In addition, analytical models and their results may not be consistently persisted in corporate data repositories, making it difficult to provide a historical record for auditing and corporate learning. When analytics are performed locally within a specific tool, models and results are not retained in the data warehouse for future reference.

Sceptical business users

Operating independently, siloed analytic teams can push insights to end users with little to no involvement from actual decision makers in the business. Without collaboration, such teams miss valuable input that could drive insight and generate buy-in. Meanwhile, business users are often sceptical of analytic results that they have not helped generate.

Figure 2 illustrates the impact of disjointed process on the business. BI provides answers to “what happened?” while advanced analytics suggests improvements and answers “what if” questions. Ideally, the two processes complement each other – but if disconnected, they could actually work against each other. To ensure smooth operational execution, a business needs an advanced analytic system built on, or in conjunction with, its BI framework.

Figure 2: Current business processes for using BI and advanced analytics

Benefits of an integrated framework

As a best practice, SAP recommends an integrated framework that combines analytical applications with traditional BI solutions, underpinned by a holistic performance analytics framework. As the example in Figure 3 shows, such an integrated architecture has several benefits – better strategic alignment, consistent data definitions and use, and business users who embrace analytics to accelerate performance.

Figure 3: Future state best-of-breed architecture for integrated BI and advanced analytics

Strategically aligned application architecture and business processes  

If you start with a strategic top-down blueprint, all your BI and analytics applications can be architected according to a coherent set of solution requirements, scope, and vision, factoring in all inter-dependencies. Such a blueprint could potentially enable drill down from a strategic KPI at the top level of a balanced scorecard to the lowest degree of operational detail – describing, for example, how KPIs relate to operational metrics at the user level. A top-down analytics environment permits close alignment of a company’s analytics architecture with its enterprise performance management and strategic planning processes. Adding advanced analytics to the mix could also potentially enable you to forecast your performance under a variety of business scenarios. 

The top-down approach also identifies and builds in interdependencies among business areas, helping to balance worthwhile, but often conflicting, objectives of different business functions. For example, a bank’s sales team may want to increase the number of new loan customers while its credit department works to increase loan portfolio quality – objectives that could easily conflict. An integrated suite of analytic applications can eliminate such conflicts by optimizing decision making across conflicting constraints, ensuring smooth operational execution.  

Meanwhile, an integrated feedback loop can ensure that insights derived from an analytic system are picked up by the transactional system, so those insights can be acted on. For example, customers identified as profitable with a promising future lifetime value can be tagged in customer service applications so they receive higher service levels, increasing satisfaction and leading to greater purchase and retention rates.

Consistent and more accurate data

In this model, all insights are acted upon – and all actions are analyzed. Unlike current analytical applications in which outputs and insights are not persisted, in an integrated approach, new analytic insights are written back to the data warehouse each time. This provides a historical base for past decisions, improving both traceability and auditability. New records also become assets to corporate memory, enabling future learning.

In an integrated environment, too, all BI and analytics applications use data from the same corporate data warehouse and operational data stores, ensuring consistent data definitions throughout the company. Data sourced from data warehouses also goes through standard cleansing and quality processes – improving data quality while drastically reducing both data inconsistency and lack of confidence in analytic outputs.

Collaborative culture 

The integrated approach enables a single umbrella team – such as an analytics competency center – to own all analytics and BI applications and initiatives within the organization, with sub-teams dedicated to specific business areas. This approach facilitates a culture that more closely integrates analytics into standard operational processes, while fostering collaboration between line of business users and the analytics team – to create analytics that truly improve performance.

In a best practice environment, business users interact with the analytics team to define the questions that need answers and validate analytic insights. Business users then feed the real-world results back to the analytics team, further fine-tuning the process. This culture change benefits both teams as well as the organization as a whole.

Figure 4 shows how insights from embedded analytics can be disseminated to transform a company into an effective learning organization.

