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BPC 10 MS/NW - Sending and retrieving comments in an EPM Add-in input form

2012-02-03T22:08:00.001-08:00

Introduction

Very frequently, while customers are opening their planning period to entity owners or managers, they would like to attach some comments, explaining their figures.

In the new EPM Add-in, if you use the standard way of inputting or retrieving comments (via the comment button), you are not able to see them directly in Excel cells, but in an Internet Explorer window instead.

In this blog, you will learn how to use the EPMCopyRange formula in order to dynamically send and retrieve comments in an EPM Add-in input form.

Create your Balance Sheet input form

Launch the EPM add-in and choose a valid Planning and Consolidation connection.

Once logged-on, click the New Report button.

Drag & Drop PRODLINE dimension in rows, TIME dimension in columns, and all other dimensions, ACCOUNT, CATEGORY, ENTITY, RPTCURRENCY, MEASURES, in page axis.

Click on PRODLINE dimension in row axis, select All Product Lines account and Member and Descendants as for the relationship, and click the OK button.

Then, click on TIME dimension in column axis, select 2012.TOTAL member and Member and Descendants as for the relationship, and click the OK button.

Finally, on your page axis, select Third Party sales member for your ACCOUNT dimension, Budget member for your CATEGORY dimension, United States member for your ENTITY dimension, LC member for your RPTCURRENCY dimension, and Periodic member for your MEASURES dimension.

Then, move the Total placements on the top right, by accessing the Sheet Options and selecting the Top radio button on the General tab. On the same tab, check the Use as Input Form box, to allow data input.

Then, on the Refresh tab, select the option Calculate parents in hierarchies (same as the SumParent option in former EVDRE reporting mode), and click OK.

Your input form should look like below.

Notice that APL member is calculated on the fly, as soon as you input a value in its children.

Building the EPMCopyRange formula in order to allow comment input in this input form.

Insert 5 new rows on the top of this sheet.

In cell P2, enter following formula:

=EPMSaveComment($O2,,$A2,$N$12,$A$6,$A$7,$A$8,$A$9,$A$10)

Then, choose a grey background in cell O2.

Then, in cell A1, type-in following formula and press Enter:

=EPMCopyRange("000",TRUE,B2:P2)

Note: “000” is the ID of your Default Report, TRUE is for rows expansion (FALSE would have been applied to the columns), and B2:P2 is the formatting range you’ve just defined for your data range.

Finally, type-in Comment input in cell O11, and Comment send in cell P11, and click the Refresh button.

At that point, type-in following comments and click the Send Data button:

APL Comment in cell O13
FPS Comment in cell O14
RPG Comment in cell O15
SPT Comment in cell O16
STR Comment in cell O17

Result should be this one:

Finally, hide column P and rows 1 to 4 for visibility purpose.

You now have the last comment being displayed in the rows, following the defined expansion on the rows.

BONUS

You can use the same way of building the EPMCopyRange formula to retreive Work Status in an Excel cell.

In fact, by having your Entities being displayed on the row axis, you can use the EPMWorkStatus formula (instead of EPMSaveComment in the example above), as the source range for your EPMCopyRange.

EPM Add-in report with multiple Categories in SAP BPC, version for Microsoft and NetWeaver 10

2012-02-03T22:06:00.001-08:00

EPM Add-in report with multiple Categories in SAP BPC, version for Microsoft and NetWeaver 10

With the new user interface in BPC 10, one might wonder how to create a report rendering two different Categories: Actual data for closed months and Plan data for the outlying months. Follow the below instructions and you will impress your client in no time.

First, we need to create a property informing the system which months are closed or what the beginning Plan month is. One way is to create a property on the Category dimension named OPENING_MTH and the administrator updates this monthly. One advantage of this is your Categories can have different beginning months. Another was is to create a property on the Time dimension (CLOSED) with valid values of “Y” or blank. Either way will work and you should base your decision on the businesses requirements. For this blog, we focus on the later and create a property on the Time dimension.

Create CLOSED Property on the Time Dimension

When the Administration tab opens, click Dimensions.

Highlight the Time Dimension and click Edit Structure (at the top). Be careful to not double-click on the Time dimension as that will take you to the Time dimension members.

Once you are in the Structure of the Time dimension, click Add and then select New Property.

Type in CLOSED for ID and Name will default with CLOSED. You can change the Name to something else that is more informative like Closed Actual Months or Actual Months. Enter 1 (one) for the Number of Characters as this will be either a “Y” or blank. Click OK to when finished.

Save the dimension by clicking Save.

Click Close when the dimension has finished saving.

Either double-click on the Time dimension to open it or single click and choose Edit Members.

Find the newly created CLOSED property when the Time dimension opens.

Enter a “Y” in all months, quarters, and Years that are closed. In the below, I have enter a Y for month January, February, March, April, May and Quarter 1 for 2010.

Save and Process the dimension.

When the splash screen asking to take the environment offline, click No.

When the Time dimension has finished process, click Close.

Now it is time to start configuring the actual report. To do this, click on the EPM Office Add-in for Excel.

Choose the correct model (in BPC 7.x, this was an application) and click OK.

At the prompt, supply a valid user ID and password and click Logon.

Since we are going to be creating formulas above the report, place your cursor in cell G7 and click New Report under the EPM ribbon.

Drag the Account dimension to the Row axis and the Time and Category dimensions to the Column axis.

Click the Category dimension to open the Member Selector. If there are any members in the Selector Members box (on the left), highlight them and click the left arrow. Choose Actual from the Dimension Members pane. Ensure Member Only is selected for the expansion (at the bottom), and then click the right arrow. Click OK when done.

Click the Time dimension to open the Member Selector. If there are any members in the Selector Members box (on the left), highlight them and click the left arrow. Choose a single month and select Member Only in the Selection Relationship dropdown (bottom). Next, click the right arrow to bring the selection into the Selected Members pane. When finished, click OK.

Click on the Account dimension and choose accounts that you have Actual data for. In this example, I chose Context (Net Income) and to show the Member and Children.

Now that the report layout is complete, click OK.

The report should look like below, assuming you used the same dimension members.

In cell F1, type in the formula =EPMContextMember(,”Time”). Since there is only one active connection, the first parameter can be left blank. The function EPMContextMember is the new version of EVCVW from BPC 7.x. Click OK when finished to save the formula.

In cell G1, type in the formula =LEFT(F1,4)&”.01”. In my environment, the months are represented by numbers (01, 02, 03, etc), but if you can just as easily have .JAN, .FEB, .MAR, etc. This will be taking the current year in cell F1 and adding a suffix of .01. Basically, our report will always start with the first month of the year, in this case January.

In cell G2, type in the formula =EPMMemberProperty(,G1,”CLOSED”) where G1 is the first month of the year and CLOSED is the property you defined in the Time dimension. EPMMemberProperty is the new version of EVPRO. Again, since we are only using one connection, the first parameter can be blank.

In cell G3, type in the following formula: =IF(G2=”Y”,”Actual”,”Plan”).

In cell H1, type in the formula =EPMMemberOffset(,G1,1). EPMMemberOffset() is the new version of EVTIM().

Next, copy the contents in cells G2 and G3 to H2 and H3, respectively.

Copy the contents in cells H1, H2, and H3 out 10 (ten) columns to column R.

Next, we need to manufacture the time dimension. In order to do this, click in cell G5 and enter EPMMemberDesc(G1) for the first parameter. Click OK when done.

We are going to do the same thing for the Category dimension. In cell G6, type in EPMMemberDesc(G3) to display the correct Category Member.

Technorati Tags:

Now, copy cells G5 and G6 out to column R.

Click the Refresh Report and two different Category dimensional data will be rendered in the same report.

Bonus:

Now that you have created this, it takes one formula to create a Rolling 12 report. In cell G1, enter the following formula, change the Time Current Context to 2010.Q2, and click Refresh:

=IF(EPMMemberProperty(,F1,"Level")="Year",LEFT(F1,4)&".01",IF(RIGHT(F1,2)="Q1",LEFT(F1,4)&".01",IF(RIGHT(F1,2)="Q2",LEFT(F1,4)&".04",IF(RIGHT(F1,2)="Q3",LEFT(F1,4)&".07",IF(RIGHT(F1,2)="Q4",LEFT(F1,4)&".10",F1)))))

Robert Marshall is a member of the BPC CSA team

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How to manage scope changes with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS? Part 7

2012-02-03T22:02:00.001-08:00

Each blog introduces a practical guide that deals with the following questions:

- What are the regulation requirements that applies to the business case

- How to handle the business case in the starter kit for IFRS

- What are the impacts on the financial statements

The business cases presented in these blogs are included in the set of data provided with BPC NW 10.0 Starter kit for IFRS. You can consult them in the database. Please, refer to the operating guide delivered along with the starter kit for further detail on the consolidation process.

These blogs have been written by members of the SAP EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) Starter Kits & Innovations team that develops starter kits on top of SAP financial consolidation products, Financial Consolidation (FC) and Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC). The starter kits are preconfigured contents created to deliver business logic, to speed-up the application deployment and to provide guidance to help maximize advantages of the product. The contents provided in the starter kits consist of reports, controls and rules for performing, validating and publishing a legal consolidation in accordance with IFRS. SAP starter kits for IFRS are provided to BPC/FC customers at no additional charge; they can be downloaded from SAP service market place at http://help.sap.com/.

Now to the seventh blog!

Presentation of the business case

Year 2013

P7 owns 100% interests of subsidiary PS7 and 100% interest of subsidiary PS71

A fair value adjustment has been accounted for in PS71:

(USD6 000 – 33% deferred tax = USD4 000)

A goodwill of USD6 000 has been posted on PS71

Year 2014

PS71 net income = USD15 000

At the end of Year 2014, PS71 is merged into PS7

PS7 increase its share capital with 2 000 shares (nominal value of USD10) à USD20 000

PS7 accounts for a share premium of USD65 000 (total equity USD85 000 – increase in share capital USD20 000)

P7 individual accounts in 2014 (including intercompany accounts)

PS71 individual accounts in 2014 (with intercompany accounts):

Detailed merger of PS71 into PS7:

PS7 individual accounts (with intercompany accounts):

Practical guide

Please click here to access the practical guide

Acknowledgements to Laetitia Lamoureux, Caroline Verrier and Jean-François Bouillon from the EPM SK&I team for their high contribution to the "Consolidation Practical guide".

Your comments about the contents are very welcome. Let us know what you wish to write about.
http://forums.sdn.sap.com/forum.jspa?forumID=400
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/sapifrs
Twitter http://twitter.com/SAP_IFRS_XBRL

How to manage scope changes with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS? Part 6

2011-12-24T12:12:00.001-08:00

This series of seven blogs is dedicated to handling scope changes using “SAP® BusinessObjectsTM Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS". The objective is to illustrate in the BPC Starter kit for IFRS some of the most frequent scope changes.

Part #1: Acquisition of a subsidiary (full goodwill method)

Part #2: Loss of control without any retained interest

Part #3: Acquisition of further equity interests from Non Controlling Interests

Part #4: Partial disposal of an investment in a subsidiary while control is retained

Part #5: Step acquisition

Part #6: Loss of control while retaining an interest - this blog

Part #7: Internal merger between two subsidiaries

Each blog introduces a practical guide that deals with the following questions:

- What are the regulation requirements that applies to the business case

- How to handle the business case in the starter kit for IFRS

- What are the impacts on the financial statements

Now to the sixth blog!

Presentation of the business case

Year 2012

P6 (USD) purchased a 100% interest in subsidiary PS6 for USD125 000

PS6 Fair value of net assets is USD100 000

A goodwill of USD25 000 was recognized.

Year 2013

PS6 Profit for the year = USD20 000

Year 2014

P6 disposes 75% of its equity interest in PS6 for USD115 000

P6 resulting 25% on PS6 is classified as an associate under IAS28 and has a fair value of USD38 000

P6 individual accounts in 2014:

PS6 individual accounts in 2014:

Calculation of the gain on sale of 75% of PS6:

Fair value adjustment on 25% retained interest of PS6:

Goodwill on the 25% of PS6

Practical guide

Please click here to access the practical guide

Acknowledgements to Laetitia Lamoureux, Caroline Verrier and Jean-François Bouillon from the EPM SK&I team for their high contribution to the "Consolidation Practical guide".

EVDRE Memberset Selector in Treeview

2011-12-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

In SAP BPC 7.x EVDRE you may want to filter members according to both attribute values and/or member selections. You can find these complex selection examples in "Usage and Considerations of EVDRE" document like "SELF,DEP and ACCTYPE="INC",ID=Account:SalesKorea". For some of end users it may be complicated to hardcode this selection string into EVDRE Dimension Memberset field.

For one of our clients we decided to leverage MS Excel VBA functionality to achieve easy selection of dimension members in an EVCVW functionality fashion. Of course you can argue we may achieve this functionality with defining hierarchies in dimension but I personally do not like to have many many hierarchies, and prefer flat dimension structure.

Lets start with a EVDRE(1x1) in "Sheet1" which has material dimension in row expansion. As you can see Memberset is by default SELF,DEP.

In Sheet2 prepare a EVDRE for only ROW expansion listing Material dimension and place properties which you want to construct hierarchy based on these properties. In BPC MS you can also use EVLST function but since in NW version you do not have this functionality it is better to use EVDRE.

In Excel VBA Editor start with inserting a UserForm.

You can use default controls like combobox, listbox, checkboxes but if you want to use Treeview you have to add Treeview control from "Additional Controls..."

From "Additional Controls" list you can add Microsoft TreeView Control, version 6.0

Place Treeview and two command buttons into your UserForm.

First command button will construct treeview from a selected region in Sheet2. VBA coding will be similar to the below one:

Dim nodItem As Node
Dim rangeaddress As Range
Dim level1 As Range
Dim level1name, level1key, level1text As String
Dim level2 As Range
Dim level2name, level2key, level2text As String
Dim dimmember As Range
Dim dimmemberkey, dimmembertext As String
Dim TreeView As TreeView
Set TreeView = UserForm1.TreeView1
TreeView.CheckBoxes = True
TreeView.Nodes.Clear
Set nodItem = TreeView.Nodes.Add(, , "ROOT", "ALL")
nodItem.Expanded = True
level1name = "GRUPICI"
level2name = "YAYINEVITEXT"
Set rangeaddress = Worksheets("Sheet2").Range("B138").Cells
For Each c In Worksheets("Sheet2").Range(rangeaddress.Value).Cells
Set level1 = c.Offset(0, 1)
level1key = level1name & "=""" & level1.Value & ""","
level1text = level1.Value
Set level2 = c.Offset(0, 2)
level2key = level2name & "=""" & level2.Value & ""","
level2text = level2.Value
Set dimmember = c.Offset(0, 3)
dimmemberkey = "ID=""" & c.Value & ""","
dimmembertext = dimmember.Value
On Error Resume Next
TreeView.Nodes.Add "ROOT", tvwChild, level1key, level1text
TreeView.Nodes.Add level1key, tvwChild, level2key, level2text
TreeView.Nodes.Add level2key, tvwChild, dimmemberkey, dimmembertext
Next

Second Command Button enables user to write selected nodes into a cell seperated with commas. Code for second button will be like this:

Dim filterdestination As Range
Set filterdestination = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A2").Cells
Dim TreeView As TreeView
Set TreeView = UserForm1.TreeView1
Dim FilterString As String
For Each tnode In TreeView.Nodes
If Not tnode Is tnode.Root Then
    If tnode.Checked = True Then
     FilterString = FilterString & tnode.Key
    End If
End If
Next
If Len(FilterString) > 0 Then
FilterString = Left(FilterString, Len(FilterString) - 1)
filterdestination.Value = FilterString
Unload UserForm1
Else
MsgBox ("Please Select Material")
End If

Now our UserForm is ready for users to call, so place a Shape object in Sheet1 and assign a macro to this shape.

When you click on shape object you will get a hierarchical representation of Material dimension like this

After you select dimension members and attribute nodes and click on commandbutton2 as you can see comma seperated memberset is written to destination cell specified in code.

Now you can pass these selected values to EVDRE Memberset field. In case of no selection you may want to use EVCVW option, so using an IF formula for checking empty selection will be beneficial.

SAP BPC allows us to use flexibility of Excel, in this example I have tried to show a simple solution. I hope developers may add some simple but handy functionalities in coming service packs.

You may want to examine a simple macro example without EVDRE's, download here

Best Regards

BPC WebFolder maintenance program

2011-12-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Like any other solution BPC needs to be maintained and needs general housekeeping. Recently, I have been assisting customers with various performance related issue. One of the first things that strike me is that the general housekeeping of BPC is not being done.

A simply example would be the maintenance of the WebFolders. (Please Note: This blog is applicable to the MS Version)

The BPC WebFolders is like a file server, it still needs to adhere to best practises. In doing the performance troubleshooting, I often find that performing some basic maintenance on the WebFolders structure can go a long way in improving the overall performance of the SAP BPC solution.

General best practise recommendations are:

Remove any EVDRE debug files
Remove any files in the PrivatePublications that are older than 6 months
Remove *.TMP files older than 6 months (You could remove all of the files, it is a copy of your imported data, technically speaking that data is already in the database)
Remove *.LOG files older than 6 months
Remove any inactive / old / backup reports or input schedules that are not being used

This kind of housekeeping can be done manually at regular intervals, but it would be way better if this could be automated and scheduled. Hence the reason for this blog.

I wrote a simple C# console application which recursively would go through the WebFolders and remove the files which need to be removed. It is a simple application which can be expanded to do more tasks.

You can download the program from the following link:

http://db.tt/QT1wwlaM

You can download the source code from the following link:

http://db.tt/FKRlfFwp

How the program works..

Pre-Requites: .NET 2.0 Framework

Essentially the core of the program is in the config file. It is called MaintainBPC.exe.config

In the file you will find the following configurable parameters which have to be amended to reflect your environment

CleanWF_Log_File – This is the a log file where the operations of the program will get recorded to
BPC_WebFolders_Path – This is the path of the BPC WebFolders
Deletion_Period – This tells the program how old the files must be before deleting them
Delete_Ext – This tells the program which files to delete, this is an important configuration parameter, as you don’t want to delete any input, reports, script logic files, etc
Prod_Mode – this tells the program to move the files and not to delete the files (this provides an extra layer of security, as you will have to manually peruse the TobeDeleted folder before deleting the files
ToBeDeleted_Path – this folder will be used when Prod_Mode is set to true

This program has been tested on BPC 7.0 and 7.5. I haven’t tested it on BPC 10 MS version yet. I am not a programmer, so I am pretty sure that there are ways of improving the program.

Please Note: This program will not be supported by SAP product support and as not standard functionality nor delivered with SAP BPC.

Please test the program thoroughly before deploying and RULE 1; always ensure that you have working backups.

Hopefully this program will help out some of the customers in automating some of the maintenance around the BPC WebFolders.

BPC 10 for NetWeaver Authentication Scenarios

2011-11-22T03:38:00.001-08:00

Overview

One of the major differences in BPC 10 for NetWeaver from previous releases is that all client to server traffic from the EPM Add-In (Office client) and Web client go through NetWeavers WAS (Web Application Server) as opposed to the .NET server. Since the web server performs authentication services, this change brings new options and security considerations to the table.

