Visual Composer is a composition environment aimed at delivering reporting and actionable analytical applications using various data sources such as Business Intelligence (BI) or ERP systems. It includes pre- configured business content packages showing best practices that companies can adapt or modify. I’ll describe two of the Financials-related applications to show how they work.

The first is based on BI queries and shows a manager dashboard that extracts Profit Center Accounting (PCA) data. This application targets commonly used key performance indicators (KPIs) for the management of a profit center, such as profit or return on investment (ROI). The second application focuses on the Investment Management (IM) module and communicates directly with SAP ERP 2005, demonstrating the ability of Visual Composer to consume sources of information other than BI queries. After describing these two applications, I’ll answer some frequently asked questions about Visual Composer.

To provide the functionality, you need to implement the business packages into the Portal and then activate the required BI content associated with the business packages in the related BI systems. Depending on their level of expertise, financial functional experts may need to enlist the help of the IT department for some of the steps.

Profit Center Accounting Dashboard

The Profit Center Accounting dashboard is designed for the type of manager who does not want to spend much time learning to use new reporting tools and who expects “zero training” reporting and a convenient user interface (UI) to review profit center KPIs. Figure 1 shows different frames of the PCA dashboard, such as Profit and Return on Investment Ratio, on which the end user can drill down for an immediate first- level analysis. In the case of the PCA analytical application, the user has access to financial data collected in profit centers. As a reminder, PCA collects the values of cost accounting objects (in CO) into the profit center to which all objects are attached. PCA then gives a financial overview of an area of responsibility for costs and revenue. It includes the distribution of balance sheet values to the profit centers through mechanisms beyond the scope of this article.

Figure 1

Overview of the PCA analytical application

The Visual Composer PCA application is based on BI extracted data. It uses four queries and a query view that SAP delivered in SAP NetWeaver BI content Release 3.5.3. The purpose of this application is to use these data sources and combine them for the presentation of comprehensive information. The main areas of the application are the selection area, the profit and loss area, and the account list area. You can toggle between the profit and loss and account list areas.

Selection Area

The selection area presents two drop-down list boxes pre-defined in the application and enabling the selection of the year (Year) and of the profit center (Prctr Sel). The Year drop-down list box contains a static list of years (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Definition of the drop-down list boxes

A standard Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) reading the available profit centers in the SAP ERP system feeds the profit center selection (Figure 3). This demonstrates the possible synchronization of information between online transaction processing (OLTP) and SAP NetWeaver BI systems in Visual Composer.

Figure 3

Definition of the dynamic drop-down list box using an SAP ERP BAPI

To limit the number of selections in the application for simplification purposes, someone in the IT department or occasionally a financial power user makes selections, such as the controlling area or the accounts selected for reporting in the query definition or in the personalization of variables in the BI environment. The variable’s personalization in the queries, or fixed values in the query selection, influence the set of data delivered to Visual Composer. The two drop-down list boxes appear then in the UI to refine the selection within this set of data in the analytical application. This latest selection is offered to the end user of the application.

The end user selects the profit center value from the selection area of the profit center in the top frame of the dashboard. The system propagates it into the various frames containing queries, using the selected profit center value as an input parameter for the various queries. The same value transfer of the period selection out of the drop- down list box to queries is also enabled by the definition of the model in the Visual Composer design time (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Example of the transfer of parameters within Visual Composer

Functionally, in the top left frame in Figure 1 the query shows the cumulated value of revenue and cost accounts in the Profit frame. The frame on its right represents the division of this profit by the assets distributed to the profit center, hence, Return on Investment Ratio. Visual Composer can use any key figure out of a BI query to create formulas in the modeling environment, and combine and include them for the calculation of further ratios (Figure 5). The selection of accounts is ensured by the selection of hierarchical nodes in the BI query definition.

Figure 5

Definition of the Return on Investment Ratio in Visual Composer, with BI key figures used in a formula to define the ratio

This means that you can select the cost blocks and balance sheet values in the back-end system in the query definition and avoid additional selection parameters in Visual Composer. As a consequence, modifying the account’s selection requires a modification of the query in the BI environment and IT support. The financial user needs help from the IT department for reporting the ratios relevant for the profit center manager in the context of the company reporting guidelines. Through the graphical modeling concepts of Visual Composer (Figure 4), it is then easier to discuss and define the information flow within the model with the IT department. The model-driven approach improves communication between IT and financial users because it is graphical and helps to model the data flow.

In the two frames at the bottom of the application, the user finds periodical information on profit and loss and on the balance sheet.  If you have distributed the balance sheet accounts to the profit centers in the SAP ERP system, see the Note below.