Figure 4: An integrated framework for BI and advanced analytics supports best-of-breed business processes

Conclusion

If you have a portal which exposed to internet, you may want to use captcha for bots. So in this blog I will implement reCaptcha. Why do I choose reCaptcha? Because it is easy to implement and you dont need to implement a lot of things to work. Let's do it!

First you have to modify logon page. You can find it solution here: http://nwturk.com/blog/2011/06/06/changing-logon-page-on-netweaver-7-3/

You have to import jar files of reCaptcha (link). After importing files modify logonPage.jsp file for reCaptcha.

-Import reCaptcha:

<%@ page import="net.tanesha.recaptcha.ReCaptcha" %>
<%@ page import="net.tanesha.recaptcha.ReCaptchaFactory" %>

-Add reCaptcha code for displaying captcha. You can customize it for your need:

<%
	ReCaptcha c = ReCaptchaFactory.newReCaptcha("your public key", "your private key", false);
	out.print(c.createRecaptchaHtml(null, null));
%>

Be careful adding these code block between <sap:form type="logon"></sap:form>

We have done about this part. Now it is time to implement login module. You can get more information about login modules from this link. Now you have more information about login modules after link. Implement the class and add a new method to get response.

	private String getRequestValue(String parameterName)
		throws LoginException {

		HttpGetterCallback httpGetterCallback = new HttpGetterCallback();
		httpGetterCallback.setType(HttpCallback.REQUEST_PARAMETER);
		httpGetterCallback.setName((String) parameterName);

		String value = null;

		try {
			_callbackHandler.handle(new Callback[] { httpGetterCallback });

			String[] arrayRequestparam =
				(String[]) httpGetterCallback.getValue();

			if (_decodeRequestParameter) {
				value = URLDecoder.decode(arrayRequestparam[0], "UTF-8");
			} else {
				value = arrayRequestparam[0];
			}

		} catch (UnsupportedCallbackException e) {

			return null;

		} catch (IOException e) {
			throwUserLoginException(e, LoginExceptionDetails.IO_EXCEPTION);
		}

		return value;
	}

You can call method with these parameters. (example: String challengefield = getRequestValue("recaptcha_challenge_field");

And also you need client ip address. Here is the moethod to get ip address:

	private String getIPAddress(){
		String clientIp = "";
		try{
			HttpGetterCallback hgc = new HttpGetterCallback();
			_callbackHandler.handle(new Callback[] { hgc });
			hgc.setType(HttpCallback.CLIENT_IP);
			clientIp = (String)hgc.getValue();
		}catch(Exception ex){

		}
		return clientIp;
	}

If you have a reverse proxy you get ip address of it. So you have to configure it to get clients ip address.
After you get the parameters for reCaptcha check them:

import net.tanesha.recaptcha.ReCaptchaImpl;
import net.tanesha.recaptcha.ReCaptchaResponse;

ReCaptchaImpl reCaptcha = new ReCaptchaImpl();
reCaptcha.setPrivateKey("your_private_key");
String ipAdress = getIPAddress();
String challenge = getRequestValue("recaptcha_challenge_field");
String uresponse = getRequestValue("recaptcha_response_field");
ReCaptchaResponse reCaptchaResponse = reCaptcha.checkAnswer(ipAdress, challenge, uresponse);
if (reCaptchaResponse.isValid()) {
	// do your valid login work
}else{
    // do your invalid login work
}

This blog is a work around to pass query parameters in background to a BEx report deployed in Enterprise portal. 

To explain this work around simply, the below scenario is taken as example.

Consider a scenario where there are many customers (Info object 0SOLD_TO). Customer will log into Enterprise portal and run their Account statement Report. The customer’s Login ID (Should be same as customer Key) will be passed as filter value to 0SOLD_TO automatically in background. This will prevent customer from accessing others data.  

The following are the step by step instruction to do this work around. 

Create the necessary report in BW with 0SOLD_TO in free characteristics.  

Create a Web template. For creating Web templates use Web application designer. There will be standard web templates like 0ANALYSIS_PATTERN. Remove unnecessary buttons like filter, Navigation pane, New analysis from that template and save as a new template with a name 0ANALYSIS_PATTERN_1. 