Client Communication Overview

As I alluded to earlier, there are two primary ways users access BPC 10:

The EPM Add-In which is the new office client.
The BPC Web client which has been totally redesigned in this release.

Both clients access content in BPC by querying RESTFUL web services, which is similar to previous versions – just a different format. Why am I going over all this? The different clients each support different authentication mechanisms, in addition to the web services themselves. The chart below provides an overview of what is supported where. We will cover each scenario in more detail later on.

Basic Authentication

Basic authentication is used in the EPM Add-In by default and results in a prompt for your username and password during each login.

This authentication type is not secure unless using SSL as usernames and passwords are only Base64 encoded. Due to this, SSL should always be used when using basic authentication.

HTML Form based Authentication

HTML form based authentication is used by default by the BPC web client and results in an HTML form that prompts you for your username and password.

Like basic authentication, form based authentication requires SSL (HTTPS) to be secure “across the wire”. Due to this, SSL should always be used when using form based authentication.

Client Certificate

Client certificates are supported by both the EPM Add-In (for BPC 10 NetWeaver connections) and the BPC web client. Users are not prompted for credentials when using client certificates, and as such it provides Single Sign On capabilities. The configuration of client certificates is beyond the scope of this blog; however they basically work like this:

The BASIS team installs an SSL certificate on the BW instances and enables the HTTPS protocol.
The BASIS team then maps X.509 certificates to BW users (using STRUST, etc).
The security or networking teams deploy user specific X.509 certificates to end users’ desktops.
When a user executes a request, the client (either the EPM Add-In or web browser) verifies that it trusts the server certificate, and the server verifies that it trusts the client certificate allowing each side to validate each other’s identity before carrying out the request.

Client certificates must be installed in the end users’ desktop certificate store to be used with the BPC web client or EPM Add-In. Additionally, you must enable client certificates for the EPM Add-In connection by checking the Client Certificate checkbox and selecting the appropriate certificate in the connection manager.

This authentication mechanism is convenient since it delivers SSO but comes along with more overhead then the other scenarios, since the X.509 certificates have to be maintained and deployed to end users systems.

SAP Logon Ticket

SAP Logon ticket’s allow users to obtain a ticket (which is stored in the form of a MYSAPSSO2 cookie) from one system and use it to authenticate to other trusted SAP systems. SAP Logon tickets can also be used to generate reentrance tickets, which can be used by applications other than browsers (like the EPM Add-In) for authentication purposes without prompting users for credentials.

This makes a number of single sign on scenarios possible. For example:

A user can login to the EPM Add-In from the BPC web client without being prompted for credentials using a reentrance ticket.
A user can logon to an SAP Portal instance, connect to the BPC web client (as a new page in Portal Content) and launch the EPM Add-In while only having to log in once – at the Portal.
A user can logon to an SAP Portal instance and launch the EPM Add-In directly while only having to login to the portal.
- Note – This doesn’t work out of the box, but I was able to create a relatively simple web application that can be deployed in an AS JAVA portal that enables this behavior. It will be posted to SDN as an HTG soon.

Like the basic and html form authentication models, it is crucial that all communication occurs over HTTPS to ensure that the MYSAPSSO2 cookie is not compromised. This scenario also requires that the BASIS team configure the required SAP systems to “trust” each other.

SAML 2.0

SAML 2.0 authentication is not used directly by any of the BPC clients at this time, but is supported by the BPC Web Services. SAML 2.0 may be valuable for integration and custom development scenarios.

Suggestions…

I have but one suggestion and if you’ve made it this far, you probably already know what it is. Whatever authentication mechanism(s) you chose to deploy, ensure you enable and use SSL / HTTPS. Your network security auditors will thank you.

Ownership Manager System Generated Proposals from SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, version for Netweaver

2011-11-22T03:36:00.001-08:00

Similar in function to the Dynamic Hierarchy Editor available in BPC 7.x versions, the SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, version for Netweaver (BPC10NW), Ownership Manager allows the definition of complex holding/subsidiary relationships that can be time, category, and scope specific. The organizational structures defined by Ownership Manager are also used by the Consolidation Monitor and the Controls Monitor to display and status the defined organizational levels.

New to the Ownership Manager functionality is the ability for the BPC system to propose key consolidation parameters.

There are three main prerequisites for activating system calculations for ownership manager:

1. Model and Master Data requirements

Ownership manager functionality requires a configured ownership manager model as defined by :

Ownership-based Hierarchy Requirements .

Summary requirements:

Required member ids in the O_ACCOUNT (ownership model account) dimension:

METHOD

METHOD_SYS is populated by the system to store the generated proposal for the consolidation method

PCON

PCON_SYS is populated by the system to store the generated proposal for the consolidation rate

POWN

POWN is also known as the ultimate percent ownership of an entity by the holding company. It is the calculated share percentage based upon a specified calculation method (Direct Share or Group Share). For the Direct Share calculation, the percent ownership is assumed to be 100% of the subsidiary ownership. For Group Share calculations, the percent ownership is the product between the various subsidiaries percentages.

Example:

Holding Company (H1) owns 70% of subsidiary (S1) and S1 owns 50% of subsidiary S2.

Using the Direct Share method, the ultimate percent ownership of S2 is 50%.

Using the Group Share method, the ultimate percent ownership of S2 is 35% (=70%x50%).

directly or indirectly

PCTRL

PCTRL identifies the ultimate percent of control for each entity in a model.

Member ids used internally during Ownership Manager Calculations

METHOD_SYS

METHOD_SYS is populated by the system to store the generated proposal for the consolidation method

PCON_SYS

PCON_SYS is populated by the system to store the generated proposal for the consolidation rate

POWN_SYS

POWN_SYS is populated by the system to store the generated proposal for the financial interest rate, or percent shares owned. Shares Owned contains the number of shares and voting shares that an entity owns of another entity.

PCTRL_SYS

PCTRL_SYS is populated by the system to store the generated proposal for the percent of subsidiary control

Required O_ACCOUNT Dimension Properties

The IS_INPUT property for the O_ACCOUNT dimension identifies the dimension members which can be displayed in the Ownership Manager hierarchy display.

2. A Defined Method Business Rule:

The Method Business Rule table supports the Ownership Manager calculations by identifying a relationship between a range of shares allowing a system derived consolidation method (METHOD) as well as a proposed Financial Interest Rate (PCON):

indentifying source accounts
Indentifying target accounts
Indentifying source flows
Indentifying target flows

Note the unique syntax for identifying the share ranges.

0.20<,<=0.49 is interpreted by the system as a range definition: “any value greater than 20%, through any value less than or equal to 49%”.

0.50<,<=1.00 is interpreted by the system as a range definition: “any value greater than 50%, through any value less than or equal to 100%”.

3. Implementing a Cross Ownership Matrix

Automatic ownership calculations require additional information to allow the ultimate ownership share ownership values. An input schedule providing details on Percent Control and Percent Ownership data must be provided by entity and intercompany partner. Data is saved to the OWNERSHIP model.

In the following example:

- Germany controls 80% of a UK subsidiary, and the UK subsidiary controls 60% of a French subsidiary

- Germany owns a 70% share of a UK subsidiary, and the UK subsidiary owns a 50% share of a French subsidiary

Note: Share and control data must be entered without any scope (group) specification (i.e.: S_NONE).

Once all prerequisites have been completed, the user can request system generated ownership manager calculation through the CALCULATE option available in the edit mode of the ownership definition:

User can select the accounting principle for calculating the ultimate ownership and control (Direct or Group share methods).

Checkbox options allow the user to update the “Current” sub column values for Method, Percent Consolidation, and calculated ownership percentages.

A graphical illustration of the data flow between the three prerequisites:

SAP Change and Transport System for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for Microsoft platform

2011-11-22T03:16:00.001-08:00

The requirement to integrate into a change control infrastructure refers to the set of concepts, procedures and tools involved in managing information related to the software or application lifecycle, i.e. application lifecycle management (ALM) from initial installation and deployment to end of maintenance and replacement.

SAP Business Objects Business Planning and Consolidation, version for Microsoft platform (BPC MS), now supports the SAP Enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+) to implement and operate proper change control procedures. BPC MS software objects, which had been changed and modified in a development system, can now be efficiently and effectively transported into pre-production and production systems. This facilitates the application’s compliance with IT management standards and practices, i.e. that software changes are quality assured before applied to any productive system. The assumption behind being that development activities are performed in development systems (DEV), changed or modified software objects are consolidated in consolidation systems (QAS), and after quality assurance, these changes and modifications are applied in productive systems (PRD).

BPC MS supports the controlled transport of the following object types:

Table 1: Transportable Objects of BPC MS

SAP Change and Transport System (CTS) together with SAP Change Request Management (ChaRM) and SAP Change Diagnostics as part of SAP Solution Manager Diagnostics (SMD) provide the infrastructure and the tools to implement and support the processes and tasks of Software Change Management and Change Control. CTS organizes transport requests and transports objects between systems of a system landscape, i.e. a transport landscape. Enhanced CTS or CTS+ is an add-on to CTS which enables the transport of non-ABAP objects across CTS+ enabled systems. Another component of CTS, the Transport Management System (TMS), manages the distribution of transportable objects within the transport landscape and triggers their import/deployment into the target systems.

BPC MS 7.5 (as of SP06) and 10.0 (as of SP01) are CTS+ enabled, i.e. make use of CTS to achieve the following goals:

Transport changes and modifications through multi-tier product system landscape
Avoid multiple changes and modifications in different dependent repositories
Enforce similarity or equality of all systems in the product system landscape
Record and control changes and modifications

In essence, the purpose of transporting content with CTS is to ensure that two or more BPC MS systems maintain the same content - by transporting it from one system to another in a controlled way.

Figure 1: Example of a BPC MS Transport Route in a Transport Management System

BPC MS provides a user interface to easily work with Change and Transport System. The integration is part of the BPC MS Administration Client. The well-known BPC Action Pane offers the action “Transport Content with CTS” (or Ctrl + F8). The following screenshots are taken from a BPC MS 10.0 system.

Figure 2: BPC MS Action Pane in the Context of Environment Tasks including Task Transport Content with CTS

In sub-screen “Transport Content with CTS”, the transport object selection as well as transport request review is executed.

Figure 3: BPC MS Environment Task of Selecting Changed Objects for Transport/Export

For a detailed description of requirements and prerequisites, setup and configuration steps, as well as application and usage of CTS for BPC MS please refer to SAP Note 1582525 and SAP SDN article Using SAP Change and Transport Management for SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation. The functionality will be briefly introduced in SAP TechEd 2011 session ALM 219

Demystifying Financial Consolidation Part I

2011-11-22T03:15:00.001-08:00

In this blog series, we will be covering concepts related to financial statements consolidation. As the topic is bit complex for people from non-finance background, I will start from the basics covering each and every term, what it means, and relevant context and so on. In this series I won’t be covering how these things are implemented in BOFC or BPC but the functional knowledge required to implement it.

Before moving on to this topic we need to understand why we are required to consolidate financial statements.

We observe lot of merger/acquisitions happening around us every day, recently we have seen Google acquiring Motorola mobility for $ 12.5 Billion, Microsoft acquiring Skype for $ 8.5 Billion and the list is endless.

These acquisitions were friendly acquisitions, means the management of Target Company wanted to sell the company to the acquirer, whereas in a hostile takeover Target Company management does not want to sell the company to the acquirer.

Hostile takeover are portrayed in negative shade, than friendly acquisitions but both create and destroy value to the shareholders in long term depending on the post acquisition scenarios/synergy and on lot of other factors.

Management of Target Company takes lot of steps to prevent acquisition in hostile takeover. If the company is owned more than 51 percent by one individual or group of people then hostile takeover can’t happen. Even if the acquirer company acquires 49 percent stake in the company it won’t be able to govern it or control it as rest of the 51 percent stake is with other party. We can take the case of Wipro, in it approx. 70 percent equity stake of the company is owned by Azim Premji and members of his family, therefore acquirer can’t acquire more than 30 percent in Wipro so hostile takeover can’t happen.

Hostile takeover happens when the management of the target is not willing to sell the company, or if there is difference in the valuation of Target Company between target & Acquirer Company and lastly sometimes because of vested interests of management in the company.

To prevent hostile takeover, the management of Target Company can takes lot of steps:

Poison Pill: In it, the management of target company gives right to the existing shareholders to get more shares of the company at price far below than fair value. Current shareholders will get this option only when other company acquirers a certain percentage stake in the company. This way target company increases the cost of acquisition for the acquirer company and is beneficial for the shareholders. These again can be divided further, but we won’t be going deep in it. In 2004, News Corporation used this method to ward off acquisition from US cable group Liberty Media. It allowed its shareholders to increase stakes in the company at half the price if some acquirer buys more than 15 percent of the company i.e. company offered to its existing shareholders to buy new shares at half the price.

White Knight: Management of the target company which is currently looked for hostile takeover looks for some other company whom they can sell their company at friendlier terms. Sometimes, management of the target company puts his own interest first, as in a hostile takeover most of the management is removed while in friendly acquisition it depends on the negotiation and sometimes current management is allowed to continue. Around three months back Teva acquired Cephalon by outbidding hostile acquirer Valeant. Teva offered 12 % percent premium to Valeant’s offer.

Staggered Board of Directors: Instead of electing all the directors every year, in staggered boards only a fraction of the members of board of directors are selected every year. In this case, even though the acquirer company acquires majority stake in the target company, it takes 1-2 year to get actual representation in Board of members depending on the fraction of the members of boards of directors selected every year.

Selling the crown jewels: management of the target company sells vital assets to make the target less attractive

Greenmail or greenmailing is the practice of purchasing enough shares in a firm to threaten a takeover and thereby forcing the target firm to buy those shares back at a premium in order to suspend the takeover.

There are lots of other tactics to discourage acquisitions by Target Company in case of hostile takeover; we can’t cover all of them in detail. These tactics are normally used in combinations instead of only one technique. We have seen normally staggered board of directors being applied along with Poison pill provisions.

From the view point of Acquirer, it looks at the earning potential of the company, if it makes economic sense for it to acquire target company (Financial Analysis & Modeling), if it is in line with its strategic vision, if it will be able to realize synergy between both the companies, if it will be able to gain tax benefits out of it and so on.

Whenever one company acquires another company, we need to write it in our books of accounts the money we paid to acquire the company, the assets we acquired and the liabilities we inherited. There are various methods of consolidating financial statements depending on the equity one holds in the target company. The basic rule is if acquirer holds between 0-20 percent, the stake will be valued at fair value, in case of 20-50 percent stake we opt for equity method and in case of 50-100 percent stake we go for acquisition method (purchase method in IFRS3 2004).

According to new IFRS guidelines, if the company owns more than 50 percent stake in the target company it will be called as subsidiary and if the percentage stake lies in between 20 to 50 i.e. significant influencer it will be an associate. These guidelines also covers lot of scenarios like if the acquirer company owns more than 50 percent stake in the company but is not able to govern the company because of some reasons than we can opt for equity method and vice-versa i.e. if the acquirer owns between 20-50 percent but it is able to govern the policies of the target company then it can opt for purchase method.

In the next blog, we will look at the various terms used in consolidating financial statements, their utility and how they are calculated like fair value, goodwill, ownership, control etc. Once we are clear with the basics, we will further look in detail acquisition method (purchase method), equity method and proportional method of consolidating financial statements

Prior to 2001, we used to have one more method of consolidating financial statements i.e. pooling method, but the same was discontinued by regulatory bodies. We will also cover some of the differences between both the methods (Purchase and Pooling), though it is not required to understand it but knowing it will help us to appreciate the purchase method.

Making The Case for Investing in Financial Excellence

2011-11-22T02:13:00.003-08:00

One of the fun aspects of working closely with a wide range of retailers is the friendly competition and passionate sharing of ideas that highly competitive retailers show when they have the chance for dialog. It's always fun to listen to companies like Under Armour and New Balance as they highlight their differences but then also dive deep into what they can learn from each other's internal processes.

This week 30 current and potential customers from 16 companies met at SAP's Newtown Square campus to share best practices in driving Financial Excellence using SAP's Business Planning and Consolidation solution. The highly focused two day event gave a sharp and vivid snapshot of how some of retail's most innovative companies are using BPC to transform the role that their finance functions play.

Financial Excellence for Retailers

Making the case for excellence is always a challenge for any supporting function in a retailer. Executive leadership and key stakeholders rightly focus transformation close to the customer, where the connection between investment and increased sales or increased GMROI is clearly visible. What this week's discussion showed though is that flexible tools like BPC can drive real transformation in finance and enable finance functions to provide much stronger value to the business.

Here are a few examples of how customers are using BPC to dramatically improve their own processes, better inform the business and deliver tangible results:

New Balance reduced their monthly financial close from several weeks to just a couple of days
Given that more than 40% of a typical retailer's SKUs are unprofitable based on Net Margin Return on Investment level - merchants need to see this data and use it to transform their assortments
Even with a complex landscape of legacy systems, Charming Shoppes is able to deliver full store P&Ls to each of its 6,900+ stores to empower store management
No business can grow 300% without changing the way it plans - in the middle of the Nook's unexpectedly dramatic growth, BarnesAndNoble.com was able to deploy BPC in just seven weeks so that it now has the ability to plan and adapt successfully for its new world
By assessing total cost of risk at store level, Family Dollar is able to drive highly effective loss prevention
Under Armour is now able to complete a bottom-up budgeting cycle in just two weeks instead of 8 weeks
Leading multi-banner retailers using shared service organizations for key back office functions can provide the business with clear visibility on shared service usage and costs to enable them to control their shared service costs

Flexible and Intuitive Tools Deliver Ongoing Transformation

In addition to the significant value customers have been able to deliver, one of my other key takeaways from the event was that the BPC tools are so flexible and intuitive (thanks partly to the familiarity of Excel) that both finance and business users are constantly pushing to use them more widely and expand their use within the company.

Successful and flexible Enterprise Performance Management empowers executives, finance, IT and the business to focus on what they do best.

Executives get rapid and actionable insight that they can use to drive strong performance.
Finance has robust tools that allow their operational processes to be streamlined and enables them to invest in developing new insight, improving the strategic dialog with the business and driving incremental performance.
The business no longer has to wait for IT or finance to let them access new data or detail and can get the answers they need when they need them.
And IT... gets to put a solution in place and see the business vigorously engage and want to expand it to new areas, contribute to its administration and own the data in a way that can take years to achieve with other solutions.

it's very much to the credit of SAP's partners who focus on implementing Enterprise Performance Management and BPC that so many customers at the event were able to enthusiastically share evidence of how their organizations continue to extend using the strong foundation their implementation partner had put in place. Throughout the two days, customers mentioned that the expertise they had relied on from Aster Group, Column5, The Glenture Group, Sandpoint Consulting and SAP Consulting had been one of the most crucial success factors in their successful transformations.