Profit and Loss and Account List Area

The PCA template application delivers a three-level drill-down list for a financial functional user from a graphical presentation of ratios to the profit and loss or the account list to the partners of a selected account. You can reuse this template application and adapt it to other requirements, including, for example, existing queries in your BI implementation.

The end user can switch between a profit and loss display and an account list display by selecting Profit and Loss or Account List in the View: drop-down list in Figure 1. From the account list display, the user then has a further drill-down level and can establish relations between queries and pass over parameters between them (Figure 6).

Figure 6

Account list display at the bottom part of the analytical application

When the user selects an account in the account list, Visual Composer transfers this account to the next query, which aims at delivering the partner profit centers for this particular account (Figure 7).

Figure 7

The link and the transfer of parameters between different frames are predefined in the modeling environment of Visual Composer, but your IT department can adapt it

Investment Approval Application

This application deals with appropriation requests in the IM module of the system, which you use in most implementations for capital investments that eventually will become fixed assets. The Investment Approval template covers the approval of appropriation requests during investment budget preparation. This application targets the person responsible for investment budgeting, such as a business unit analyst or more generally the manager responsible for a business unit. For example, an IT department manager can visualize all of the investment requests (e.g., for new licenses or for additional hardware) issued by his team and approve or reject the request. An example in the finance department is the person responsible for the capital expenditure budget preparation collecting appropriation requests from different departments and approving or rejecting them to build up the capital expenditure budget. For this kind of process step, some use the standard R/3 Web interface, but many of them also develop a specific Web interface to cover it. For that reason, SAP delivered a template application for Visual Composer enabling the analysis and the approval of appropriation requests.

This particular application demonstrates another capability of Visual Composer, which is the ability to use BAPIs and remote function call (RFC)-enabled function modules. These data sources are pieces of ABAP coding that you can execute remotely in Visual Composer. They enable you to retrieve information on appropriation requests and interact with the system, approving, rejecting, or sending back an appropriation request. The application is based on these data sources and communicates with SAP ERP directly. SAP includes these RFC function modules in SAP ERP 2005 for the purpose of this analytical application.

The top frame of the application delivers the list of appropriation requests that the user needs to approve (Figure 8). The Visual Composer model reads the portal user. The data source receives all appropriation requests in SAP ERP relevant for this user (and defined as an approver of the request in the back-end system) and with the status For approval. Through this, SAP delivers a personalized worklist of appropriation requests that the manager needs to approve. The personalization mechanism lies in the data source logic itself, meaning that the data source in the back-end system only selects the appropriation requests relevant for the user of the analytical application.

Figure 8

Overview of the analytical application Investment Approval

After the end user selects one of the appropriation requests in the worklist, the middle and lower sections of the application display detailed information on the selected item. The middle section, labeled Details to Appropriate Request, displays information on the master data of the appropriation request. With the use of the BAPI BAPI_APPREQUEST_GETDETAIL, the user setting up the application can access a large set of information regarding the master data of the appropriation request. This user can choose and arrange all of these fields in the display of the application.

Two buttons complete the master data view: View Additional Details shows other fields of the master data, and View Text shows a visualization of the plain text entered in the appropriation request master. These two buttons open pop-up windows showing the information. From a functional point of view, the end user can then analyze the characteristics of the investment request: its nature, its priority, its description, and also plain text in the back-end system to explain the purpose of this proposed investment.

The lowest part of the application displays information related to the appropriation request selected in the worklist. On the left in the Yearly Values Distribution frame, the display shows the yearly budget values associated with the selected appropriation request. This display splits the budget information between capital expenditures and operating expenditures; an additional column called Revenues, showing the estimation of the revenue associated with the investment (directly or indirectly). On the right frame labeled Overall Values Distribution, you can see the global distribution between capital expenditures and operating expenditures for the investment.

Additional buttons in this lower part deliver further information:

• The View Financial Analysis button calculates the value of the financial analysis in the back-end system and delivers the net present value of the budgeted values, the internal return rate, and the payback period for the investment.
• An appropriation request is always associated with an investment program position in the ERP — the object covering a hierarchical sub-level that classifies investments in an investment program. With the View Program Position Values button, the user can trigger the display of an analysis of the values associated with the investment program position to which the appropriation request is attached. This analysis delivers three values related to the context of the appropriation request: the budget values of the program position, all appropriation requests associated with this program position, and all already- approved appropriation requests attached to this program position. This information gives an overview of the program position values, which represent the context of the proposed investment. This gives the manager an idea of the budget already consumed or to be consumed in the investment bucket represented by the program position in the back-end system.