Next create an iView of type "BEx Web Application iView" in Enterprise portal.  

In the iView give query technical name, Web template technical name as shown in the below screen shot.

 To restrict report in background we need a string like the one below.

“BI_COMMAND=&BI_COMMAND-BI_COMMAND_TYPE=SET_SELECTION_STATE&BI_COMMAND-TARGET_DATA_PROVIDER_REF_LIST-TARGET_DATA_PROVIDER_REF=DP_1&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS=&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1=&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1-SELECTIONS=&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1-SELECTIONS-ELECTION_1=SELECTION_INPUT_STRING&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1-SELECTIONS-SELECTION_1-SELECTION_INPUT_STRING=05A05325&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1CHARACTERISTIC=0SOLD_TO&PAGE_ID=1_elZDdTRmeUY4TUtTc21FQm1GUHhjQS0tMFlHQ01IaTZuczd1bWRTQVZsUks5QS0t&REQUEST_ID=7”

Whenever we restrict a query with a parameter, this kind of string passed in background. There is a work around to get this string. For that you need the following things,

 (i)                  A web template with filter option – to give restriction on characteristic so that string can be captured.

 (ii)                A Web Debugging Proxy - which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. This will capture the required string in text view.

  Change the template name to 0ANALYSIS_PATTERN in iView and execute. Give restriction to query as below.   

For this purpose only 0SOLD_TO was kept in free characteristic. After getting the restricted output, go to Web debugging proxy. There you get the string.

Once the string is captured, that can be modified to meet our requirement. The user login ID can be obtained from the command <User.LogonUid>. Replace Restriction parameter value with the command as shown below and remove the PAGE_ID at the end of the string. So the result string will look like this.

“BI_COMMAND=&BI_COMMAND-BI_COMMAND_TYPE=SET_SELECTION_STATE&BI_COMMAND-TARGET_DATA_PROVIDER_REF_LIST-TARGET_DATA_PROVIDER_REF=DP_1&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS=&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1=&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1-SELECTIONS=&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1-SELECTIONS-ELECTION_1=SELECTION_INPUT_STRING&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1-SELECTIONS-SELECTION_1-SELECTION_INPUT_STRING=<User.LogonUid>&BI_COMMAND-CHARACTERISTICS_SELECTIONS-CHARACTERISTIC_SELECTIONS_1CHARACTERISTIC=0SOLD_TO"

This modified string should be added to iView Application parameter as in the below screen shot. 

iView HTTP Request method should be set to POST method as in the below screen shot. 

Again change the iView name into 0ANALYSIS_PATTERN_1.

Now, when a customer opens the report it will be restricted to his account only.

In-memory technology is a success story within SAP NetWeaver BW for many years. The introduction of SAP NetWeaver BW accelerator provided a new level of reporting performance and became role model for others. Since then there was a strong desire to significantly accelerate planning use-cases with this technology, too. The value proposition can be summarized to:

• Improved plan quality (allow more simulations cycles)
• Improved user experience (provide better response time)
• Improved plan accuracy (process higher data volume) 

In general it is the mass data operations that benefit the most from in-memory technology: in reporting it naturally is the aggregation, in planning the disaggregation. But within planning there are much more mass data operations and every planning function is a candidate.

However for a significant performance benefit, mass data operations need to stay within the data layer completely, including data read, calculations and write-back.  BWA did not provide the durability of an acid-compliant database and as such was a secondary store which could not manage written-back data. With SAP HANA the same technology becomes available now with full acid-compliance.

To understand what it means to have the complete operations in HANA, let us look at the processing on a classical database (the width of the arrows describe the volume of data transferred):

First the data is read into a local cache in the application tier. There it is exposed into the plan session which is used to feed both, the BEx query for the end-user and the calculations in planning functions or disaggregation in the query. The calculations are tightly bound to different other components: the metadata of the plan application, constraints like characteristic combinations that the calculations must not violate and the delta buffer that contains the pending changes. These buffered deltas together with the locally cached data feed again the plan session. Finally the deltas in the buffer are written back to the database upon a save-command. All this is handled in the application tier for classical databases.