Now Make It Real Time

Looking into the very near future, Steve Townsend of SAP gave a vivid outline of how SAP HANA will enable customers to take the scattered legacy of data sources that they have to aggregate, transfer and consolidate today and provide amazing fast access to real-time data with no aggregation. Combining this power with tools like Sales Analysis for Retail, a great foundation of retail intelligence available today using POS data feeds, will transform the speed at which customers can respond to the dynamic retail environment of rapidly changing consumer preferences, highly volatile demand, and long, risky supply chains.

What if every financial report and dashboard in your company was in real time? Replay your last major holiday event or promotion - if the lessons learned in preparing for and executive the event could have been identified and responded to in real time, think how the results could have been significantly improved.

Find Out More

More details on SAP BPC can be found here and any of us on SAP's Value Engineering team would be keen to work with you and your customers on developing the case for implementing or extending your use of SAP BPC.

How to manage scope changes with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS? Part 1

2011-11-22T02:13:00.001-08:00

This first series of seven blogs is dedicated to handling scope changes using “SAP® BusinessObjects^TM Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS". The objective is to illustrate in the BPC Starter kit for IFRS some of the most frequent scope changes.

Blog #1: Acquisition of a subsidiary (full goodwill method) - this blog

Blog #2: Loss of control without any retained interest

Blog #3: Acquisition of further equity interests from NCI

Blog #4: Partial disposal of an investment in a subsidiary while control is retained

Blog #5: Step acquisition

Blog #6: Loss of control while retaining an interest

Blog #7: Internal merger between two subsidiaries

Each blog introduces a practical guide that deals with the following questions:

- What are the regulation requirements that applies to the business case

- How to handle the business case in the starter kit for IFRS

- What are the impacts on the financial statements

Now to the first blog!

Presentation of the business case

Practical guide

Please click here to access the practical guide

The Next Blog

In the next blog of this series, we will look at the loss of control without retaining an interest in a foreign subsidiary

Acknowledgements to Laetitia Lamoureux, Caroline Verrier and Jean-François Bouillon from the EPM SK&I team for their high contribution to the "Consolidation Practical guide".

Your comments about the contents are very welcome. Let us know what you wish to write about.
http://forums.sdn.sap.com/forum.jspa?forumID=400

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/sapifrs

Twitter http://twitter.com/SAP_IFRS_XBRL

SAP BusinessObjects Operational Performance Management Elite Enablement - Spend 3.0, Supply Chain 2.0, Data Enrichment 1.0 - Sep 26-30, 2011, Palo Alto

2011-11-22T02:12:00.001-08:00

BE THE FIRST TO HAVE LIVE SPEND 3.0, SCPM 2.0 and DEC 1.0 EXPERIENCE at the SAP BusinessObjects Operational Performance Management Elite Enablement.

After successful Elite enablement sessions for BPC in US, Shanghai and (soon to come) in EMEA and a great PCM 10.0 Elite enablement session in Palo Alto, we felt that is was time to extend the offering to the Operational Performance Management (OPM) suite that is part of EPM 10.0:

SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management / Spend Analytics 3.0 (SPM)
SAP BusinessObjects Data Enrichment and Classification 1.0 OnDemand (DEC)
SAP BusinessObjects Supply Chain Performance Management 2.0 (SCPM)

This action-packed week conducted by OPM product and solution management and Customer Solution Adoption (CSA – former RIG), will provide customers and partners invaluable "hands-on" exercises and information to ensure you hit the ground running with the latest OPM suite. In addition to mingling with the solution experts you will also have the opportunity to meet our OPM executive leadership team.

This Elite enablement workshop will cover a large variety of topics including:

Day 1 – Hands-on walk thru of new features in SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management 3.0 (SPM), SAP BusinessObjects Supply Chain Performance Management 2.0 (SCPM) & SAP BusinessObjects Data Enrichment and Classification OnDemand (DEC) including What-If-Analysis, Advanced Analytics and Risk Management Integration
Day 2 – Product deep dives covering User Interface configuration, data sourcing and integration from SAP ERP, integrating Spend and Data Enrichment & Classification
Day 3 – Product deep dives (continued): Extensibility of SPM data model, integration of External Factors, Risk management integration and related applications configuration, Integration of SPM & BPC
Day 4 – performance tuning SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3, SCPM, SPM, DEC, Backend Modification to extend out-of-the-box functionalities (JAVA and ABAP Extensions), standard transports, install, security
Day 5 – SAP In-Memory (HANA), best practices project setup, documentation, issue handling, project scoping

Also hear from the experts on the roadmap and future of OPM and OPM with HANA – SAP's in-memory technology.

We will distribute iPads to the participants to support the exercises.

Space is limited so register today! We will be limiting space per company in order to ensure we can meet the demand from all partner companies, so we encourage you to respond quickly to ensure your registration.

What other Elite enablement is coming up?

A BPC 10.0 MEGA Elite training completely on BPC 10.0 NW is planned for Nov 14-18, 2011 in Philadelphia. For the first time this will be open for over 100 customers and partners to go hands-on and dive deep into BPC 10.0 NW. Register here. Contact liz.fitzgibbons@sap.com for details and follow us on Twitter at #BPCElite or directly @SAPEPMRIG and @jenskoerner

Also SAPinsider is hosting a 3 day BPC bootcamp seminar in Chicago, Orlando, Amsterdam, Las Vegas and Philadelphia for customers and partners. For details check out www.bpcbootcamp.com and http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/24378

Debugging BPC 10 for NetWeaver

2011-11-22T02:10:00.001-08:00

Debugging in BPC 10

In my opinion the ability to debug is one of the biggest advantages in the BPC for NetWeaver platform. It has proven to be a huge asset when writing custom logic (BAdi’s and custom integration scenarios) in addition to general troubleshooting tasks.

The good news is that the latest release of BPC for NetWeaver (BPC 10) also allows you to debug the BW tier but there have been a couple of changes that you need to be aware of:

The .NET tier has been removed from the 10.0 release of BPC for NetWeaver. This means you don’t have to map accounts on the .NET tier to enable debugging anymore.
The entry point for debugging has changed

After reading this (short) blog you will be prepared to debug BPC 10 for NetWeaver to your heart’s content.

Let’s get started…

Setting up your debug user

The only thing you need to start debugging BPC 10 is a valid BW user account with the same access as the BPC BW System Account. You can find the required roles in section 4.1 of the Installation guide.

Once that is complete, grant the user the appropriate rights to the environment / model (application set / application) and set your breakpoints.

Where do I set my breakpoints?

There has been a pretty good amount of rework in the UJ package for BPC 10 and this has also impacted where you need to set your breakpoints. I’ll cover two different scenarios below, debugging EPM Add-In and Administration functions and debugging data manager packages.

Debugging EPM Add-In and Administration functions

Log into the BPC client you want to debug (EPM Add-In or Web Administration console) with your BW debug user account.
Go to the portion of the use case you want to debug, but don’t execute the action yet.
Log into SAPGUI with your BW debug user.
Go to transaction SE80
Navigate to the class CL_BPC_REST_RES (under package UJX, embedded package UJX0).
Go to line 56 of the HANDLE_REQUEST method and set an external breakpoint.
- Note – If you know the specific location you want to debug you can set the external breakpoint there and skip the breakpoint mentioned above.
Switch to the BPC client and execute the action you want to debug.
This will launch a SAPGUI debugging session
The case statement on line 60 will get you to the code you need to evaluate.

Debugging Data Manager Packages

Log into SAPGUI with your BW debug user.
Go to transaction SE80
Navigate to the class CL_UJXD_PACKAGES_RES (under package UJX, embedded package UJXD).
Go to line 179 of the DO_POST method and set an external breakpoint.
Switch to the BPC client and execute the data manager package you want to debug.
This will launch a SAPGUI debugger
Double click on the ‘ls_package_run-if_debug’ exporting parameter and set its value to true (represented by the character X).
You can then continue to any downstream external breakpoints you already set (for instance, in your BAdi) or can step through the code line by line.

How to manage scope changes with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS? Part 2

2011-11-22T02:09:00.001-08:00

his series of seven blogs is dedicated to handling scope changes using “SAP® BusinessObjects^TM Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP Netweaver Starter Kit for IFRS". The objective is to illustrate in the BPC Starter kit for IFRS some of the most frequent scope changes.

Blog #1: Acquisition of a subsidiary (full goodwill method)

Blog #2: Loss of control without any retained interest - this blog

Blog #3: Acquisition of further equity interests from Non Controlling Interests

Blog #4: Partial disposal of an investment in a subsidiary while control is retained

Blog #5: Step acquisition

Blog #6: Loss of control while retaining an interest

Blog #7: Internal merger between two subsidiaries

Each blog introduces a practical guide that deals with the following questions:

- What are the regulation requirements that applies to the business case

- How to handle the business case in the starter kit for IFRS

- What are the impacts on the financial statements

Now to the second blog!

Presentation of the business case

Year 2013

The 1^st of January, parent company P2 (USD) acquires 100% interest of subsidiary PS2 (EUR) for USD 95 000 in cash. PS2 net value of the identifiable assets and liabilities is EUR 87 500

Goodwill calculation = EUR 7 500 (x rate: 1 USD = 1 EUR)

PS2 profit for the year = EUR 10 000 (average rate for 2013: 1 USD =0,80 EUR)

On December 31^st, the exchange rate is 1 USD =0,85 EUR

Year 2014

PS2 goodwill impairment = EUR 4 000

PS2 profit for the year = EUR 15 000

The 1^st of December P2 sells its 100% controlling interests in PS2 for

USD 100 000. The average rate from January 1^st to December 1^st is

1 USD = 0,75 EUR. The spot rate on December 1st is 1 USD = 0,80 EUR

Note: For a matter of simplification, the case study is displayed on two years even if it is not fully relevant from an IFRS perspective (e.g. IFRS5)

PS2 net assets at the disposal date is EUR 112 500 (87 500 + 10 000 + 15 000).

PS2 individual accounts converted in USD and including goodwill are as follows:

Calculation of net gain/loss on the disposal

Practical guide

Please click here to access the practical guide

The Next Blog

In the next blog of this series, we will look at the Acquisition of further equity interests from Non Controlling Interests (Equity transaction)

Acknowledgements to Laetitia Lamoureux, Caroline Verrier and Jean-François Bouillon from the EPM SK&I team for their high contribution to the "Consolidation Practical guide".

Your comments about the contents are very welcome. Let us know what you wish to write about.
http://forums.sdn.sap.com/forum.jspa?forumID=400

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/sapifrs

Twitter http://twitter.com/SAP_IFRS_XBRL

Impact of Maintaining Debug Users in BPC NW

2011-11-22T02:08:00.001-08:00

BPC is a tool for planning and consolidation, which is available in two platforms one in Microsoft and other in Netweaver. All the objects created in BPC Netweaver platform are created as BI objects and saved in the backend BI system connected to it.

All the logics and functions defined in BPC NW frontend are developed using ABAP logics in the backend. Also we have option to write custom ABAP codes using standard BADI’s delivered with the tool for various business requirements. So for checking the malfunctioning of any function in BPC frontend we need to debug the corresponding ABAP logic of that function in backend. For which we need the option for debugging. The same is provided in the BPC NW system which has to be configured in the server end with the details for Domain User, BI user ID and its Password.

System Connection Issue:

The user details what we use in the front end to connect to the BPC system is domain/system specific, whereas different set of user details are used to connect to BI system in the back end. So when a domain specific user connects to the BPC system in front end, simultaneously a connection is established with the backend BI system.

To establish this connection with the backend BI system, it uses different BI user details depending on the debug user maintained in the server. Below flow chart clearly states the procedure for connection establishment between BPC and BI system.

So having said these one can connect to a BPC NW system only when,

Domain User ID and Password are correct
Backend BI user ID and Password are correct

The Domain user ID and Password are the one we would be providing from the front when connecting to the BPC system, but BI user ID and password are automatically taken by the system for establishing the connection with BI system. These values are taken either from the key user details or from debug user details depending on the user logging in and the debug user table.

Consider we have a domain user maintained with his corresponding BI user ID and password in the debug user screen of the server. When the user tries to connect to BPC, the BI credentials provided in the debug user screen of the server will be used for establishing connection with BI system. Having said this, if the details are not maintained correctly or the BI password is locked then the user will not be able to connect to the system.

Authorization Issue:

When we don’t have any debug user maintained in the system, we are connected using a Key BI user ID which will have all access to the system and so from the frontend we will not face any problem in performing any operations. But if a debug user is maintained for a domain user and if the BI user used has a limited access in the BI system we may have problems in performing certain tasks from BPC end.

Consider a domain user which is maintained in the debug user screen with BI user ID and password. The BI user provided in the debug user screen has access only to certain functions like create BI objects and to some other transactions used for programming but do not have access to the transactions to save files in the SAP system. When this particular domain user logins to the BPC system and tries creating any BPC object he will not have any problem, as he have access to create any object.

But when he tries to run some Data Manager Package for loading a master data from a flat file which is in the BI server, since the BI user provided in the debug user screen doesn’t have authorization to access the file the data manager will fail stating “No Authorization for Accessing the file” in the error log.

So when we maintain debug user screen in the server we need to make sure of the following,

The BI credentials provided are correct
The Password for BI user provided is not locked
BI user provided for debug user has all access which will be required when working from the front end BPC system.

If we miss the first and second option, the user will not be allowed to login to the system. If we miss the third option, it is not sure that user can perform all the actions from BPC end.

To prevent all these problems it is better to make sure that the Debug user details are maintained as and when it is required for debugging and removed when we don’t have the work with debugging.

BPC Script logic for Dummies? (Part 2)

2011-11-22T02:06:00.001-08:00

I explained basic 3 parts of script logic in the last post. It was Scoping, Calculation and writing.

We will find out more advanced features for scoping In this post.

1. Scope using member property

We found how to use *XDIM_MEMBERSET last time.

      *XDIM_MEMBERSET is for scoping based on the member ID.
      What if user wants to scope members based on a specific property value?
      For example, a user wants to filter Account dimension members those are Asset.
      To achieve this, we need to use ACCTYPE property which has the type value of account.
      AST is the value for ASSET account. (Note: Value is based on the APSHELL of BPC.)
      The command is *XDIM_FILTER.
      The usage is

*XDIM_FILTER <DIMENSIONNAME> = [DIMENSIONName].Properties("Property name") = "Property value"

So above example can be written as below.
*XDIM_FILTER ACCOUNT = [account].properties(“ACCTYPE”)=”AST”

Let's say Account dimension has 3 members as below.

         ID           ACCTYPE
      Extsales          INC
      CASH              AST
      TAXES             EXP
      NETINCOME    INC

Then about *XDIM_FILTER_ACCOUNT will select CASH member only.

Let's assume If you already used multiple *XDIM_MEMBERSET command

and below are selected data from the fact tables.

*XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME = 2011.JAN
*XDIM_MEMBERSET CATEGORY = BUDGET

<Result>
 EXTSALES , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 9000
 CASH , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 3000
 TAXES , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 800
 NETINCOME, 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 1500

Now if you add *XDIM_FILTER against ACCOUNT dimension.

     *XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME = 2011.JAN
     *XDIM_MEMBERSET CATEGORY = BUDGET
     *XDIM_FILTER ACCOUNT = [account].properties(“ACCTYPE”)=”AST”

Only one record will be selected from above result because CASH is

the only account member that has 'AST' value of ACCTYPE property.

<Result>
CASH , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 3000

2. Scope using member value
      We just figured out how to scope the source data based on the property.
      Then someone might ask this question.
      "Can we scope based on the value?

For example, can we select all data that an account value greater than 100?

Of course, we can do it.
The command is *XDIM_GETMEMBERSET. Unlike other command,

it needs *ENDXDIM command to specify data.

Here is the grammar of XDIM_GETMEMBERSET and an example.

      *XDIM_GETMEMBERSET {dimension} [={member set}]
           [*APP={application}] //optional
           [*XDIM_MEMBERSET {dimension} [={member set}] //as many of these as needed
           [*QUERY_TYPE= 0 | 1 | 2] //optional
           *CRITERIA {expression} //required
      *ENDXDIM

      *XDIM_GETMEMBERSET P_CC=[P_CC].[H1].[AAPJ].CHILDREN
           *APP=PLANNING
           *XDIM_MEMBERSET P_DataSrc=INPUT
           *CRITERIA [P_ACCT].[H1].[CE0001000]>1000
      *ENDXDIM

It will get the data and those are..

           a. Children member of AAPJ in the P_CC dimension. AND
           b. from the PLANNING application AND
           c. INPUT member of P_Datasrc dimension AND
           d. CE0001000 member's value of the P_ACCT dimension should be greater than 100000

Let's Assume Fact table has below records.

      CE0001000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, INPUT, KOREA , 2500
      CE0002000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, INPUT, CHINA , 5000
      CE0001000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, ADJ , CHINA , 3000
      CE0002000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, INPUT, JAPAN , 1999
      CE0003000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, INPUT, JAPAN , 2222
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, ADJ , KOREA , 345
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, INPUT, TURKEY, 1999
      CE0003000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, INPUT, TURKEY, 1100
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, INPUT, CHINA , 1050
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, INPUT, JAPAN , 450

Which records will be selected?

      The answer is
      CE0001000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, INPUT, KOREA, 2500
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, INPUT, CHINA, 1050

      Below records will not be selected even though P_ACCT is CE0001000
      because its value is less than 1000
      or Datasrc is not INPUT
      or it is not the child member of AAPJ (Asia Pacific)
      CE0001000, 2011.JAN, ACTUAL, ADJ , CHINA , 3000 (datasrc is not input)
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, ADJ , KOREA , 345 (datasrc is not input)
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, INPUT, TURKEY, 1999 (Turkey is not child member of AAPJ)
      CE0001000, 2011.FEB, BUDGET, INPUT, JAPAN , 450 (Value is less than 1000)

Here are some important Notes for using this command.

Note 1: This command works only for BPC MS.
Note 2: if you don't specify each dimension's scope, it will be performed in the

corresponding members of the pre-selected region which is defined with

DIMMEMBERSET of previous line or Passed by Data Manager.

Note 3: This command will generate MDX statement so it takes more time to execute.
if your dataset has only base members, you can use

*XDIM_GETINPUTSET. (please refer help file)

3. When user wants to add more members on top of current scoped data.

Let's say a user wants to add USASales entity on top of predefined memberset.
In that case user defines as below.

*XDIM_ADDMEMBERSET Entity = USASales

      The main reason why we need this is
          a. Sometimes XDIMMEMBERSET doesn't work with some specific functions like BAS(parent).
             For example, IN BPC NW, *XDIM_MEMBERSET = BAS(US),CANADA will not work.
             Therefore, we should use *XDIM_MEMBERSET and *XDIM_ADDMEMBERSET.

*Note: In BPC MS, BAS() will not work with XDIM_MEMBERSET.

b. if user always wants to run a specific memberset whenever logic runs,

should use *XDIM_ADDMEMBERSET

4. Dynamic Scope and saving it to a variable.

      Sometimes we need to save our scoped data into a script logic variable.
      But... what if your dimension members are updated frequently?
      As I know, almost every customer updates their dimension at least once a month.

