The 3.1 content release offers a wide range of new business content for SAP and third-party applications. Here, the author outlines what's new in this release by SAP application, industry, and third-party application.
The SAP BW 3.1 Content Release, available since last December, offers new Business Content for a range of solutions including mySAP CRM, mySAP Financials, mySAP SCM, and mySAP SRM, as well as industries such as retail, banking, and services. Based on a foundation of data warehousing, a BI platform, and a BI suite of tools, SAP BW provides integrated applications that understand each other's metadata and offers a closed loop that incorporates operations, analytics, and personalization. Current SAP BW customers will not automatically receive this new release. They must request the software through their contracts representative. BW 3.1 is solely a content release with no new functionalities or technologies since BW 3.0B, so your upgrade decision depends on the value of this new Business Content to your organization.
1 I'll describe in detail what the new Business Content in BW 3.1 offers by SAP solution and industry.
Each Business Content set listed in the following seven tables is a pre-configured information model that contains roles, workbooks, queries, InfoSources, InfoCubes, ODS objects, key figures, characteristics, update rules, and extractors.
Companies can use standard Business Content as delivered or customize the content to support business processes without the effort of developing their own models. Alternatively, standard Business Content can serve as a template for companies that want to create their own information models.
mySAP Financials
- Asset Management Business Content provides a delta extraction mechanism for asset accounting. Delta extraction will be possible for transaction data and asset master data. All the necessary data needed for reporting in Asset Accounting is provided in line items. They can be aggregated in InfoCubes.
- Tax Reporting now allows you to create an advance return on tax for sales and purchases for most countries worldwide by using pre-defined queries.
- MyBudget, a Manager Self Service (MSS) business package, is used only within Portal Content. An internal activity allocation monitor, an asset cockpit, and a planning iView extend this business package. Available separately, these new features will be supplemented by BW iViews displaying internal activity allocation, asset, and cost center plan data.
- Risk Management, a function within Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM), can be used to obtain an overview of potential risks and the consequences for your company if an event that was identified as a risk occurs. At the same time, you can define activities to counter undesired events to minimize the economic damage or balance out the effects. Risk Management is integrated in the Balanced Scorecard application in SEM. It supports an extraction of the risk-related data (from the so-called target systems in SEM such as the Balanced Scorecard) to the BW and their analysis via delivered SAP Business Content queries.
- Generation of Users and Profiles for Cost Center Reporting provides a BW content scenario that allows responsibility area assignments for users to be extracted from the R/3 master data of the cost centers and the representative cost centers in the cost center hierarchies. Based on the extracted information, new BW 3.1 standard tool functionality is used to automatically generate users and assign authorization profiles for the responsibility areas. The generated authorization profiles allow fully personalized execution of queries for the responsibility areas of the specific users. This functionality allows you to create a standard query for delivery to a large number of users. The personalization features ensure that they see only the portion of the data that is relevant to them — only their cost center or cost center hierarchy. This also makes deployment via SAP Enterprise Portal easier to support in that the same iView can support many different users.
mySAP Customer Relationship Management
- The Reseller Portal has Business Content that allows organizations to provide a partner portal using mySAP CRM 3.1. Through this portal, their channel partners can sell to and interact with end customers. For example, companies can inform their partners about new products, distribute collateral material and documentation, convey company news, offer training courses, and announce upcoming promotions through the partner portal. A lot of the Partner Portal's content data comes from mySAP CRM based on order entry from SAP Internet Sales. BW analyses include the partner's sales in the last month, analysis of the partner's contracts with the brand-owner, customer contract analysis, or product planning information with a plan/actual comparison.
- Customer Analysis makes it possible to display daily analysis of customer history. It also allows you to analyze active and non-active customers. There are particular advantages to the general reporting options with regard to customer master records. The data volume for each document is substantial, so you have comprehensive analysis options in queries (Figure 1 shows a mySAP CRM customer analysis report). However, master data reporting refers to the analysis of master data, which is retrieved from transaction data. The volume of single records is not very extensive and is also greatly aggregated since it is aimed at evaluating only one customer. The new analyses or results are important for reporting over a medium- or long-term period, but average daily business volumes per customer can also be measured.
Figure 1
A mySAP CRM Customer Analysis report
mySAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
With BW 3.1, SAP has enhanced the Business Content for procurement (purchase orders, confirmation/goods receipts, invoices, and contracts from both R/3 and SAP Enterprise Buyer) with consolidated InfoObjects that were new in BW 3.0B.
These InfoObjects were developed for product, product category, buyer, seller, and the company, and they consolidate the different entities from R/3, SAP Enterprise Buyer, and mySAP CRM. This allows for reporting on navigational attributes that are on those different entities. All queries included in mySAP SRM roles have been changed and the new InfoObjects replace the old entities. This allows users of all mySAP SRM roles to report on integrated objects. For example, it provides integrated reporting on the seller regardless if the seller is a vendor from R/3 or a business partner from SAP Enterprise Buyer. Additionally, the BW roles in mySAP SRM include changed queries on those new objects. This eases the integration of SAP Enterprise Buyer and R/3 reporting.
- Enablement of Supplier Self-Service allows the supplier to access reports that show the actual values of his or her orders. Here, the supplier can recognize where a goods receipt or an invoice is missing.