With HANA optimized planning all steps, data read, calculations and write-back, are done in HANA completely. The components remain the same: 

The plan session orchestrates the data flow between the physical data indexes and the consuming BEX query, the calculations in planning functions or disaggregation in the query. The data is read via projections into the level of aggregation demanded. The calculations are applied and the result written back into a delta buffer within HANA which is subject of further data requests. With this all mass data operations remain within HANA and only query relevant data and meta-data is exchanged between the application tier and HANA leading to significant reduction of IO-costs. In addition the columnar storage and parallel processing provide superior performance.

As a great benefit of this design the complete user experience remains untouched. This is true for the end-user clients (e.g. BEx suite, Advanced analysis for office) as well as for the modeling UI (ABAP planning modeler) and all existing BW-IP models. I.e. there is no need to migrate BW-IP scenarios to run on HANA. Adjustments might be considered though to optimize the HANA usage since not the complete BW-IP feature set can be executed in HANA today (see note 1637199). The other way around, all capabilities offered in HANA are available in the ABAP runtime as well. This allows to toggle between two operation modes of BW integrated planning on HANA:

 Coming from an existing BW 7.x installation (A), the upgrade comprises a simple upgrade to BW 7.30 SP5 on the existing database and a subsequent database migration to HANA. Here BW-IP leverages the SQL-interface of HANA leading to superior read performance. Plan calculations are executed in ABAP (B), still. Their execution in HANA can be enabled by activation of the planning applications kit, activated by flipping a switch (see note 1637199) (C). The planning applications kit leverages the calculation and planning engines build into HANA to process the plan calculations in the best possible performance.  This way the planning applications kit combines the feature-rich capabilities of BW-IP with the superior performance of SAP HANA.

Finally let me summarize the relation between BW-IP and the planning applications kit (PAK).

ISSUE :

Time zone difference causes incorrect data loading from data source -   0CSM_CASE_ATTR.

SOLUTION:

The case extractor 0CSM_CASE_ATTR is being used by many customers successfully with no issues in data extraction. 

In the extractor 0CSM_CASE_ATTR the default time zone is UTC. This is the architectural design where all time fields in the Basis Case Management application are in UTC format. The table SCMG_T_CASE and SCMG_T_CASE_ATTR would have all time fields in UTC format during save/retrieval or any other operation.

In the extractor 0CSM_CASE_ATTR we use the ABAP statement 'CONVERT DAT' which converts the timestamp from local time zone to UTC format. No other format would be supported because then it would cause inconsistencies with the database.

Initially in a similar issue reported by another customer we first were exploring the idea of increasing the time range interval in RSA2 transaction in the customer system directly. But then this range has been set from beginning and has worked fine for all the customers till now. So the issue would not be resolved by this action.

Below notes explain about the Time Zone issues ~
198411  - Current data and information about time zones
741734  - Incorrect times due to the time zone settings
481835  - Analyzing the time zone settings
101726  - Incorrect times and time zone setting
15913    - Timezone problems (local vs. global time)

Refer to the below notes which talk about Daylight Saving issues ~
126692  - Daylight saving time rules are incorrect
102088  - Reducing downtime when changing from summer to winter
7417      - Conversion between winter time and daylight saving

Go through each of the notes in detail (most would have manual instructions to be performed and nothing should be skipped as it could result in inconsistencies).

Additionally if after applying all the above notes the issue still persists then the below notes would be useful -
<1> For issues on CRM cases refer to note ~
       1470994  - 0CRM_CASE_ATTR: additional fields
<2> For issues on Basis Case extraction refer to notes ~
       1281000  - retrieval of data from case extractor taking a lot of time
       1159696  - Not able to get the data using case type from case
       996360    - Case Extractor not able to pull more than 1 data package.