If customer changes their dimension members, what will happen in your script logic?
You can use *Filter but sometimes it may not work all the time.

Then we can use *SELECT and *MEMBERSET command as a dynamic scope tool.

Like other script engine, Logic script also supports Variable to save some data.
The Variable is defined using % symbol.Here are some examples, %MYTIME% , %CUR% etc.

So how can we save some data into the variable and when it can be used?

      Usually, the variable can be filled using *SELECT command and *MEMBERSET command.
      Both of them is scope command but *SELECT will be faster because it will create SQL statement.
      Here is the grammar of both commands.
          *SELECT ({variable}, {What}, {From}, {Where})
          *MEMBERSET({variable}, {member set in MDX format})

Let's see how to use *SELECT command.

*SELECT(%REPORTING_CURRENCIES%, “ID”, “CURRENCY”, “[GROUP] = 'REP'”)

This command will get the 'member ID(what)' from the 'currency dimension(From)' that the

GROUP property has the value 'REP' (where).

Actually, it will create a SQL statement as below

SELECT ID from mbrCurrency where [GROUP] = 'REP'

After it executes above SQL command, all result will be saved into

%REPORTING_CURRENCIES% variable.

Here is an example of *MEMBERSET which will make same result but execute MDX statement

instead of SQL.
*MEMBERSET(%REPORTING_CURRENCIES%, “filter{[CURRENCY].members,

           [currency].properties(“GROUP”)=”REP””)
      The variable can be used anywhere in the logic, like in this example:
                        *XDIM_MEMBER_SET CURRENCY=%REPORTING_CURRENCIES%

Let's assume Currency dimension has below members.
ID GROUP

         USD            REP
         EUR            REP
         KRW
         JPY

Then above statement will be converted as
*XDIM_MEMBER_SET CURRENCY = USD,EUR

When you define and fill in data using *SELECT and *MEMBERSET,

please remember this as 'MEMBERSET Variable'

Note: MEMBERSET command is only supported by MS version.

We reviewed key command of scoping today.

We will review advanced calculation command and control command like *IF or *FOR - *NEXT in the next post.

If you have questions or want to know something about it, please leave a comment.

Thank you.

Comparision list of BPC Script Logic command between NW version and MS version

2011-11-22T02:05:00.001-08:00

I guess many consultants already know the difference between BPC NW version and MS version.

Even though you know the difference, I think this chart will help us as a reference.

If you find anything wrong in the list, please leave a comment so that I can update it continuously.

Thank you.

*Index of Color

YELLOW : Supported by both version.

GREEN : Supported by NW version only

WHITE : Supported by MS version only

ORANGE : It was supported by MS version before 7.0 but not suppported any more.

Here is a link of Google docs. If you want to add more, please use it and edit, I will convert it as image and will publish it later

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlNX_-VUdSnudFhZSlpibzJ1NmpTX0N1Ty1WcUZUbFE&hl=en_US&authkey=CM3FoJkB

OSS Note Reply - It is By Design ?

2011-11-22T02:04:00.001-08:00

In BPC you may encounter the need to do currency conversion by business rules. In the Net Weaver Platform when using business rules, SAP delivers a program for currency conversion. It is indeed a good program and gives great flexiblity to customers that want detailed control over currency conversion and currency effects on forecasts.

In the Microsoft Platform and even in the Net Weaver platform there remains standard script logic forms of currency conversion, but in many cases this is significantly limiting.

In our planning scenarios we often encounter plans that have 15 month rolling plans or other planning features that span fiscal years or calendar years. For example we might have planning for January to December for 2011 and also include the first three months of 2012. As the months roll by we add a new month of forecast to the plan so we are often if not always entering LC in periods that are in two different years.

In our default logic we want currency conversion and in the case above using business rules, the system simply is built to ONLY convert the LOWEST NUMBERED year and its related time periods. SAP says this is by design. The work around is a performance hit relative to a better approach.

We say, yes it may be by design but as is often the case with SAP development, the design makes no practical business sense and limits customer use of the business rules process and code.

We urge SAP to not simply reply to notes with "it is by design" but also consider the design as perhaps meaningfully flawed in real world applications.

The currency conversion program in Net Weaver that engages currency conversion and business rules use is by design flawed.

A Taste of What’s Coming in BPC 10.0

2011-05-16T22:03:00.001-07:00

Today, the 2011 ASUG Annual Conference (and SapphireNOW) began with a series of pre-conference education sessions. I was fortunate enough to attend the Enterprise Performance Management Version 10.0 Roadmap session led by a number of product experts within SAP’s EPM leadership team. The goal of the session was to provide an overview of the changes that were coming in the to-be-launched-this-week EPM 10.0 as well as the vision for the suite of products beyond this pending release.

I was most interested in the SAP BusinessObjects Business Planning and Consolidation (“BPC”) portions of the session, since that’s the tool that I work with the most within the EPM product category. In today’s session, I learned that SAP will be delivering a number of enhancements in the 10.0 release and I’ll do my best to try to outline the bigger changes below and my thoughts on those changes.

BPC Netweaver

New look and feel – One of the themes that SAP has been touting in the EPM 10.0 release is ‘Unified’, and this refers to making each of the EPM products have a similar user-friendly interface so that the user doesn’t know whether they’re in a BPC report or a Strategy Management scorecard (for example). This new user interface seems very visually appealing based on the screenshots and demos provided.

Integrated security with Netweaver back-end – One of the complaints about BPC security in previous 7.x releases was that the security was not integrated with the underlying BW system. SAP appears to have addressed this issue and provides a new administration area that will give system administrators a user friendly tool that acts as a front-end to PFCG or SU01 transaction code.

Enhanced hierarchy maintenance – While maintaining hierarchies were do-able by maintaining the ParentHx property in the dimension sheet, new functionality was developed that will allow for drag and drop hierarchy builds within BPC.

Enhanced script logic editor – Let’s face it, writing script logic can be less than straight-forward (and that’s putting it nicely), but with the new functionality planned for this enhancement, it will become a little easier. With keywords and MDX statements now at a script-writer’s finger tips, searching online for the exact nomenclature will hopefully be less frequent.

No more .Net tier – As a business guy, I’m not sure that I understand exactly what this involves, but a more simplified and streamlined backend likely makes things easier.

Enhanced core consolidation functionality – New features such as Consolidation Central will give administrators a single place for configuration. Better data validations (with thresholds that will allow consolidation process to continue or if breached, to stop) and a Consolidation Monitor (ala SEM-BCS) are added features in the upcoming release.

Ownership Manager – the Dynamic Hierarchy Editor is now called the Ownership Manager. This web-based tool allows for auto calculation of ownership percentages based upon a user input of the Parent/Child relationships. Based on the description, this reminds me a little of the SEM-BCS Group Shares report.

Web-based Journals – Journals will now be entered via a new web-based front-end, with what seemed to be a user-defined layout. Enhanced journal reporting using a query manager will also allow users to better investigate the entries that are being posted in the system.

Future HANA Enablement – Beginning later in 2011, BPC will be enabled to run on HANA, first with replication of data using the Sybase Replication Server. Then, in mid-2012, look for BPC to run fully on the HANA technology.

BPC Microsoft

Further demonstrating what SAP has said it would do, some of the Netweaver enhancements mentioned above will be available in the Microsoft platform, but not all. Specific notable enhancements called out for the Microsoft platform were performance enhancements brought on by fully leveraging the 64-bit architecture and a new Advanced Variance Analysis tool that will help drive variance reporting. The AVA will only be available in the Microsoft version of BPC, at least for the initial roll-out of 10.0

Conclusion

It was a really good Roadmap session with a lot of excellent and knowledgeable speakers. I hate to short-change the speakers for the non-BPC EPM tools, but that’s what my personal focus is on these days.

I look forward to an exciting week at ASUG Annual Conference and SapphireNOW as there will be plenty of EPM sessions (more than any one person can actually attend by him/herself).

Don’t miss the official launch of EPM 10.0 on Tuesday, May 17 at 11:00am ET.

I’m quite certain that I missed out on some other enhancements that are coming in 10.0, especially on the Microsoft side, so please don’t think that’s all that’s coming.

SAP BPC Tutorials | SAP BPC Training | SAP BPC Interview Questions |SAP BPC Books

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SAP BPC Books :Cases on Information Technology And Business Process Reengineering (Cases on Information Technology Series,)

2011-05-15T23:05:00.001-07:00

Cases on Information Technology And Business Process Reengineering (Cases on Information Technology Series,)

Basic Questions about SAP BPC (SAP BPC Faqs)

2011-04-19T22:42:00.001-07:00

1. What is BPC ?

As you must be aware that BPC stands for Business Planning and Consolidation. As the name suggest, BPC is used for both Planning and Consolidations, unlike IP, which is used for only planning.

2. When BPC 7.5 NW is avaliable?

The 7.5 version is currently in the ramp-up stage and should be availble in few months. I am not sure of the exact month.

3. BPC for NW has an aggregation level or not, Is BPC an application on top SAP-IP?

BPC and IP have completely different architecture. BPC doesnt use aggregation levels or filters. BPC and IP have no relation and thus, cannot be compared. BPC uses various script logics, business rules for doing the planning. Manual planning can be done with input schedules. The input schedules are on excel platform and are quite versatile. You can use BPC functionalities alongwith native excel functionalities for better design of the input schedules.

4. What about BPC in consolidation part?

BPC comes with pre-delivered components for consolidationm, which can be leveraged on. There are few business rules, which makes the consolidation process easier.

5. What is the concept for plan data from BPC?

The concept of planning is the same as you have in any other tool. The functional side of the planning remains the same. However, the tool differs. The way you configure a planning scenario will be much different than any other planning tool. Unfortunately, it will not be feasible to address this in the forum. You can definitely go through the study materials for a better understanding.

6. BPC for NW need to install .NET application server and Web server or not?

Yes. You can have a look at the installation guide available on market place for detailed requirements.

7. What is BPC client tool? and If I planning on BEx report, I have to create an aggregation level for planning data or not?

BPC client sits on the client machines, from where, you will be doing the design. There are mainly 3 interfaces available - BPC Admin, BPC Office, and BPC Web. BPC Office, in turn has 3 interfaces - Excel, Word, Powerpoint. These interfaces can be used for various requirements.

8. How about BPC license?

You can get in touch with SAP for the license relation information.

Welcome to the central information center for SAP Enterprise Performance Management (formerly CPM) offerings

2011-04-18T13:41:00.001-07:00

It has information about following products:
SAP Strategy Management (SSM)
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC)
Profitability Management and Cost Management (PCM)
Information on Spend Performance Management can be found here (link )
The purpose of this EPM wiki site is to provide a living communication platform between SAP EPM development, Regional Implementation Group, Consulting, SAP implementation partners and EPM customers. Ultimately, we would like to ensure knowledge transfer and customer success through this wiki platform together with BPX and other resources.
We absolutely need your active participation and contribution to make this site as informative and lively as possible.
Enjoy!

Welcome to the central information center for SAP Enterprise Performance Management (formerly CPM) offerings

2011-04-18T13:37:00.001-07:00

BPC Comments via Excel Pop Up - How to and Comparison with other modes of commenting

2011-04-18T13:36:00.001-07:00

As we all know, one of the most admired and user friendly feature of BPC is its Excel Interface. Business users are comfortable with flexibility and features available with excel to work on their different business plans. However they miss the secured and integrated planning environment. BPC is a tool which provides best features of Excel in an integrated planning tool with enhanced planning features like trends, spread, drilldown, commenting etc.

Commenting is a functionality which is used for sharing information among a set of people who work together in any system. And this function plays a vital role in any kind of planning scenario by bridging the communication gap between the people in different level of any organization.

Business users in general add comments for various needs like, to share their view points on the plan data, to specify any reasons for data fluctuations etc.

Posting any Comment in BPC is possible via three interfaces,

Via Action Pane
Cells of Excel – EVCOM
Excel Pop Up – EVCOM

The procedure for adding comments from Action Pane and via cells of excel sheet using EVCOM function is very well illustrated in the How to Guide which is available in the link below,

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/508b62ee-000b-2c10-2d91-a867451ad958?QuickLink=index&overridelayout=true

This blog details how to configure comment by Excel Pop Up and its advantage over other modes of commenting.

Steps involved,

1. Create any Input Schedule or Report in BPC Excel Client.

2. Set the value for Workbook Options à Read Option for Comment to “As Excel Popup”(As below)

3. Set EVCOM function for various fields in the report and refresh the sheet.

a. Select the cell where the function is to be written.

b. Fill it with “=evcom()”

c. Select insert function and define the cell value for different parameters of the function.

4. Select the cell for which the comment needs to be added then go to Review Tab and select New comment,

5. Enter the required comment for the cell selected in the pop up screen and move back to Add Ins Tab,

6. Click on the button to save comment to the system,

7. The comment is saved successfully to the system and you have the comment in the Popup Screen as and when you move the mouse over the cell.

Advantages of having comment as Excel Popup are,

Business have the feel of using the same Excel functionality for adding comments with data saved in system
Can be used to comment any data cell in a Report or Input Sheet having dynamic expansion.
No need for allocating any area for commenting in the IS/Reports.
User Interface looks good having only the required set of data without explicitly displaying the comment entered for it.

Note: The Comments included via Excel Pop Up can also be viewed using EVCOM function in cells of different BPC reports or Input Sheet and can also be reported via standard system reports for Comment.

It is in general depends on the business user who demands for the interface of commenting, being a consultant it is always good to propose the best option available based on the business need.

The Table below clearly states what type of comment can be used in different business scenarios,

Business Need

Best Option

Report or Input sheet dynamic
Huge volume of data and commenting across any individual cell of the data

Excel Pop Up

Report or Input sheet is static
All Relevant comments to be displayed simultaneously.
Sheet where comments are entered without any data.

Within Cell

For any business user who maintains only comments and doesn’t need any access to see any plan or consolidation data.

Action Pane(Provide Access only to Commenting in Task Profile of that business user)

Thus comments can be added using Excel Popup function and the business users can be provided with the feel of their excel functionality for commenting.

Why the new script logic keyword - *WHEN_REF_DATA?

2011-04-18T13:35:00.003-07:00

At times in SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, when writing a *WHEN-*REC-*ENDWHEN structure in script logic, we may come across a scenario where we want to post value to an intersection/region where there is no data. This was not supported previously as calculations happen in transaction mode by default.

The above is not a limitation anymore in SAP BPC NW with the new script logic keyword -*WHEN_REF_DATA. This allows us to switch our calculation mode to either transaction data or master data.

Syntax

1) To enable master data mode

*WHEN_REF_DATA = MASTER_DATA

//*WHEN-*REC-*ENDWHEN CONSTRUCT

2) To enable transaction data mode

*WHEN_REF_DATA = TRANS_DATA

//*WHEN-*REC-*ENDWHEN CONSTRUCT

In transaction data mode, calculations will happen based on the transaction data in the source data region
In master data mode, calculations will happen based on the Cartesian product of the source data region no matter if the transaction data exists or not
The mode is set to transaction by default. So when we do not use this keyword in our logic, all the calculations in *WHEN construct will happen in transaction mode
When we use the *WHEN_REF_DATA statement, all the calculations in following *WHEN constructs will happen in the mode specified until the next *WHEN_REF_DAT (if specified)

Example

*XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME=2010.MAR

*WHEN ACCOUNT

*IS ACC1

*REC(EXPRESSION=1000, ACCOUNT=ACC2)

*ENDWHEN

Here we have no *WHEN_REF_DATA and thus calculations will happen in the default mode i.e. transaction data mode. A value of 1000 will be written to ACC2 wherever there is a value for ACC1 in the period 2010.MAR.

Now, let us look at the same example in master data mode.

*XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME=2010.MAR

*WHEN_REF_DATA = MASTER_DATA

*WHEN ACCOUNT

*IS ACC1

*REC(EXPRESSION=1000, ACCOUNT=ACC2)

*ENDWHEN

In this case, 1000 will be written to ACC2 even when there is no data for ACC1 in the period 2010.MAR.

Please check the Note 1474115 for further details.

EPM RIG BPC 7.5 NW Elite Partner Training

2011-04-18T13:33:00.001-07:00

From Monday, Jan 24 until Friday, Feb 4, 2011 the EPM RIG welcomes 48 partner employees in Palo Alto to go through a BPC 7.5 NW Elite Partner Training hosted in the Amazon Cloud.

The training covers

Hands-on walk thru of the BPC 7.5 NW key features (such as Xcelsius integration, automated BW data loads, new Business Process Flows)
BW Concepts and data integration hands-on
EPM Roadmap and HANA outlook
An overview of SAP ERP Data in the context of BPC
EVDRE Best Practices
Transports and Lifecycle Management
EPM Resources and Escalation Process
Performance Tuning
Consolidations (Logic Setup, Dynamic Hierarchy Editor, Consolidations rules and methods)
ABAP and Technical Programs
BPC Data Manager
Project Planning and Risk Management
Script Logic
Final Exam

There are already plans to repeat this training in Shanghai and discussions around sessions in Europe and a repeat in the US. So, feel free to share your thoughts and feedback in this blog.

Also, with the integration between BPC and PCM becoming a hot topic in 2011 (see How to Generate Product and Customer Data Views using Planning and Consolidation, Profitability and Cost Management, and Financial Information Management for technical integration details) we are investigating the idea of a PCM Elite Partner Training later in 2011.

So, blog away and share your thoughts... If you want to follow us on Twitter look for hashtag #BPCElite

Also don't forget to check out the EPM RIG how-to guides about all EPM products and visit the RIG blog page at SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation Blogs.

Master Data Volume and its impacts on BPC for NetWeaver

2011-04-18T13:25:00.001-07:00

Master Data Volume and its Impacts on BPC for NetWeaver

Overview

BPC for NetWeaver does not have any pre-defined limits on the amount of master data that can be stored in any one dimension. The amount of master data included in a dimension impacts BPC performance in the following ways:

Client Login Performance
- Dimension member master data cache files are created for clients on the BW tier the first time a client logs in from a specific system and on subsequent logons if there are changes to master data.
- These cache files must be loaded into memory on the client tier (BPC for Excel, BPC Administration, etc).

In both cases, the amount of master data is one of the primary factors dictating performance.

Administration Operations
- Processing dimensions will take progressively longer as more master data is created
- Selecting members when configuring Member Access Profiles and Business Process Flows is impacted by volume of master data

Client Report Creation Operation
- Some operations, such as creating an EvDRE report may cause master data to be read from the cache files. In these cases the amount of master data has a direct impact on client side performance.

It is possible that client side issues exist and have not yet been identified which impose a limit on the actual amount of master data that can be loaded for a given dimension/application. In these cases the limitation is generally induced by a defect which is later corrected by development.

There is no limitation to the amount of accessible master data inherent in the design of BPC at this time.

What Factors Determine Master Data Cache File Size

Each dimension a user has access to gets cached during the first login on a given machine and then subsequent logins, when changes are made. The XML cache files consist of one line per dimension member / hierarchy that a user has access to. Each line documents all of the properties associated with that dimension member.