- Vendor Evaluation presents the evaluation reporting of procurement processes as a basis to optimize vendor performance and assist with the sourcing processes and the creation of a vendor list.
- Bidding Engine Reporting allows for reporting on bid invitations, and bids from the bidding engine are made available. Reports include an overview of the bids for an individual bid invitation to allow for bid comparison.
Other mySAP Solutions
- mySAP Human Capital Management (HCM) Business Content for BW 3.1 focuses on three areas: comparisons between personnel cost plans, analysis of personnel cost plans, and plan/actual comparisons.
- mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Quality Management delivers business examples for exception analysis. Using the BW reporting agent, you can track outstanding notifications or rejected inspection lots. Existing workbooks and queries have been updated and new queries and workbooks have been added. New exceptions and conditions using variables have been created to allow greater flexibility.
- SAP Resource & Program Management (RPM), the first of SAP's new Cross Applications (xApps) product line, is designed to boost the performance of complex R&D and IT projects. RPM integrates information from project management, human resource, financial, and time-tracking systems to provide end-to-end business process support for the entire project organizations — from Portfolio Management for executives to collaboration scenarios for project team members. The RPM development team is leveraging BW 3.1 Content to instantiate a variety of Portfolio Management iViews and Dashboards. The RPM team is shipping a set of pre-built InfoCubes as well as a new graphic type (7D-type chart).
mySAP Supply Chain Management
- Inventory Management now gives you the ability to evaluate valuated inventory across all inventory types (valuated stock, customer request stock, and so on) and stock characteristics (quality check, stock transfer, and so on).
- Production has two enhancements in BW 3.1 for the delivery service area. First, it now provides process chains for the initial load and delta transfer. Second, the backlogged order schedule line has a new InfoProvider (InfoCube) containing such information as quantities of backorders, time periods and classification.
- Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) makes supply-chain processes visible beyond company boundaries, both in planning and in execution. SCEM enables companies to monitor processes immediately and in detail so that they can react to critical situations before they result in delayed deliveries and production standstills. In many cases, event information is essential not only during the processes, but also after completion, because it can be used both for measuring quality aspects and for cost saving. Incorporating SCEM's features into the robust offering provided by SAP BW enhances the flexibility of the solution to allow users to map, manage, and monitor all the business processes that are required. Shipments are one of the main application areas in SCEM. Using the new Business Content, you can see the delivery process from creating a sales order to transferring the data to the data warehouse, from which end users can analyze this information.
Industry Business Content
- The Financial Services Asset/Liability Management (ALM) reporting and BW are now integrated. Sample InfoCubes and queries are provided. The Business Content for Claims Management delivers a functional enhancement that contains specific information regarding claim health relevant to claim activities, diagnosis, and procurements (item grouping).
- The Consumer Products Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Business Content supports the trade promotion management process across the mySAP SEM, mySAP CRM, and R/3 SAP systems. Plan data is captured from SEM and the mySAP CRM Marketing Planner, and actuals are captured from Profitability Analysis (CO-PA).
- Utilities has new Business Content (InfoCubes, queries, MultiProviders) that carries out the unbilled revenue reporting via BW in conjunction with SEM-BPS (Business Planning and Simulation). For Quotation Planning and Analysis, new content supports an SEM-BPS model for planning the profitability of mySAP CRM utility service quotations, and for carrying out plan/actual comparisons for those quotations in BW.
- Media's Intellectual Property Management (IPM) functionality has new Business Content that allows you to monitor all information relevant to the decision-making process regarding the legal situation of a media enterprise. To widen the scope of the Industry Solution Module, functional enhancements have been made to the existing Business Content for the Media Sales and Distribution industry module (IS-M/SD) for subscriptions, and for the Advertising Management (IS-M/AM) industry module for complaints and agent assignment.
Non-SAP Business Content
- Oracle Applications 11i standard Business Content was delivered with BW3.0B in the financials and project accounting areas. With BW3.1, Oracle Applications 11i is supported by predefined extractors to load the business data from the Oracle Applications source system into SAP BW. The integration of Oracle Applications into SAP BW is based on the new Oracle extract package of Ascential Software's DataStage product. Business data from Oracle Applications is extracted into the BW InfoCubes for the Oracle General Ledger and for Oracle Project Accounting that are delivered with BW 3.0B.
- Crystal Reports predefined report templates have been included as standard business content since BW3.0B as a result of a partnership with Crystal Decisions. These reports cover the mySAP Financials, mySAP PLM and international development areas. Figure 2 shows an example of a SAP BI-formatted report using Crystal Reports.
- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) also has BW 3.1 Content analytics. BAM is a Gartner term that defines the concept of providing real-time access to critical business performance indicators in order to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations.
Figure 2
SAP Bl report using Crystal Reports
1 For additional availability details, go to the SAP Service Marketplace at
https://service.sap.com/bw and then select "BW 3.1 Content."
Karen Comer
Karen Comer is a US SAP NetWeaver product manger for SAP Business Intelligence. After several years as a business analyst, programmer, and consultant, Karen joined SAP as a BI solutions architect. Her current responsibilities in product management include being the US contact for Business Planning and Simulation; the SAP BI partner liaison, and working with SAP BI front-end features (BI Suite), including the BEx Analyzer and the Query Designer.
You may contact the author at
karen.comer@sap.com.
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