First things first...what's "R"? Simply put...is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. More infomation can be found here R on Wikipedia

I have code in many programming languages, some of them very commercial, and some of them little known, but I got say, that from all, "R" is one of the most weird and awesome languages I have ever played with...and it has an amazing repository of custom add-ons.

If you have read the HANA Pocketbook you will realize that there's a reference to "R" in the page 59. Now, that kind of integration between "R" and HANA haven't been developed yet, but it doesn't mean we can get our hands dirty doing some research and development.

What I did for this example was to simply show the information of my Analytic View on HANA and exported as an CSV file. From there, it's easy to import it into "R" and start doing some nice things. (The idea is that we should be able to code "R" straight in the HANA environment...or at least that's how I think it's going to be...)

The first example that we're going to build on "R" is a simple Pie graphic, using the information from the FORCURAM and CARRNAME fileds.

In this example, we're basically reading the CSV file, including the header. And doing an aggregation of the two fields we want to interact with. After that, it's just a matter of pass the values, the names and call the pie.

Next example is a little bit more complex...and uses a custom package call Word Clouds

Here, we have to load the required libraries, read the CSV file, do the aggregation, create a matrix with the aggregation values, sort the matrix, create a new vector, get it's length, create an array containing the names and finally assign the values and call the wordcloud graphic method...

Hope you like it...and stay tuned for more "R"...

Within this blog (maybe there will be more posts) I want to focus on performance issues with SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA).

Some experienced BWA admin may just laugh seeing this post. However there are some customers out there not knowing about this feature of BWA. The fact is that FEMS compression is BWA feature aimed for reduction of transport costs. This is meant in terms of an intelligent compression schema. Moreover elimination of duplicates in query results directly on the BWA side is enabled. Setting this feature ON can improve performance of BWA.

FEMS are Formula EleMent Selections (or also Finite EleMent Solver) carrying information about structure elements where certain value belongs. Database and BWA are giving records by exploding structure elements. These records are than assigned to correct structure elements by the OLAP. FEMS compression enables merge of duplicate structure elements in BWA part and makes OLAP par being able to process this information. All together there is a reduction of information traffic between BWA and BW backend.

In which BWA version is this feature available?

In every BWA starting version 70 with revision 48 and higher.

Where to check status of this setting in your BWA?

Start TREX Admin Tool (e.g. on your operation system shell: <TREX_DIR> = /usr/sap/<SAPSID>/TRX<instance_number>). Open screen area Landscape -> Ini. See current settings in configuration file TREXIndexServer.ini in its [OLAP] section.

Where to set this setting?

See above configuration file TREXIndexServer.ini. Add parameter in to file: fems_compression = on.

In general settings FEMS compression ON is always advisable. Setting this ON has no influence on BWA’s indices size. You may only be asked by SAP to switch it off in situation that you raised BWA problem message (e.g. wrong data provided by BWA based query vs. proper data given by same query running without BWA) to SAP via SMP channel. If issue cannot be quickly analyzed SAP may ask you to switch compression off to help them isolate issue.

Information sources used for this blog:

SDN forum Thread: FEMS Compression

SAP documentation: Enabling 'FEMS Compression'

SDN blog: BIA BLOG Series, Part VIII: Improvements and major parameter changes for BI Accelerator

SAP Note 1074953 - FEMS, BIA optimization

Note 1118425 - BIA 7.00: Activate performance feature FEMS compression

While EPM10 is the most significant release that SAP has made from the day SAP become serious about EPM in 2007 ,  I often get asked what are those key use cases that has been addressed in EPM 10. Here is my attempt to crack some top use cases that brings significant value from SAP Business Objects Enterprise Performance Management 10.0 release.