Thus, there are three primary factors that determine the size of a master data cache file for a given dimension:

The number of hierarchies
Either:
- The number of dimension members (for unsecured dimensions)
- The number of dimension members that a user has access to (for secured dimensions)
The number and size of properties

Example 1:

For example, a simple unsecured dimension and one hierarchy containing 15,000 members will result in a file with approximately 15,000 lines (there will be a couple more to make it a well formed XML file).

Example 2:

If you take the same dimension, and double the number of properties (with consistent sizes to the first set of properties) you will effectively double the size of the cache file even though it will not result in any additional lines in the XML file.

Example 3:

Similarly, if you were to add a second hierarchy to the same dimension, including all existing members, you would approximately double the size of the cache file by approximately doubling the number of lines in the file.

Increasing the size of the cache file increases:

The amount of time it takes to create cache files in BW
The amount of time it takes to transfer cache files to the client over the network
The amount of time it takes for the client tier to interact with master data (login, some action pane operations, etc).

Recommendations / Best Practices

Now that we know the drivers to large dimensions, we can design some best practices to mitigate their impacts.

Recommendation 1: Secured Dimensions – Only provide access to required members

Often times, secured dimensions are the largest. When working with large secured dimensions, ensure that you configure member access profiles in a way that only grants access to required members. By limiting the number of members and/or hierarchies a user has access to you are directly impacting the size of the cache files used on the client tier which in turn increases performance.

Recommendation 2: Hierarchies – Evaluate whether additional hierarchies are required

Multiple hierarchies are often required and can be included in well designed applications however; it is worth evaluating whether an additional hierarchy is required to reach your goal. There are other techniques that can sometimes be used in place of a hierarchy without losing any functionality.

Depending on the purpose of the hierarchy, some possible alternatives include:

Adding one or more additional dimensions to the application model
Adding logic to simulate the rollups to be included in the new hierarchy

Recommendation 3: Property Names – Keep property names concise

This is a relatively simple one to demonstrate. If you have a dimension with 120,000 lines (unique member / hierarchy combinations), and you name a property “ARLP” instead of “A_REALLY_LONG_PROPERTY”, you will decrease the cache file by a little more than two megabytes. If you enact shorter names for multiple properties, or have more lines in your cache file, the savings can be much greater.

Final Thoughts

We are continually seeing refinements in the way BPC creates and interacts with master data so setting any targets or limits on master data volume would quickly become out of date. That said we currently have successful BPC NetWeaver customers with dimensions containing greater than 100,000 members.

Based on the information above, you know what drives the size of the master data cache files and where the application will be impacted. You also have the aforementioned guidelines to help mitigate the impact of large amounts of master data.

Rolling 12 Custom Measure in BPC 7.x, version for MS and NW

2011-04-18T13:24:00.001-07:00

It is not out of the ordinary for a client to want a summation of last 12 months for many accounts. One way of doing this, if the number of accounts is minimal, is to create several dimension formulas, but this could diminish performance. A better way of accomplishing this is to create a Custom Measure called Rolling 12.

BPC version for Microsoft

In BPC, version for Microsoft, it is fairly straight forward in that the formula for both Periodic and YTD are the same, except for “ELSE” statement at the end.

The formula for a Periodic application is as follows:

iif([Account].CurrentMember.Properties("ACCType")="INC" or

[Account].CurrentMember.Properties("ACCType")="EXP",sum(LastPeriods

(12,closingperiod([Time].month)),Measures.[Periodic]),Measures.[Periodic])

For a YTD application:

iif([Account].CurrentMember.Properties("ACCType")="INC" or

[Account].CurrentMember.Properties("ACCType")="EXP",sum(LastPeriods

(12,closingperiod([Time].month)),Measures.[Periodic]),Measures.[YTD])

To test the formula, login into SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio

Select File-> Open -> Analysis Services Database. When the splash screen renders, select the correct database. If a database is not listed, enter the correct server and database.

On the right side of the pane in the Solution Explorer Pane, select the desired cube, right click, and select Browse.

Click on the Calculations Tab and in the script Organizer, right click and select New Calculated Member.

Fill out the Name and the Expression as specified below:

To save the formula, click on the Process button, three green arrows in a circle or from the menu
(Build -> Process)

Click Run.

When the process is finished, click Close and Close again.

Navigate back to the Browser Tab and reconnect to the database by clicking on the icon.

Drag the Measures dimension into the center of the table, Time along rows, and Account for the columns.

You will notice that the YTD and the new Rolling 12 measure should equal for the current year, but will be different once you span multiple years.

In order to get this into BPC, you must log into SQL Server Management Studio:

Navigate to the proper Application Set -> Tables -> dbo.MeasureFormula. Right click and choose Edit Top 200 Rows.

Fill out the table according to the below:

SEQ: Pick a number greater than what is already stored by 10, in my
instance I chose 270
Name: The name of the Custom Measure, in this case it is Rolling_12
Statement: enter

[Measures].[Rolling_12] as 'iif([%

ACCOUNTDIM%].CurrentMember.Properties("ACCType")="INC" or [%

ACCOUNTDIM%].CurrentMember.Properties("ACCType")="EXP",sum

(closingperiod([%TIMEDIM%].month,[%TIMEDIM%].currentmember).lag

(11):closingperiod([%TIMEDIM%].month,[%

TIMEDIM%].currentmember),Measures.[Periodic]),Measures.[Periodic])

SolveOrder: 4
Description: Rolling_12
Required Level: Year
IsVisible: 1
IsYTDApp: 1 for yes or 0 for Periodic
IsSystem: 1

Tab out of the last column to save the row. Right click on dbo.MeasureFormulaApp and Edit the Top 200 Rows. Scroll to the bottom and enter the below:

Application Name: Finance or your cube name
SEQ: 270, or the number you specified earlier
Name: Rolling_12
Description: Rolling 12

The last step is to log into BPC Admin and reprocess the cube. To do this, login to BPC Administration, go to the applications, and highlight Application. On the right, click Modify Application.

Select the appropriate application and check the boxes to Reassign SQL Index and Process Application. Next, click Modify Application.

When this is complete, log into BPC for Excel and in the Measures dimension, you should now see Rolling_12.

For BPC 7.x, version for Netweaver

Login to the SAP GUI and go to transaction SE38. For the Program, enter UJA_MAINTAIN_MEASURE_FORMULA and click the Execute icon (3^rd from the left)

Enter the Application Set ID, Application ID, and the User ID:

Click the green check mark.

Click on the first icon to create a new measure. Enter Formula Name, Description, and formula.

For Periodic applications, the formula is as follows:

MEMBER [MEASURES].[ROLLING12] AS 'IIF([%

P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="INC",SUM

(LastPeriods(12,CLOSINGPERIOD([%TIME%].[LEVEL02])),-[Measures].

[/CPMB/SDATA]),IIF([%P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES

("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="EXP",SUM(LastPeriods(12,CLOSINGPERIOD([%

TIME%].[LEVEL02])),[Measures].[/CPMB/SDATA]),IIF([%

P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="AST",

([MEASURES].[/CPMB/SDATA],CLOSINGPERIOD([%TIME%].[LEVEL02])),IIF

([%P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="LEQ",-

([MEASURES].[/CPMB/SDATA],CLOSINGPERIOD([%TIME%].[LEVEL02])),-

[MEASURES].[/CPMB/SDATA]))))';SOLVE_ORDER=3

For YTD applications, the formula is as follows:

MEMBER [MEASURES].[YTD] AS 'IIF(([%

P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="INC" OR

[%P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="LEQ"),-

([MEASURES].[/CPMB/SDATA], CLOSINGPERIOD([%TIME%].[LEVEL02])),

([MEASURES].[/CPMB/SDATA], CLOSINGPERIOD([%TIME%].[LEVEL02])))'

SOLVE_ORDER=3##MEMBER [MEASURES].[PERIODIC] AS 'IIF(([%

P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="INC" OR

[%P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="EXP")

AND NOT ([%TIME%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/PERIOD")

="TOTAL" OR [%TIME%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES

("2/CPMB/PERIOD")="Q1" OR [%TIME%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES

("2/CPMB/PERIOD")="JAN" ), [MEASURES].[YTD]-([MEASURES].[YTD],[%

TIME%].LAG(1)), [MEASURES].[YTD])' SOLVE_ORDER=3##MEMBER

[MEASURES].[ROLLING12_YTD] AS 'IIF([%

P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")="INC" OR

[%P_ACCT%].CURRENTMEMBER.PROPERTIES("2/CPMB/ACCTYPE")

="EXP",SUM(LASTPERIODS(12,CLOSINGPERIOD([%TIME%].[LEVEL02])),

[MEASURES].[PERIODIC]),[MEASURES].[PERIODIC])';SOLVE_ORDER=3

***Note- The Rolling 12 custom measure for a YTD application is

more complex because it has to build off the Periodic calculation

which is built off the YTD calculation.

Click the Save Icon.

Dependent Tasks in Business Planning and Consolidation 7.0 NW (BPC)

2011-04-18T13:17:00.003-07:00

Task Manager helps in managing different activities to be performed by the users in Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) system. Task Profile Creation being One time activity it involves lot of responsibility in creating it. Right set of system authorization needs to be given to right set of people else it might lead to lot of issues. Usually System administrator creates task profiles and assigns it to end users.

The Security in BPC system needs to be maintained for any user to perform the desired activities in the BPC system. The Security of the BPC system is handled through different profiles on different criteria.

As represented in the diagram above, Member Access Profiles help in providing the authorization to the users based on the Secured Dimensions in the BPC applications. The major mapping for providing access to BPC system is as below,

1. Team <--> Member Access Profile (Many to Many), Team <--> Task Profile (Many to One)

A Team can have any number of Member Access Profiles and Only one Task Profile

2. User <--> Team (Many to Many), User <--> Member Access Profile (Many to Many), User <--> Task Profile (Many to Many)

A User can be assigned to any number of Teams, Member Access Profile and Task Profiles.

Once a user is assigned to any Team he has access that is defined in Member Access and Task Profiles assigned to the Team. Assigning users to Team helps in reducing the effort of maintaining users individually.

Note:

1. It is good practice to assign single task profile to any user.

2. Both Member Access Profile and Task Profile needs to be assigned accordingly for correct set of activities.

(No use of access to write data through Task Profile without having write access to any master data through Member Access Profile)

There are different set of tasks available for BPC system. Every task is unique and provides different access specific to them.

Not all tasks can individually provide the required access specific to them. They require certain other tasks to be added for providing their access to assigned users. The table below gives information on the additional set of tasks required for those individual tasks to provide the required access.

Dependent Task Name

Description

Supporting Task

Accessing System

Manage Template

It provides read access to Reports and Input Schedules saved in the system.

eAnalyze

Excel Client

Submit Data

It provides access to save any data to the system through any input schedule.

eAnalyze

Excel Client

Manage Distributor

Provides access to,

Create new distribution list
Validate and Save distribution list
Edit existing distribution list

Needs to be a Primary Admin.

Excel Client

Publish Offline

Collects offline changes in Input Sheets and sends to data base

eAnalyze,WebAdmin, SubmitData

Excel Client

Create Journal

Provides access to create and save new journal entries into the system.

Review Journal and eAnalyze

Excel Client

Post Journal

Provides access to post data to the system through available journal entries.

Review Journal and eAnalyze

Excel Client

Review Journal

Provides access to review available journal entries

eAnalyze

Excel Client

Unpost Journal

Provides access to unpost the data entered through journal entries

Review Journal and eAnalyze

Excel Client

Set Work Status

Access Content Lib: user can set work status through BPC for Web.

Submit Data :User can set work status through BPC for Excel

Access Content Lib or Submit Data

Excel Client, Web Interface

Create Web Page

Provides access to,

Add a new web Page
Post a document
Preview available documents
Filter or Sort the document list

Access Content Lib

Web Interface

Manage Content Lib

Provides access to,

Post a document
Edit Page information of available documents
Preview available documents
Filter or Sort the document list
Delete required documents available

Access Content Lib

Web Interface

Manage Live Report

Access to Build a Report and Delete available Live reports

Live Report

Web Interface

UpdateToCompanyFolder

Allows user to Update the templates in Company folder.

Manage Template

Excel Client

Tasks available in BPC 7.0 NW other than what mentioned in the above table are Independent Tasks and can provide their specific access without requiring any additional supporting tasks.

Thus various Dependent tasks and its Supporting Tasks help us configuring the Exact Task Profile required for various End Users.

Tip on Using Data Manager Package IMPORT_USING_FTP in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for NetWeaver

2011-04-18T13:17:00.001-07:00

If you have used the SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation (BPC) Data Manager package to load a flat file you will know you must first import the file onto the BPC server before running the load package. But what if you have sensitive data like a payroll file and you want to limit the potential for someone to access a file they are not permitted to view? Then you may want to automate the transfer of data from a source system into BPC. For this type of use case, there is a Data Manager package called IMPORT_USING_FTP which allows BPC to pick up a file from an FTP site and import the data in a single step.

The Import_Using_FTP package works fine for all versions of BPC for NetWeaver if your FTP site containing the source file allows anonymous FTP login. But unfortunately there is a bug in this Data Manager package in BPC before Support Package 10 of BPC NW 7.0 and before BPC NW 7.5 Support Package 05 which causes the package to fail if the FTP site has anonymous logon disabled. Naturally, when dealing with sensitive data, you would not allow anonymous logon to the FTP site, so the IMPORT_USING_FTP package has not been a workable option for many BPC users.

SAP Note 1504226 has been released for BPC 7.0 NW SP10 and BPC 7.5 NW SP05 to fix the problem the IMPORT_USING_FTP package does not work if anonymous access is disabled on the FTP server. If due to your application lifecycle you are not able to install the support package or, even the SAP note individually, then you can utilize the following work around to be able to use the IMPORT_USING_FTP package.

From BPC Excel, go to the modify package option for your Data Manager package.

Click on the Advanced button.

In the script window, change the highlighted reference from %FtpSourceFile% to %DestinationFolder% and save the change. Below is the original script.

The following screen print shows the corrected script.

The changed line should read as follows:

TASK(/CPMB/CONVERT,FILE,%DestinationFolder%)

Below shows the package execution prompts with a working example.

SAP Note 1504226 fixes a problem with the BPC Data Manager package IMPORT_USING_FTP. But if you need to utilize that feature before applying the note, then just follow the simple steps explained in this work around.

A Checklist for BPC Projects Who Are Preparing for Using SAP Safeguarding Services

2011-04-18T13:16:00.001-07:00

Due to the tremendous adoption of the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC) application many SAP customers are implementing the software currently. During the Realization phase of a BPC project, customers who have SAP MaxAttention support contracts may elect to participate in a service offering called SAP Safeguarding for Integration Validation. These services may also be known as a Technical Integration Check (TIC) or Technical Integration Check Extended (TICx).

These Safeguarding services are delivered by experts from SAP Active Global Support (AGS) and sometimes supplemented by my teammates from the SAP Labs Regional Implementation Group (RIG) or from SAP Field Services. The Safeguarding services focus on integration, performance, and data consistency. The goal is to make your core business processes work, end to end. To accomplish this, we analyze and monitor the critical components and interfaces that support core business processes, carefully checking that:

Integration is defined, tested, and transparent
Interfaces are monitored and are passing consistent data
Performance of critical business processes is optimized

Your organization’s assigned SAP Technical Quality Manager (TQM) and/or the SAP AGS service lead person will work with you to schedule and prepare your organization for this service. To receive the most efficient review service, I suggest five topics which you should tackle prior to the SAP team’s arrival.

1. Business Process Identification

2. Environment to be Used for Monitoring

3. Remote Connectivity

4. Security

5. Logging, Tracing, and Debugging

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Business Process Identification

The BPC Safeguarding services usually run between three and five days during which it is customary to review a few significant business processes. Your BPC Administrators and Subject Matter Experts should discuss prior to the review which are the most important processes for the SAP team to review. The “got-to-have” processes might include key input schedules/reports to be used by a large portion of your users, a critical piece of script logic that is essential to your planning process, or other crucial business rules used, for example, in consolidations. Ideally you will be at a stage in your project timeline to have already tested these processes on production-like data sets or using a simulated number of users and you will have established some benchmark performance data you seek to have the SAP review team validate or improve upon.

2. Environment to be Used for Monitoring

After documenting and understanding the critical business processes you identified in step 1, the SAP review team will run those processes as a baseline measurement to compare against subsequent runs after making any suggestions for improvement. Given this iterative test and review process, certain factors have to be thought about in the context of your project environment. Will the system environment be comparable in size and load to production? Will the system review be competing with other testing activities which may be occurring at that time? If the SAP team asks to change a certain parameter, script logic file, or other configuration setting is your change and transport management system and process ready to accommodate the review team’s requests? Are the security profiles of the test users truly representative of that of the future end users? BPC security can have a big impact on not only the system’s performance but on the overall user experience within the business process. Finally, due to the unique way BPC data is transferred to the client hardware it is very helpful to gather a sample client hardware snapshot from some of the BPC Administrators and the future end users. A screen print of the system properties is sufficient. To collect this from your users ask them to press the Windows key + Pause, or alternatively go to the Windows Start menu then right-click on the computer name and select Properties. Preparing for the points above before the SAP review team arrives will make the assessment go smoother and more effort can be put forth on review of the business processes, rather than working through the environment questions.

3. Remote Connectivity

During the course of the BPC review some SAP team members may be working off-site and therefore it is vital that remote connectivity to the customer’s system is available. Not only does this mean the SAP R/3 Connection to access the BW system (BPC, version for NetWeaver only) needs to be open, but it also means a WTS connection has to be open to access the BPC .NET server and the BPC client applications which need to be installed on the server. SAP Note 605795 explains the WTS set up. Since WTS setup is generally not needed for the SAP Business Suite including BW many customers do not have this in place. However without WTS, remote analysis of the BPC client applications and .NET server setup is not possible.

4. Security

User ids and security for the SAP review team members needs to be setup in advance of arrival for three different areas of the BPC landscape. First BW Basis users are needed with SAP_ALL security profiles to review and monitor the system parameters and performance. The profiles must contain the transaction codes that begin with ST*, SM*, DB*, SE*, AL*, UJ*and RS*. The SAP team also needs an Active Directory or local admin user which has authorization to the .NET server to look at the BPC Server Manager application, IIS, and various logs which BPC creates. Finally, the SAP review team needs to be provided with valid BPC user ids with appropriate security to execute the critical business processes and to review the BPC administration setup. To reiterate a point made before, the BPC security profiles, especially the member access profiles, need to be representative of the users who will execute the business processes in production. It may be simpler for you to just give the SAP team full member access rights to these test users, but that approach will sacrifice accuracy in providing a realistic measurement of system performance.

5. Logging, Tracing, and Debugging

Prior to the SAP review team’s arrival, you should activate several Appset and Application parameters used for logging and tracing in BPC. You can setup these parameters from tasks within the BPC Web Administration homepage.

Appset Parameters:

                LOGLEVEL = Info
                TRACELEVEL = Debug
                TRACEUSER = DOMAIN\USER

Application Parameters (for each application that is to be reviewed):

BPC_STATISTICS = ON

Trace Files:

On each local machine which is to be used for the review, find the file named log-configuration.xml which is located in the <Drive>:\Program Files\SAP BusinessObjects\PC_NW directory where the client software was installed. If using Windows with 64 bit platform the path would be: c:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\PC_NW.

Edit this file with a text editor such as Notepad and change the setting TRACE=ERROR to TRACE=DEBUG. Note that with Windows 7 you have to run Notepad as an Administrator to write to the Program Files directory named above.

Within the log-configuration.xml file, you can specify where the trace and log files should be stored. To do this you need to modify the following items by inserting the drive and path inside the quotation marks. For example:

TraceDestination value="C:\Program Files\SAP BusinessObjects\PC_NW\Trace"

LogDestination value="C:\Program Files\SAP BusinessObjects\PC_NW\Log"

Make sure the BPC users have write access permission to the drive locations where the trace and log files are written. In Windows 7 you may have to right-click on the Microsoft Excel menu item and select Properties, then click on the Compatibility tab and check the option to run as an Administrator. If permissions are setup correctly BPC will begin to write trace and log information to two files:

BPCTRACE.0.LOG and BPCLOG.0.LOG

The log and trace files are explained further in chapter 3 of the BPC Operations Guides.

Debug User

If you are running the NetWeaver version of BPC, it is critically important that you setup one or more debug users for the SAP review team to utilize. How to establish the debug users in the BPC Server Manager application is detailed in chapter 4 of the BPC NW Operations Guide. From our experience, many customers are unsuccessful at defining the debug users on the first attempt. Often this is because they failed to type the Planning and Consolidation user id in capital letters as DOMAIN\USER ID or they mistyped or cut and pasted the information which resulted in an extra space after the user id. Please test your setup to see if the debugger does launch.

Login to the BW system with the user id named as a debug user
Go to transaction SE37
Enter function module name as: UJ0_ON_NEW_RFC2 and click display
Set an external breakpoint on line 39
Login to the BPC Excel client and start the connection wizard using the user id defined as a debug user and proceed to the step when BPC obtains the AppSets available to the user
Switch to the BW session and the debugger should have started
Optionally you can use t-code SM50 to confirm that the BPC user id is shown logged into BW rather than the generic system user BPC-ADMIN
End the debugger session and log off BW and BPC

If you did not setup the debugger ID correctly, then remove them from the BPC Server Manager and restart IIS. Then try to assign the user ids again and restart IIS a second time. Repeat the test as explained above.

Fiddler

Fiddler is a free web debugging tool that is useful for monitoring the traffic between the .NET server and the ABAP server. Please download and install this application on the client machines which will be used for the review service.

In Conclusion

In the RIG team’s experience in helping with these Safeguarding reviews these are specific preparation tasks that could be addressed prior to the assessment to get the most out of the service. Often these tasks do not get performed until the SAP team shows up on site, which obviously cuts into the available time to focus on the value added deliverables of the engagement.

The SBOP PC Migration Situation

2011-04-18T13:15:00.001-07:00

The SBOP PC Migration Situation
There is a lot of confusion out there regarding how to migrate from BPC 5.1/7.0 Microsoft to 7.x for NetWeaver and now there is a two day workshop designed to make you an expert!

What’s on the agenda?

During the two day workshop we will discuss:
• The migration process
• How to estimate the effort required
• The migration utility / consulting aid
    o What is it?
    o How does it work?
    o Why use it?
    o What does it migrate automatically?
    o Gotchas
• Manual migration steps
    o Templates
    o Script Logic
    o Dimension Member Formulas
    o What is a BAdi and when should I use them?

In addition, we will have:

• A live demo exporting data from BPC for Microsoft
• Hand’s on exercise’s covering:
    o Importing an Application Set into NetWeaver
    o Migrating and EvDRE template
    o Basic Dimension Member Formula migration
    o Basic Script Logic migration

There will be a competency exam at the end of the second day to ensure you have mastered all of the relevant facts. A passing score gets you access to the migration utility!

Who should attend?
Anyone interested in gaining a broader understanding on the migration process and get access to the migration utility.

When and Where?
The workshop is being held at the MicroTek King of Prussia office January 6th through the 7th, 2011.

Where can I register?
You can get additional information, and sign up for the workshop at the official SAP Education site.

Installation Options for SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation, version for Netweaver

2011-04-18T13:14:00.001-07:00

There are two main installation paths that can be chosen for your SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation, version for Netweaver (BPC) implementation: you can install BPC within your current BW system (the "Add On" method) or you can install BPC on a separate BW system (the "Stand Alone" method). Each installation method has pros/cons that should be considered prior to deciding upon an implementation path.

Prerequisites:

SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation 7.5, version for Netweaver (BPC75NW), must be installed on a suitable Netweaver platform. For BPC75NW Support Pack 07 or earlier, the Netweaver platform version must be Netweaver 7.01. Based upon customer demand (SAP listens, and SAP delivers), Netweaver 7.3 will be supported by BPC75NW SP08 (scheduled to be released in June 2011).

Which is better: Add-On vs. Stand Alone? The answer varies for each customer since it depends on a number of factors that need to be evaluated for each implementation:

Hardware Investment
Performance
Administration Costs
Integration Development and Maintenance
Upgrade Considerations
Support Pack Considerations
BWA Investment
Data Movements

Hardware Investment

There is typically some increase in hardware investment when implementing any BPC project. The Stand Alone scenario will lead to some additional cost for servers required for creating the new instance of BW that will be used to support the BPC application. However following an "Add-On" implementation scenario will also require additional application servers to accommodate the anticipated incremental BPC user load on the existing BW system. The net hardware cost differences between "Stand Alone" and "Add-On" may be negligible.

Performance

On initial reflection, the Stand Alone scenario may be presumed to inherently have superior performance; however this is not necessarily to case if the Add-On scenario is properly sized. In addition, load balancing is also an important consideration to ensure overall system responsiveness (for example, BPC processes can be isolated from the BW processes, from a load balancing perspective, if desired).

Administration Costs

System Admin costs may be greater with a Stand Alone implementation since an additional host system will need to be maintained, tuned, monitored, etc.

However if the administration support is provided using in-house resources, the additional cost may be negligible by being easily absorbed into the existing in-house administration support model.

If system administration is out-sourced, then additional cost should be anticipated (as most external support contracts charge by system instance).

Additional consideration should be anticipated to keep your out-sourced system up to date with current support packs and corrections. Failure to maintain the system can result in increased administration and operational costs through the need to research and implement corrections that have already been developed for more current support pack levels.

Integration Development and Maintenance

There are a variety of ETL tools to pull master and transactional data into BPC, but these tools typically point to BW objects (info cubes and info objects) within the hosting BW for source input. Following a Stand Alone implementation path, additional processes will need to be developed to load the source data into the BPC supporting NW environment. This additional configuration will need to developed and, of course, maintained.

Upgrade Considerations

New BW functionality is continuously being deployed and customers struggle to determine the best timing to upgrade their systems. In a Stand Alone deployment, it may be easier to upgrade your main BW system while leaving your BPC hosting BW system at an earlier revision. One of the main benefits to the stand alone path is the elimination of many of the dependencies between BW upgrades and BPC upgrades. This decoupling may be a significant consideration since currently BPC 75 NW is currently only supported by Netweaver 7.01. If you have a BPC75NW system today deployed using the Add On approach, you cannot upgrade your NW environment to NW 7.3 since BPC is not supported by this version of NW.

Recognize that system upgrades depend on a number of business environmental factors: corporate politics, the needs and schedule of the end user work streams (i.e.: Finance, Sales, Marketing, HR, etc.), and the technical capacities to perform the work. Some companies elect to upgrade their systems on regular basis, others are more conservative and will upgrade infrequently if the system performance is acceptable.

Support Pack Considerations

Certain highly regulated industries require extensive regression testing of all BW processes after implementation of any support packs. Even companies that are not specifically bound by industry regulations should always consider some planned regression testing after any system change is introduced (i.e.: support pack, individual correction, SAP kernel updates, OS kernel updates, DB patch updates, etc...). Similar to the discussion surrounding "Upgrade Considerations", a decoupled system approach allows timely support pack implementation for BPC without the need for extensive regression testing of the main BW system.

BWA Investment

Many SAP BW customers are currently enjoying the benefits of speed enhanced processing provided by BW Accelerator (BWA). In an Add On approach, the BWA can very easily be extended provide performance enhancement for BPC. The Stand Alone approach requires additional BWA hardware to be installed since BWAs are typically setup to service a specific BW instance using a 1:1 connection between the BW instance and the BW Accelerator (reference slides 24-25 of http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/bwa?rid=/library/uuid/3604c604-0901-0010-f0aa-b37378495537 ).

Data Movements

As discussed in the "Integration Development and Maintenance" section a Stand Alone approach will require additional data extraction configuration and maintenance. Most customers will load master/transactional data into their main BW systems for general reporting purposes. Following a Stand Alone process will require at least two sets of data to be generated (one for the main BW system, and a second set for the host BW system). When data is pulled into the BPC application a third set of data can be generated as well. All this data requires storage and has to be periodically backed up. In a high availability system, additional copies may also be generated by the mirrored backup systems.

Other Considerations

Creating and installing a "system copy" (i.e.: to establish a quality test environment) will be incrementally easier with Stand Alone approach. The copied system will be much smaller due to its segregation from the main BW processes.
Data Manger is by design constrained to one BW instance (the instance upon which BPC is installed) , so the ability to create a master process chain to update all data will require addition separate steps for a stand-alone system. Additional BW configuration, such as additional staging cubes and the potential for redundant data with both BW systems should be anticipated.

This blog does not provide a final recommendation for one implementation path over the other. There is no best implementation path that can be generalized for all customers. The choice for Add On or Stand Alone should be thoroughly evaluated by your system architecture group along with project goals and appropriate cost considerations.

When the performance of BPC data manager package is not consisent. (EPM BPC Microsoft platform)

2011-04-18T13:13:00.001-07:00

When we say the performance issue of BPC, we need to make clear which performance issue.
Data retrieving performance issue in the report?
The performance of Logic calculation? Data posting performance in the input template?
Or performance of data manager package?
The reason why we need to make clear is the bottom reason of performance issue is quite different. (I will post about each root cause of performance issue later.)
When I visited a customer site 3 weeks ago, I heard the complaint about the inconsistent performance of their custom data manager package.
So we monitored SQL process and found there was some CXPACKET wait type.

CXPACKET wait type comes from Microsoft SQL engine for waiting worker threads on the CPU.
SQL server usually split a SQL query into multiple internal queries by query engine and multiple CPU threads are performing those partial queries and sync its result afterwards. Most of case, it works perfectly without any problem but sometimes, especially when insert a lot of data, CXPACKET wait type happens. It means query engine is waiting one of other partial query.

The problem is, when it happens, its performance becomes REALLY SLOW. (I saw a worst case that took several hours to finish. Usually, it can be finished within 30 minutes.)

That's why customer complains the performance of their custom data manager package is not consistent.

Some Microsoft experts says if user maintains indexes and statistics very well, this CXPACKET WAIT should not happen but as I addressed, when user tries to insert a lot of records in the table, sometimes it happens.

To resolve this issue, there is one workaround which is disable parallelism option (MAXDOP: Max degree of parallelism option.)

Of course, when we disable MAXDOP, it means we gave up parallel execution feature of SQL server. Therefore, its performance will be decreased but it will guarantee consistent execution time. (Actually, performance difference is not that big.)

In addition, we will not set this option forever because this is an option of SQL server, it will affect all other query performance, Therefore, if a custom data manager package has this issue, we can disable this option as a first step of package and enable it when package finishes.

Here is a screen shot of the package that has two additional SQL execute Tasks.

The first SQL execute task should have below statement
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; --Should show advanced option to set parallelism
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO
sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 1; --Turn off parallelism
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO

The last SQL execute task should have below statement.
sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 0; --Turn on parallelism
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 0; --will not show advanced options.
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO

In conclusion, when user executes this package, parallelism option will be turned off during package is running and roll back parallelism option when it finishes.

Of course, this option should be added when user finds CXPACKET wait type in the process monitor while their package is running and user should not run same package at the same time because parallelism option might be turned on/off unitentionally. (User can avoid this through set the flag while package is running.)

The two customers solved inconsistent performance issue of their cusom package using this solution. Of course, user should check the environment and other condition like running lite-optimization at the same time before apply this solution.

Performance is important but sometimes consistent performance is more important when it is scheduled job.

Enhanced selections to load transactional data from any infoprovider

2011-04-18T13:07:00.001-07:00

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5 version for Netweaver successfully leverages the Netweaver infrastructure and we can use data stored in infocubes in the Enterprise Data Warehouse. In this blog we will discuss the functionality that we can use to specify the selections to load a specific data slice from any infoprovider.

We can use a data manager package to load data from any infocube to SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation version for Netweaver. You can get more details about this at: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs;jsessionid=(J2EE3414700)ID1897954850DB00258195100095085303End?blog=/pub/wlg/14002

The first option to specify selection is the option that is available in the transformation file. Please see the example of the following transformation file:

Note that in the OPTIONS section, we have entered a selection to select data from only two characteristic values C2000 and C1000 of the characteristic ZACCT01. Hence we are selecting only a subset of the source Infoprovider. You can enter selections from multiple characteristics here in the selection and thus load data from a specific data slice in the source from Infoprovider.

In addition to this, we can also have enhanced user interface to specify the selections. The delivered process chain for this enhanced user interface is /CPMB/LOAD_IFOPROV_UI.

When we run the data manager package that is linked with this process chain, we can specify the technical name of the source infocube.

In the user interface that we get in the next screen, we can see the characteristics for the infocube that we selected in the earlier screen and we can specify the individual values as well as the ranges for the selections for each characteristic in the source infocube as you can see in the screenshots below..

What if your source cube has multiple key figures? In that case, one option is to convert the key figure based model into an account based model (https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm60/helpdata/en/0f/903d41d4cc4c0de10000000a1550b0/content.htm) prior to loading the data. If you don't want to adopt that approach, SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5 version for Netweaver also provides us a keyword MVAL. For us to use this keyword, the dimension must be one existed column in the cube. The dimension members in dim_mem must be the base members of the dimension (CALC = ‘N'). The key figure type must be the field name of the source data. Here is an example of using this keyword:

[Users can directly input the dimension members in the dim_mem, or input any existing mapping command in the dim_mem, such as *newcol, *col or *newcol(cash)+*col(1)].

Thus we can see that using a combination of these, we can effectively load a specific data slice easily from any infoprovider.

The Key Benefits of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation -- BPC7.5 Curriculum and Certification

2011-04-18T13:02:00.001-07:00

The SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application unifies and streamlines the planning, budgeting, and forecasting process and can enable a faster close. Finance-owned and maintained, the application unifies planning, financial consolidation and management reporting for the enterprise – improving budget cycle times, driving compliance with regulatory and financial standards, helping reduce external audit costs, instilling confidence, and reducing business risk.

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is available in two versions:

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for the Microsoft platform – A unified planning, budgeting, and consolidation application that is designed to be owned and managed by business users
SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver – A unified planning and consolidation application built directly on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform and designed to be owned and managed by business users

With SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, everything you need to meet your bottom-up and top-down financial and operational planning requirements, as well as complete consolidation and reporting, is available through a single, unified application and user interface. You can benefit from:

Improved agility – Quickly model new business scenarios and decide on a course of action that maximizes value creation
Reduced cycle time – Finance and line-of-business managers can collaborate in a unified landscape, streamlining the process of creating and approving plans, budgets, and forecasts.
Minimized business and compliance risk – Transparent financial data and a single version of the truth enable fast, accurate management and statutory reporting
Increased user productivity – An intuitive interface and familiar office tools help workers make the most of their time.

SAP Education offers a series of BPC7.5 courses in the areas of Administration, Reporting & Planning, and Consolidations:

BPC410 – BPC7.5 Administration for the Microsoft platform includes modeling and maintaining dimensions and applications, performing data imports and transformations, creating your own script logic, setting up a security model, how to set up business process flows and work status.

BPC420 – BPC7.5 Administration for the NetWeaver platform includes modeling and maintaining dimensions and applications, performing characteristic and InfoCube data imports and transformations, creating your own script logic, setting up a security model, set up auditing, how to set up business process flows and work status, and how to create drill throughs to BW and ECC.

BPC430 – BPC7.5 Reporting for the NetWeaver & Microsoft platform includes fundamental and advanced dynamic range exchange features, cross application reporting, formatting, report jumps, EV functions, audit reports, how to use business process flows, and how to create and use drill throughs to BW and ECC. In addition, you’ll be able to carry out top down and bottom up planning, use the spread/trend/weight functions, copy and mark up data, set up macro buttons or hypertext link commands, and model various planning scenarios.

BPC440 – BPC7.5 Consdolidations for the NetWeaver platform including modeling and maintaining dimensions and applications for legal consolidations, configure business rules, create script logic for consolidation scenarios, set up and test all consolidation task such as validation, currency, intercompany eliminations, ownership eliminations, journals,validations, and reclassifications. Work with a robust business process flow for legal consoldations and learn how to use the dynamic hierarchy editor to graphically maintian ownership data.

And let's not forget certification!! A new certification is now available for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation -- C_EPMBPC_75 (http://bit.ly/epmbpc75). This certification test verifies the knowledge in the area of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5. It validates that the Associate Consultant has a good sound knowledge and understanding of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5, version for SAP NetWeaver and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5, version for the Microsoft platform.

Introducing – a Content Marketplace for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation

2011-04-18T13:01:00.001-07:00

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is revolutionizing the business planning landscape. With its two versions - version for Microsoft and version for Netweaver - it has become the Gold standard for doing business planning - especially with its wide variety of planning content. In this blog, we will discuss the available planning and consolidation content.

To begin with, a natural question would be: Is there a place where I can get a list of all the planning and consolidation content currently available? The next question would be: How do I get some more details about a specific content that I am interested in? To provide the answers to these questions, now we have a content marketplace for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation here on SDN. You can access it at:https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/SAP%20BusinessObjects%20Planning%20and%20Consolidation%20Content%20Solutions

Content marketplace - why and what:

This content marketplace serves many purposes. Firstly, it gives you a list of all the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content solutions at one place. If you want to know if content for any industry or any line of business is currently available for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, this is the place where you should go. Secondly, it also gives you links and contacts to get further information about the content. Thirdly, it gives you a broad classification of the available content solutions, which we will discuss further here. Finally, it also tells you what version of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation each of the content solution will work with.

This content marketplace lists the content developed by both SAP and partners. The intent is to provide the list of all available content - not just the content specifically developed by SAP. SAP partners are at the forefront of many SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation implementations. In the process, they develop content (reports, input schedules, logic, calculations etc.) for the project and/or customer. Some partners then take that content and develop it further to incorporate the best business practices, take the project specific or confidential part out of the equation and make the application more suitable for a specific industry, line of business or point solution. This can be done sometimes with or without help from SAP. A very good example would be the accelerator for capital planning. Our partner, Aster Group, developed this solution as a point solution for meeting the demands of organizations needing a user friendly, user driven solution to do capital expenditure planning. This helps all the constituents of the community. It helps business users who are looking for a solution to a specific business problem (ex. improve capital expenditure planning). It helps SAP better meet the needs of customers looking to implement functional specific solutions faster. It helps partners to publish their achievements and promote themselves in the community. When we list the partner solution here, directly or indirectly, the prospective user of that content may consider that partner to do the implementation. So if you are a partner, who has developed a SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content solution, please consider posting the details of the solution in this wiki.