1. Our top exec own ipads – manage strategy on the move
2. We all love Excel, but there are too many of them – unify them
3. Need budgeting and consolidation rolled out to 10K+ users across 100 locations
4. Its takes a while to report financials to stakeholders and what’s this XBRL
5. Our setup is diversified, hard to get consistency on the financial notes
6. Our Legal consolidation is too complex and needs effective monitoring
7. Not interested in just analysis of output costs, need drill down to inputs
8. This variance analysis kills lot of my time - need some quick indicators
9. Would like to deep dive into GL to analyze variance by transaction
10. What’s this TCO, I am finance, can you explain

Let me explain this a bit further:

1.       Our top exec owns ipads – manage strategy on the move

With SAP Business Objects Strategy Management 10.0, the entire strategy can be managed from ipad or blackberry playbook, which has become the carry around notebook that every Executive or C-Level person carries these days. Solution that manages Strategy needs to support these cool mobile devices, to drive value.

2.       We all love Excel, but there are too many of them – unify them

When it comes to planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting or Cost/Profitability analysis, there is no better tool to the business users than Microsoft Excel. So the users continue to use their favorite Excel extensively.  But the challenge and the most time consuming task they have is to bring all the data manually to Excel from different modeling engines, whether it’s the planning engine or consolidation application or the costing system. The big ask here is, I want that familiar excel, but I would like to unify all the data into the same excel spreadsheet – get single version of truth.

With SAP Business Objects EPM 10.0, we have a seamless EPM addin for Microsoft Office, that allows all of this information from different applications like Planning and Consolidation, Financial Consolidation, Profitability and Cost Management, Strategy Management pulled into a single spreadsheet, that would make the information unified to bring the value of great integrated Performance management, though keeping the power of individual applications that are purpose built for each of the business process and complex calculation engine.

3.       Need budgeting and consolidation rolled out to 10K+ users across 100 locations

Lot of the big companies run their budget cycles or consolidation process with several thousand users. Especially for the bottom up planning, where they would like every manager to come in and submit their plans, they need an easy looking web based user interface, that the business users are familiar with, and IT does not want client addin installed in each of the users machine (a.k.a. they would like a zero foot print client). Its also important that these interface should be rolled out with minimal training, so the intuitive user interface should allow the users to self learn on their own very quickly.

New Web 2.0 interface of SAP Business Objects EPM 10.0 allows for completely new look, very intuitive and enjoyable experience for the gen Y who are exposed to more google/facebook like user interface.  Also the interface roll out can be managed centrally without having to install anything on the client machines of the users.

4.       Its takes a while to report financials to stakeholders and what’s this XBRL

Many companies have run some projects to improve their closing cycles, through better GL, ERP and Consolidation systems. But often they still land up taking a while to get the financial results published to their final stakeholders due to the collaboration and document management issues they face during the mere final  preparation of the annual financial statements. This is often referred to as Last Mile of finance, and the time to cover last mile of finance is getting longer.

On top of this, various regulators are shifting the focus from documents to data, making a way for better sector wise/industry wise comparison of the financial reported data. They are adopting the global eXtensible Business Reporting language (XBRL ) standard, which basically gives the data in a more granular form. This will necessitate companies to be more cautious to report the data, as it may be likely analyzed at a very granular level.

SAP Business Objects Disclosure Management 10.0 covers the last mile of finance including XBRL, by integrating very well with SAP systems, with great capabilities to manage document management and workflow that can cover the financial disclosure very well. You can watch a video that would help you understand it better.

5.       Our setup is diversified, hard to get consistency on the financial notes

Many diversified companies that cut across different geographies face the challenge of getting consistency of their financial notes and other qualitative information. Sometimes even collection of the financial notes is a big challenge. While they achieve better consistency in the quantitative information due the direct mapping through chart of accounts and other more traditional approaches, when it comes to reporting accounting policies, additional notes that supports financial statements, they face issues to get these information, or they spend lot of time to make it uniform. Notes on itself can be completely misinterpreted by shareholders, financial analysts and the same can bring a different perception of the company.