Classification of content solutions:

Let us talk about the classification of the content here on the content marketplace. There are various types of content; however, for the sake of simplicity, let us consider three broad categories:

Priced content supported by SAP
Non-priced content supported by SAP and
Non-priced content supported by channels other than SAP

The first category is that of the priced SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content. This can be either a Business Analytic Solution (BAS) or a Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS). For example, consider the product ‘SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for Healthcare'. This is a Business Analytic Solution. These solutions are priced analytic applications and have SAP support. (Having SAP support means that you can log an OSS message if there are any issues with the product and support persons from SAP can redress them.)

The second category is that of the non-priced content supported by SAP - like the IFRS starter kit. The content in this category does not have an additional license charge for customers of the respective version of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation. For example, for the customers of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for the Microsoft platform, the IFRS starter kit for Microsoft version is available at no additional license charge and can be downloaded from service marketplace. Similarly for the customers of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP Netweaver, the IFRS starter kit available for the version for SAP NetWeaver is non-priced content and can be downloaded from service marketplace at no additional charge.

The third category is that of the non-priced content supported by channels other than SAP. This includes a variety of non-priced content such as best practice documents, service offerings, consulting accelerators etc. These content solutions may be supported by channels other than SAP. For example, the accelerator for liquidity planning may be supported by Deloitte and not SAP though SAP may have the intellectual property for that solution.

Thus, we now have the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content marketplace to go to, to refer to, to talk about and after all, to contribute to.

Introducing – a Content Marketplace for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation

2011-04-18T13:00:00.001-07:00

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is revolutionizing the business planning landscape. With its two versions - version for Microsoft and version for Net weaver - it has become the Gold standard for doing business planning - especially with its wide variety of planning content. In this blog, we will discuss the available planning and consolidation content.

Content marketplace - why and what:

Classification of content solutions:

Let us talk about the classification of the content here on the content marketplace. There are various types of content; however, for the sake of simplicity, let us consider three broad categories:

Priced content supported by SAP
Non-priced content supported by SAP and
Non-priced content supported by channels other than SAP

Thus, we now have the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content marketplace to go to, to refer to, to talk about and after all, to contribute to.

Which EPM application is right for your planning and cost allocation needs?

2011-04-18T12:59:00.001-07:00

If you visit SAP.com to learn more about the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio and if you are new to the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) subject matter you might have the question of which is the right application to use for your organization's planning and cost allocation requirements. I know this since this is a question we receive often in the EPM RIG when talking at events and at various meetings we have with customers and consultants, despite the wealth of useful product information at the links provided above. The fact that this question arises is not surprising because from a high-level viewpoint business planning and cost allocation can occur in either of two applications.
SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC)
SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management (PCM)

BPC can be used to allocate values from one set of dimension members to another set of members using a predefined syntax of parameters defined within the script logic keyword known as *RUNALLOCATION. BPC can allocate any type of value you require to be allocated. It can perform an allocation on a quantity or it can allocate a currency amount and it can do this for any account type (income, expense, asset, liability, or equity). The important concept to take away about the BPC allocation engine is it transfers values from one or more members to one or more alternative members WITHIN a dimension. Thus the allocation of planned department expenses from a sending cost center to several receiving cost centers is a very typical use cases for BPC.

PCM, on the other hand, has a purpose-built assignment technique to handle the allocation of costs from one dimension's level of detail to another dimension's more granular level of detail. This concept is sometimes thought more of a distribution or disaggregation of costs, rather than an allocation. PCM is not limited to only costs. It could also be used to support scenarios where quantities and values other than costs need to be allocated, but cost allocation is its typical use case. Thus the allocation of department expenses to activity costs is a commonly used business process that PCM supports, as is the allocation of overhead costs to customers and/or products.

To further help address the question above, I am providing a summary of unique capabilities within SAP Profitability and Cost Management and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation. You can use this list of features to evaluate each product's capabilities against your requirements for business planning and cost allocation.

Product features which are unique to PCM:

PCM offers predefined dimensions and measures representing best practice for profitability reporting and cost analysis, as well as a number of predefined calculations like price per unit, activity rates, plan verses actual variance, etc . The number of dimensions and key figures in PCM is fixed by SAP.
An internal activity-based costing engine provides out-of-the-box ABC data flows which follow the industry standard methodology known as the CAM-I Cross of Activity Based Management.
Costs which exist at the account and responsibility center level can be assigned to activities using a resource driver and the activity costs can be further assigned to cost objects (such as customer or product or channel) using an activity driver.
One simple screen is used to setup cost assignments within a model. Costs can be cascaded, for example, first to customer and then to product, or they can be assigned multi-dimensionally to all cost objects.
PCM supports an unlimited number of alternative dimension member hierarchies and attributes to support any cost allocation scenario or reporting summary which may be requested by the business.
Hierarchies can be modified on the fly -- even adding new parent levels -- without any database reorganization required and the model automatically updates all data which is impacted by the changes.
PCM runs in memory, with real-time model calculations used for cost allocation and what-if analysis without any jobs to run.
Data loads and model calculations can also occur via a job scheduler and results can be exported to a data warehouse for reporting, if this is a requirement.
Trace back is a standard feature which allows visibility of the final allocated cost at the cost object level back to the sending activities and further back to the source line items and responsibility centers.
PCM supports driver-based planning scenarios whereby changes to the activity drivers can flex the resource requirements as represented in the model by costs, headcount, machine capacity, or any other inputs.
Wizard driven functions allow custom formulas & rules and alerts to be easily written using point-and-click interaction and then enhanced using a full featured Visual Basic scripting language.
PCM has its own proprietary reporting framework including customizable layouts which can be visualized on the web as PCM Books built using an extensive toolbox of design elements.
Note: PCM runs on a Windows Server environment with an underlying SQL Server or Oracle database. PCM does not run on SAP NetWeaver. However the PCM Data Bridge ETL tool can import BW data using BEx queries.

Product features which are unique to BPC:

BPC means Business Planning AND Consolidation and both disciplines are contained in one integrated application which allows plan data to be consolidated, if that is needed, and it allows easy reporting of plan verses consolidated actual comparisons.
The BPC data model is customizable to the extent that you define as many dimensions as which are needed for a given application; however, there can be only 1 value field (key figure) in BPC.
The BPC administration module features an embedded Excel sheet that makes dimension member (master data) maintenance easy and familiar for everyone.
The BPC for Microsoft Office add-in allows BPC to easily retrieve, combine and display BPC transactional data from Word, PowerPoint, or Excel and to modify or send data into BPC from Excel.
The Excel add-in provides more than 100 new Excel functions to interact with BPC data, while providing access to all native Excel features.
Predefined report and input schedule templates offer immediately useable views for reporting or posting data into BPC, and that which may be copied and easily adapted to business requirements.
Powerful reports or input schedules can be easily created from a wizard and provide dynamic row, column, or worksheet expansions based on user driven selections of dimension members. The dynamic expansion philosophy even allows Excel-based formulas like percent of total, and Excel based formatting to be inherited by a changing range of data.
Reports and input schedules can be parked for off-line updates and then have the changes automatically imported into BPC when back on-line.
Reports and input schedules can be sent to e-mail distribution lists and updates can be collected to submit changes to the application.
Business Process Flow templates can be created and reused to define guided instruction steps for users, as well as e-mail enabled workflow approval processes.
Prebuilt logic for tracking work states (such as draft, submitted, and final) and which can be customized is delivered with the application and can be used to set read/write access to data.
The BPC Data Manager ETL tool can import transactional data directly from BW data sources including cubes and data store objects.
The BPC Data Manager can also import BW master data, texts and hierarchies.
When importing or exporting data to/from BPC the transformation and conversion mappings are maintained easily in Excel spreadsheets.
Note: BPC can run on a Microsoft Windows Server with a SQL Server database platform or it can run on the SAP NetWeaver platform with any database supported by NW.
If running on NetWeaver each BPC application is a BW cube, each BPC dimension is a BW characteristic InfoObject and each BPC property is an attribute.

In summary, BPC is to be used for the most typical business planning scenarios found in organizations like departmental cost budgeting, financial statement planning, and, of course, financial consolidations. BPC cost allocations should be used for moving amounts from member to member within a dimension like from cost center to cost center or profit center to profit center. While BPC can be used for driver-based planning scenarios, the allocation logic is your own to define using the tools contained mainly within Excel and BPC script logic.

In contrast, PCM handles cost allocation very differently. It delivers an easy to use assignment technique to distribute costs from one dimension to another, adding more granularity along the way. PCM easily handles cost allocation scenarios that follow an ABC methodology and PCM is especially useful for driver-based planning and cost allocation without the need for much, if any, customization.

Improve performance of your BPC NW scripts

2011-04-18T12:58:00.001-07:00

Majority of BPC projects pay big attention to performance issues. This is especially true when companies want to plan on detailed level. Some scripts in such cases can run for hours.

Parallel execution of the script with sub regions could be away to improve performance. There are multiple ways of making run scripts in parallel, but the most obvious way is to split the original data set into multiple data sets manually. This becomes very cumbersome when data sets change from one run to another.

Lets' assume you have to run some script for multiple Entities and calculation on each Entity is done independently form all the other Entities. It would be natural to split the whole Data Set by Entities and execute that script for each Entity separately. This could bring not only benefits of concurrent execution, but of a smaller data set for each task as well.

We decided to automate that task by implementing a BADI that splits the data set and starts next run as soon as previous execution is finished. We found that this approach can speed up execution 10 to 20 times with just 4 parallel processes comparing to the original script.

Using that tool is very easy. You just have to call the BADI providing the script name and name of the dimension on which split is made. Sometimes you also have to adjust your original script if it has "hardcoded" members of the dimension that is used for split. If for example, the mentioned above script has a statement

*XDIM_MEMBERSET ENTITY = A1000, A1001, A1002, A1003

it should be replaced with

XDIM_MEMBERSET ENTITY = %ENTITY_SET%.

BADI RUNLOGIC is very similar to BPC MS script RUNLOGIC, but here we'll discuss mostly differences between those two. The main difference is that MS version doesn't have parallelization option.

If for instance, name of the original script is CALULATE_SALES.LGF than to run it in parallel for each Entity you have to create a script like:

*START_BADI RUNLOGIC

LOGIC = CALCULATE_SALES.LGF

CHANGED = ENTITY

*END_BADI

In the illustration above Entity Dimension was chosen just as an example. Data set split can be done on any Dimension. If you what splitting data set on Time dimension you can change that script to something like

*START_BADI RUNLOGIC

LOGIC = CALCULATE_SALES.LGF

DIMENSION TIME = BAS(2010.TOTAL)

CHANGED = TIME

*END_BADI

BADI will be attached to the How To … Guide as a transport. So, the only preparation one should make is to import that transport and set up number of parallel processes you want to run.

I'm finished next version of that BADI which will make it functionality closer to the original MS RUNLOGIChttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_bpc75/helpdata/en/a0/2f338bbdec4ba6bf9bac0ec266373b/frameset.htm, i.e. it will inherit context from the calling script. This will require less parameters in the call. This is downward compatible.

Another version of RUNLOGIC is available now. It allows grouping by Dimension property and by Hierarchy node. This provides for much better flexibility of grouping data in slices of comparable sizes. If one doesn’t have a Dimension that provides equal splits of data one can create a Property (or a Hierarchy) and populate them to form equal splits.

This is especially useful when you have a Dimension that provides slices too small to be efficient because of the overhead. We tested it on this kind of data and by adding a Property we were able to achieve run time reduction of 3 times.

How To Guide is finally published!!!. You can find it at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/b0ad38cf-9e0e-2e10-9d9a-fbf57e69cd40.

Idea Place for BPC Enhancement Requests

2011-04-18T12:33:00.001-07:00

Idea Place launched at Sapphire this year as a new tool to influence the future path of SAP products. As part of that launch SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for Microsoft, and SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation for SAP NetWeaver have been included. Several improvements to the Idea Place tool have already been realized; most recently the ability for Service Marketplace User Id's to be automatically recognized at login.

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for Microsoft was originally acquired from Outlooksoft. Since then new windows-based releases have launched as well as a release based on SAP NetWeaver. Both releases currently have a 7.5 GA release with a 10.0 release planned for next year. The 10.0 release is the release for which we are asking your feedback .

In order to provide visibility to the requests that are coming in, as well as a means to vote on the enhancements you most want to see in the products, we have converted several of our BPC requests into the tool automatically. We ask that you vote on the options you are most interested in seeing in future releases as well as any new ideas that you would like to see.

Once the voting period is up, EPM Solution Management will review the items that have the most votes and determine which ideas can be included in the product.

The direct link to Idea Place is : Idea Place

For BPC tools, please navigate to the appropriate area under the Products and Solutions links:

https://ideas.sap.com/community/products_and_solutions/epm_bpc_netweaver

https://ideas.sap.com/community/products_and_solutions/epm_bpc_microsoft

It is also possible to give suggestions on Idea Place by navigating to Services and Communities - Help us to improve Idea Place:

https://ideas.sap.com/community/community_and_services/improve_idea_place_public

If you would like to follow updates via RSS it is possible to do so by:

NetWeaver: https://ideas.sap.com/community/feeds/allcontent?community=2014

Microsoft: https://ideas.sap.com/community/feeds/allcontent?community=2015

For more information please see the following blog:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/20719

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How to create custom SSIS package for unlocking workstatus of selected base member without unlocking other workstatus of memebrs in SAP BPC (Microsoft Platform)

2011-04-18T12:32:00.001-07:00

SAP BPC has Workstatus Function that user can or can’t submit their data from client according to workstatus state value but some users complain below things.

a. If one of the child entity wants to adjust value after all entity’s workstatus set as ‘locked’, there is no way to allow submitting data from only that entity. Admin has to unlock all entity so Admin can’t make sure others do not submit data during workstatus is unlocked.

b. Even though there is TOPDOWN application parameter exists, it needs to unlock from top member to based member.

c. In addition, if user wants to change status, it can’t change it from ‘Locked(Approved)’ to ‘Unlocked’. It means if user has 4 states in their workstatus, they have to change 3 times using current UI.

Tbl<app>Lock table has all workstatus information so user can solve above issues using Data Manager custom package. This blog article will help to create it.

Note: Create custom package should be done by customers and partners. This document is just helping to create package and doesn’t guarantee its result. SAP strongly recommends testing custom package after it is created by users or partners.

Package will work based on the selected base members.

For example, if user selects Actual, Budget and 2010.JAN, 2010.FEB, SalesUSNeast, SalesWest it will change below combinations.

Actual, 2010.JAN, SalesUSNeast

Actual, 2010.JAN, SalesWest

Actual, 2010.FEB, SalesUSNeast

Actual, 2010.FEB, SalesWest

Budget, 2010.JAN, SalesUSNeast

Budget, 2010.JAN, SalesWest

Budget, 2010.FEB, SalesUSNeast

Budget, 2010.FEB, SalesWest

Here is detail design of SSIS package.

a. Package Screen shot

-. Package will create SQL statement in the script task

-. ExecuteSQL task will execute that SQL statement

-. ForeachLoopContainter will execute stored procedure as many as combination of selected members.

b. SQL statement for creating all combination of selected base members

For example, if user selects below members, query and result set will be same as below.

Category Dimension: 'Actual','Budget'

Time Dimension: '2007.JAN','2007.FEB'

Entity Dimension: 'SalesUSNeast','SalesSouth'

<Query>
select a.*, b.* , c.* from ( select 'actual' as category union select 'budget' ) as a, (select '2007.JAN' as [time]union select '2007.FEB' ) as b, (select 'salesusNeast' as [entity]union select 'salesSouth' ) as c order by category,[time],entity

actual 2007.FEB salesSouth

actual 2007.FEB salesusNeast

actual 2007.JAN salesSouth

actual 2007.JAN salesusNeast

budget 2007.FEB salesSouth

budget 2007.FEB salesusNeast

budget 2007.JAN salesSouth

budget 2007.JAN salesusNeast

c. Stored procedures that needs to be executed in the loop container

EXEC up_SetWorkStatusFinance @StatusCode=2,@UpdateBy=N'<Execution user>,@Category=N'ACTUAL',@Entity=N'Worldwide1',@Time=N'2006.TOTAL'

EXEC up_SetWorkStatusIncludeChildrenFinance @StatusCode=2,@UpdateBy=N'<Execution User',@Category=N'ACTUAL',@Entity=N'Worldwide1',@Time=N'2006.TOTAL'

d. Data Manager Script for receiving selected dimension members

You can define Global variable and use this value for creating SQL statement in the First script task

GLOBAL(A1,%CATEGORY_SET%)

Note: Global variable is case sensitive so please define it as UPPERCASE.

One of my customers created this package with SAP Partner based on this article and used it in the production environment now. Of course, this is not for usual case but might be useful for controlling complex workstaus without affecting workstatus of other entity.

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Discovering the hidden tables of SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation, version for Netweaver

2011-04-18T12:30:00.001-07:00

Within SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation, version for Netweaver (from herein called "BPC") there are several control tables that are automatically generated when certain options are activated. For example, activating BPC comment capability requires the BPC system to generate tables to store the user submitted comments. These "hidden" tables are located in the 1CPMB name space. The technical id of these tables always incorporate the two character application set designation.

A delivered program, UJ0_GET_GEN_TABNAME , allows you to locate the technical names of all generated tables. To access this program, log into the BW Netweaver enviroment supporting the BPC application and execute t-code SE38 "ABAP Editor". Enter the program name "UJ0_GET_GEN_TABNAME":

The program will request a selection for the Appset and Application:

After entering the Appset and application names, the system response is to provide a report with all generated tables associated with the specific selection:

You may copy the table technical names and access the table contents via t-code SE16:

Execute the transaction and a selection screen is presented to allow you to limit the selection to specific records:

Executing from the selection screen provides a listing of all relevant table entries:

You can drill into each table entry (by double clicking the desired row) to view the specific record (this includes information on the user who entered the comment, the date the comment was created, the dimension context associated with the comment, and the comment text itself.

Note that for comments, the actual comment text is stored in the "SCOMMENT" field.

Know your BPC - Attend TechEd 2010 Session BI164

2011-04-18T12:29:00.001-07:00

Introduction to BI164

The SBOP PC (BPC) 7.5 NW session meets the definition of hands-on. With nine exercises ranging from core functionality (Reporting and Formatting) to new features and functionality (Business Process Flows, Xcelsius Dashboards and Drill-Through) it’s guaranteed to keep you busy learning about one of SAP’s hottest products. With thorough documentation this session is suitable for beginners and experts looking to experience the benefits of this latest release. Best of all, at the end of the session you can back up your work and take it with you!