SAP Business Objects Notes Management 10.0 helps in collection of the unstructured notes data that is in the context of the financial data and allows for building consistency, aggregation and roll out of the notes data to different companies in the group. The solution built on top of SAP Netweaver is seamlessly integrated to SAP data. It really helps in rolling out an easy way of collecting the unstructured data and report the same, and filling a great pain point to get out better consistent financial notes to the stakeholders.

6.       Our Legal consolidation is too complex and needs effective monitoring

Legal consolidation is a very mission critical process in the financial reporting journey for some of the companies that have very complex holdings, run in different geographies and have diversified businesses with a very brief time window to get out the consolidated financial results. Reliance on IT during this process is a NO NO, so finance wants to manage this process on their own, and are always looking at solutions that can handle the complexity, with the ease of use that finance can understand and manage on their own.

SAP Business Objects EPM 10.0 focuses a lot on getting better on the more complex consolidation functionality, but maintaining the easy and flexibility that allows finance users to manage the same. The solution brings capabilities for managing the ownership structure of the companies easily by the finance users, make top side adjustments through Journals on the web, establish and view controls from a single cockpit view, monitor the consolidation process by each of the submitting company to improve the speed and status by HQ controller office- all these through the Consolidation Central functionality in SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation solution.

More complex scenarios like matrix consolidation are supported through SAP Business Objects Financial Consolidation 10.0. Matrix Consolidation enables the user to parallely roll up across multiple hierarchy: reports allow for the ability to cross both hierarchies and retrieve properly positioned eliminations on both axis.

7.       Not interested in just analysis of output costs, need drill down to inputs

Stepping into a different territory, one of the aspects people would like to ascertain in the profitability and cost analysis is not just the output costs of finished goods or services, but ability to drill down and analyze the input costs that makes up the finished goods/services. Often this requires ability to go to the Bill of Material (BOM) level to do such analysis. This immediately poses a challenge of not being able to achieve this with a spreadsheet or not being able to get into a ERP system that is very complex to understand for a business user.

With SAP Business Objects Profitability and Cost Management 10.0 version, ability to model or extend BOM to achieve target costing, analyze costs and profitability based on the input costs and derive BOM unit rate based on Production/Input that can be applied to Sales Volumes can be achieved through the new delivered extended BOM model.

This solution combined with other EPM solution and new features makes it good value for an overall performance management initiative of any company.

8.       This variance analysis kills lot of my time - need some quick indicators

Most busy activity that finance analysts through to CFO spend their time every quarter is to analyze - budget vs. actual, or quarter vs. quarter each year, so on and so forth. They always ask for some quick tools that would highlight the key differences and root cause.

SAP Business objects Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0 allows for ‘Automated Variance Analysis’ function that quickly suggests some root causes for variance instead of the user having to navigate the entire data to find the reasons. This gives tremendous value to analyse the cause and provide commentary, in a very speedy manner.

9.       Would like to deep dive into GL to analyze variance by transaction

Continuing on the variance analysis topic, once the user has found the key differences, often they would like to drill down to their GL or transaction system to understand want makes up the variance.

SAP Business Objects EPM 10.0 has the key Financial Information management capability that allows for drill down to SAP ERP from the EPM solution. This is a very powerful capability and provides the greatest value to leverage several existing investment that the customer has already made with SAP ERP.

10.   What’s this TCO, I am finance, can you explain

TCO (total cost of ownership) is often used very loosely in the IT world for very minor cost improvements. Finance really wants to understand the real impact of IT investment, not just software but all the prerequisites and associated costs.

SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidations 10.0 for Netweaver version is especially a clear value when it comes to TCO. With elimination of the .Net requirements ,some great integration solutions such as Financial Information Management  and ability to unify the solution across Planning and Consolidation with minimum end user training required to use the intuitive web interface, this solution allows for managing TCO to very manageable level, and provide quicker payback for the investment in EPM initiative.

Hmm, that was the key 10 use case and how SAP EPM 10.0 addresses them, above were just some of the key highlights. I am sure you are convinced why SAP EPM 10.0 is such a big release; please do approach us to sign up for ramp up.