Sessions

1. Logging into the System

This first exercise teaches you how to log on to the system and its different clients such as the Administration client and BPC for Excel.

2. Reporting, Formatting and Properties

One of the core strengths of BPC is its highly customizable formatting capabilities. In this exercise you will learn how to use the standard BPC formatting tools. There is also a bonus section that teaches you how to create consistent formatting dynamically using BPC Properties.

3. Administration Client: Dimension Members, Security and Drill-Through to BW

Next, you will review the capabilities of the Administration client, touching on some of the most common tasks. You will also implement one of BPC 7.5 for NetWeaver’s newest features, Drill-Through.

4. Data Manager: Importing from BW and more...

One of the main benefits of BPC’s NetWeaver platform is its integration points with NetWeaver. In this exercise you will touch on one of those topics by importing data from BW into BPC. You will also dive into other data manager topics.

5. Data Entry through Excel

Similar to the 2nd exercise, in this case we will cover creating input schedules which allow users to write data back to BPC via Excel. We will also cover the rules for when data can and cannot be written back.

6. Multi-Currency Conversion and Reporting

Currency conversion is a vital part of every planning cycle. After discussing some of the theory about the properties and rules at work, we check out the account dimension and the conversion methods associated with each account. Then we take a look at BPC’s currency conversion rule engine.

7. Creating and using Business Process Flows (BPF’s)

BPF’s were another key addition to the BPC NetWeaver platform in the 7.5 release. In this exercise you will experience both the administrative side of creating BPF’s and how end users consume them.

8. Dashboarding for BPC using Xcelsius

Visualization of data is critical – especially when it comes to presentations of the final budgets or plans to company executives. To achieve powerful visualization we will build an Xcelsius Dashboard on top of the BPC data that will refresh dynamically when the underlying data in BPC changes.

9. Take Your Work Home – Backup and Restore

After all of your hard work this last exercise will allow you to backup your work to restore it later in your own BPC 7.5 NW system. Backup & restore is a task that system administrators perform and nothing an end user would normally do.

Who's coming directory?

"The 'Who’s Coming?' directory will allow all attendees to find out who else will be attending SAP TechEd 2010 Berlin and Las Vegas. The system helps attendees connect with the colleagues, experts, and peers they follow on Twitter and LinkedIn that are also registered for TechEd. In addition, attendees can identify their interest areas using social tagging and then connect with others that have similar interests." - Chip Rodgers

Expert Networking Sessions

All speakers have been asked to register expert networking session to intensify the dialogue about the topic of choice. Typically these sessions should be highly interactive and dynamic and result a bi-directional communication and ultimately a pleasant discussion/great time. I've already registered two sessions in Las Vegas to reach out to all those interested in attending a 'BPC 7.5 NetWeaver Technical Q and A'. I'm looking forward to the discussions!

Networking Sessions: Las Vegas

Innovation Weekend

Last, but definitely not least - Innovation Weekend. I was really excited to hear from Marilyn Pratt about their (Marylin Pratt, Craig Cmehil and Jason Cao) ideas of putting together a new community event as never seen before. In a nutshell the idea revolves around bringing together the most brilliant minds from all the sub-communities of SCN (BusinessObjects, BPX and SDN) and let them take a business case from idea to prototype in just 30 hours! Wan't to find out more? Here are link to an introduction blog post and the WIKI page. See you there!

Selection Screen in Tranformation file

2011-04-18T12:28:00.001-07:00

To import the transaction data from BI cube, best option is make use of transformation file. In transformation file if we want to filter the records based on some conditions then we have to make use of option SELECTION where we will give the parameters as there is no option to pass the data from LoadInfoProvider Package to transformation file.

Now the problem comes, if we want to update BPC cube frequently. E.g. if we are uploading the Actuals from BI cube then this activity needs to be done monthly. And if, user is doing actual upload activity then there are chances of error as he might can remove some semi-colon or delete some other parameters. Also he might not have any interest in data which is visible in INSTRUCTION sheet of transformation file.

So best solution is we can provide the selection screen in transformation file itself with all the necessary parameters by using excel functionality. Following is the procedure:

1. In the Transformation file, add another sheet e.g. INPUT.

2. Give the selection parameters in the added sheet.

E.g.

Company
TEST

Financial Year
2011

Fiscal Period/Month
5

3. Now use the excel functionality (& or concatenate) in SELECTION option in the Instruction sheet of transformation file which contains all the details like options, mapping and conversion.

="SELECTION= 0COMP_CODE,"&INPUT!F6&";0FISCYEAR,"&INPUT!F7&";0LOC_CURRCY,INR;0FISCPER3,"&INPUT!F8&";"

So I am referencing the INPUT sheet data into INSTRUCTION sheet. So whenever user selects the Financial Year & Period, values will get changed automatically in INSTRUCTION sheet.

Now we can hide INSTRUCTION sheet and only INPUT sheet will be visible to user. So he just selects the required data and validates and uploads

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When to use the Write-back badi in BPC7.x NW

2011-04-18T01:38:00.001-07:00

SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation version for Netweaver effectively leverages the Netweaver infrastructure and we can use the Business Add-In functionality (http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/e6/d54d3c596f0b26e10000000a11402f/content.htm). In this blog we will try to explore the features of write-back badi and discuss when we can use it to our advantage in the implementation projects.

You are in the best position to use the write back badi if you are on SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation 7.5 version for Netweaver. At present, the latest support pack for 7.5NW is SP4 but even if you are on an earlier SP level, you can still use the write-back badi. If you are on BPC7.0NW though, you should be at least on SP4 or higher to take advantage of the write-back badi.

One may ask, is it mandatory for us to use a write-back badi to write any records using BPC? The answer is ‘no'. It is not mandatory for us to use write-back badi if we don't want to. Even without a write back badi, several BPC customers have been entering data through input schedules, data manager packages, comments etc. Write-back badi is generally of use when we want to write-back records in a fashion not supported by the regular write back operations.

For example, let us consider a simple case of budgeting by cost centers. Let us consider that our Entity type dimension is Cost_Center and it has a hierarchical structure with Worldwide as the top node, followed by Europe, Asia and North America as lower level nodes. Under each of these nodes, let us assume that we have individual countries. So North America may have USA, Canada and Mexico; whereas Europe may have UK, Germany, France and Asia may have Singapore, India, China etc. Hence, in this dimension, the individual countries are the lowest level nodes and typically we can do planning ONLY at the lowest level nodes. So in a normal situation, we can plan at the level of India, USA, Canada, Germany etc but we may not be able to plan at the level of Europe, North America, and Asia. This is good if we want to do bottom-up planning. If we have to do top-down planning where it may become important to enter the data at the higher level nodes, then the normal write back operation may not allow us to do so. In such cases, write-back badi can be effectively used. With the write-back badi we can enter the plan data at a higher level node and the data will get stored at the base level dimension members by means of the disaggregation mechanism defined in the write-back badi. The disaggregation mechanism can be defined in the badi implementation. This may include different types of distributions, including even distribution, based on a percentage value which is maintained in a property, or distribution based on previous year's data, etc. Some type of ABAP program could also be developed to allow maintenance of such distribution rules for parent level entries per Appset/Application/Parent Member.

Another example where write back badi may become necessary is where we have matrix security and the data entry has to be secured based on the matrix security. Let us take an example to clarify this scenario.

Let us consider that a member access profile (say MAP1) is set up as follows:

Category = Plan - Read/Write

Time = 2009.OCT - Read/write

Time = [ALL] - Read only

The idea here is that the user should be able to read the plan values for all time periods but write to only 2009. OCT month plan values.

Now consider that there is another member access profile (say MAP2) that is set up as follows:

Category = Forecast - Read/Write

Time = [ALL] - Read/Write

The idea here is that the user should be able to write forecast values to all periods.

Now, if these profiles are assigned to two different users there is no issue. However if they are assigned to the same user, then there is a conflict. Clearly, the administrator of the security intends to RESTRICT writing of values to Plan category for time other than 2009.OCT. However what happens is that if the user who has both these member access profiles assigned, enters a Plan value for say 2009.SEP, it gets saved according to the rule of least restrictions by dimension - in this case the time dimension. This is not what the administrator might have intended.

In this case also the write-back badi can come to our rescue. With the write-back badi we can very effectively handle the situations like this.

The write back badi is a ‘pre-process' badi. This means that it is called before any other checks are processed. Since the write-back badi is called before the standard security checks, validation checks, work status checks etc, it can accomplish the tasks that are generally not possible with the standard write-back operations. The Enhancement Spot for the write-back badi is ‘UJR_WRITE_BACK' and it includes filters for AppSet ID, Application ID, and Module ID.

Appset and Application IDs are self explanatory. The module can be either Manual planning, journals, data manager, comments or document modifications. This enables us to use a PRE-PROCESS method where the logic for pre-processing for the write back can be written. BAdI Implementation UJR_BADI_SAMPLE_DISAGGREGATE is shipped as an sample implementation for disaggregation.

There is also a how-to guide available for the step-by-step instruction for the write-back badi implementation for disaggregation. (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/f0309226-814f-2d10-61a6-ef8da29e3727?QuickLink=index&overridelayout=true)

Thus write-back badi can b

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e a very useful utility for us to leverage on out BPC NW implementation projects

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How to restart BPC service automatically using scheduler (Microsoft platform)

2011-04-17T15:58:00.001-07:00

Sometimes BPC system needs to be restarted whatever the reason is.

Here is what we should restart. (Note: it should be done sequentially.)

1. Stop 'Send Governor' service

2. Stop BPC component services (Please see below screen shot how to stop it manually)

3. Stop and Start IIS (Internet Information Services

4. Start 'Send Governor' service

As we know step1, 3 and 4 can be done command.

Here is command for executing above steps.

1. net stop "Outlooksoft Sendgovernor service"

3. IISRESET

4. net start "Outlooksoft Sendgovernor service"

But there is no command for stopping BPC component in the component services.

One of BPC customer wanted to do this so I created simple script that can stop all component service's component. (Note: it will stop all component so if customer is using other component, it needs to be modified to avoid stopping.)

Here is source code.

=====================================================

Set adminCatalog = CreateObject("COMAdmin.COMAdminCatalog")

'getting all the Applications in the server

Set objAppCollection = adminCatalog.GetCollection("Applications")

    objAppCollection.Populate
    'loop for all application
    For i = 0 To objAppCollection.Count - 1

        Wscript.echo objAppCollection.Item(i).Name
        'Shutdown app
         adminCatalog.ShutDownApplication objAppCollection.Item(i).Name
    next

set objAppcollection = Nothing
set adminCatalog = Nothing

=====================================================

Let's assume user saved above source code as 'RestartCom.vbs'.

Now we can create a batch file - let's say it is ResetBPC.bat - that can be scheduled using windows scheduler.

Below four lines of source code is content of ResetBPC.bat file.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

net stop "Outlooksoft Sendgovernor service"

Cscript c:\restartcom.vbs

IISRESET

net start "Outlooksoft Sendgovernor service"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The customer who asked it to me satisfied its result using this script.

They could restart BPC service during night time without manual procedure.

I think it also will help other customers who have same concern and save time all SAP colleagues and partner consultants.

If you have any questions, please leave comments.

Do you want to become better BPC consultant !!!

2011-04-17T15:57:00.001-07:00

How do you become successful in BPC projects, what are the skills that i need to have to get better, if i am a BW consultant, can i convert into a BPC consultant etc. etc.

I would recommend reading a new book that has come out, authored by Sridhar Srinivasan and Kumar Srinivasan, which is a must read if you are exploring into this products

http://www.sap-press.com/products/SAP-BusinessObjects-Planning-and-Consolidation.html

Offcourse you should additionally become more finance savvy, business savvy as you groom into become a better BPC consultant. Study a finance MBA or CFA or CPA, and become BPC certified, this would help a lot

We also have lot of content posted in BPX community

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BPX/Enterprise+Performance+Management+%28EPM%29+How-to+Guides

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/epm-elearning

All the best !!!

Understanding how to Preserve Manually maintained Alternate Hierarchies with the new BPC Data Manager Package to Load from BW Hierarchies

2011-04-17T15:55:00.001-07:00

With the release of SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidations (BPC) 7.5, version for SAP NetWeaver into Ramp Up this past December one of the key improvements was the additional BW master data integration. Specifically BPC 7.5, version for SAP NetWeaver has two new Data Manager Packages / BW Process chains that represent this new set of functionality.

For a detailed look into this functionality you can also reference the excellent How-To Guide authored by Jeffrey Holdeman.

/CPMB/IMPORT_IOBJ_MASTER - BPC Import BW InfoObject Master Data
/CPMB/IMPORT_IOBJ_HIER - BPC Import BW InfoObject Hierarchy Data

This blog is going to highlight and explain the behavior of the latter of the two new Data Manager Packages listed above. Specifically this blog will highlight the way that hierarchies are mapped from BW InfoObjects to BPC Dimensions and how to "work around" some potentially unfavorable features that are standard with this package.

When running the newly delivered Data Manager Package as the end user you are prompted to select the following fields; your InfoObject Source, The format (external or internal), as well as the name of the transformation file, this is all fairly straight forward as most data manager packages are.

Once the InfoObject Source is selected, the format as well as the transformation file, the next critical step in using this package is to click on the "Set Selection" button and choose the hierarchies you wish to load from your chosen InfoObject.

The end user will be prompted to choose the Hierarchies they want to load into BPC, the hierarchy version (if relevant), the Member ID (the top node in from the hierarchy you wish to load), and the Level (if relevant).

One thing that is not extremely clear that I wanted to make crystal is the way that the source and target hierarchies are mapped to one another when using this Data Manager Package. Within this Data Manager Package the first line in the "Set Selection" prompt will load PARENTH1 in the target dimension; the second line will load PARENTH2 and so on. The standard behavior of this package is to completely blow away / delete all pre-existing hierarchies in your target dimension. There is currently no way to preserve pre-existing hierarchies that you have manually maintained in BPC directly (i.e. PARENTH3) using the standard functionality.

To make this package behavior very clear I will outline the behavior step by step:

The entire set of hierarchies of the target dimension is deleted
The hierarchies selected in the data manager prompt interface are matched to the target BPC dimension hierarchies based on their position in the prompt: (using the above screenshot as an example)

STDHIER will map to and overwrite PARENTH1
ALTHIER2 will map to and overwrite PARENTH2

NOTE: If for example, the end user wanted to reload PARENTH2 by itself from SAP BW this would not be possible as the target hierarchy that is mapped to is determined by the position of the entry on the prompt whereas the source by the contents of the prompt itself; without the first line in the prompt there can be no second.

Once the specifications for the source infoObject and hierarchy have been made, select the "Next" button in the data manager package prompt.

You will then be asked to choose the target dimension you wish to load into. Once you have chosen your target dimension you can simply click the "Finish" button to execute the package.

Multiple customers that I have recently spoken with have communicated a business requirement to preserve pre-existing hierarchies that are not being loaded into from BW. For example, if there is an alternate cost center hierarchy that is manually maintained in BPC NW as PARENTH3 the business wants this hierarchy preserved even when loading PARENTH1 and PARENTH2. To achieve this goal we can leverage another recently introduced feature within BPC 7.5 NW; the data manager package end routine.

The following part of this blog will explain how to preserve manually maintained hierarchies in your target dimension that are NOT BEING LOADED INTO from BW.

The ROUTINE BADI was introduced in BPC 7.5 NW which allows you to create an ABAP transformation prior to the execution of the transformation and conversion file (STARTROUTINE) or after the execution of the transformation and conversion file (ENDROUTINE).

To create a BADI of type routine, login to the backend NetWeaver BW 7.01 system that your BPC NW system is installed on top of. Once you have logged in to your backend system, navigate to transaction SE19.

Under Create Implementation choose the Enhancement Spot "UJD_ROUTINE" and click Create. Name your Enhancement Implementation.

Select the name of your BADI Implementation, the ABAP Class which will hold the code implementing the routine, and make sure the BADI definition name is BADI_UJD_ROUTINE. Once you have populated these fields click the Green Check Mark to continue.

Within the ABAP Class named above (Z_CL_BPC_HIER_UPDATE) you will have the standard IF_UJD_ROUTINE~RUNROUTINE method which will contain the main portion of code your start or end routine will leverage. For the purposes of our END ROUTINE you will create two other methods as well.

ADD_TO_HIERARCHIES_TO_BE_UPDAT
CONVERT_TO_N_FORMAT

I will take you now step by step through the process of adding the code necessary to execute this workaround.

First navigate to transaction se24 and modify the newly created class we just created Z_CL_HIER_UPDATE.

Now you are going to create the two new methods that were just mentioned above.

Type in the text names for both methods and give them descriptions accordingly. Once you have completed this you can select the "CONVERT_TO_N_FORMAT" method and click on the Parameters button.

Parameter

Type

Associated Type

I_HIE_MBR_NODES

Importing

UJA_T_MBR_NODE

R_HIE_N_NODES

Returning

UJN_T_HIER_NODE

Populate the parameter selections with the values outlined in the table above.

Once you have populated the parameter fields accordingly click on the button to take you into the actual code of the CONVERT_TO_N_FORMAT class method.

method convert_to_n_format. data: ls_hier_nodes type uja_s_mbr_node, lt_hier_nodes type uja_t_mbr_node, lsn_hier_nodes type ujn_s_hier_node, ltn_hier_nodes type ujn_t_hier_node, counter type i. counter = 1. refresh r_hie_n_nodes. lt_hier_nodes = i_hie_mbr_nodes. sort lt_hier_nodes by parent member. loop at lt_hier_nodes into ls_hier_nodes. at new parent. counter = 1. endat. lsn_hier_nodes-nodename = ls_hier_nodes-member. lsn_hier_nodes-parent = ls_hier_nodes-parent. lsn_hier_nodes-hier_name = ls_hier_nodes-hier_name. lsn_hier_nodes-order = counter. insert lsn_hier_nodes into table r_hie_n_nodes. counter = counter + 1. endloop. endmethod.

Cut and paste the above code into the CONVERT_TO_N_FORMAT method and save your work.Back out to the screen listing the methods select the “ADD_TO_HIERARCHIES_TO_BE_UPDAT” method and click on the Parameters button.

Parameter

Type
Associated Type

IT_HIER_NODES
Importing
UJN_T_HIER_NODE

CT_HIER_NODES
Changing
ANY TABLE

Populate the parameters according to the table above and enter the Implementation of the method ADD_TO_HIERARCHIES_TO_BE_UPDAT as we did previously for the CONVERT_TO_N_FORMAT method.

method add_to_hierarchies_to_be_updat. data: l_lines type i, lr_data type ref to data, ls_hier_nodes type ujn_s_hier_node, counter type i. field-symbols: <ls_line> type any, <rowindex> type any, <lt_data> type standard table. create data lr_data like line of ct_hier_nodes. assign lr_data->* to <ls_line>. create data lr_data like table of <ls_line>. assign lr_data->* to <lt_data>. <lt_data> = ct_hier_nodes. sort <lt_data> by ('ROWINDEX') descending. read table <lt_data> index 1 into <ls_line>. assign component 'ROWINDEX' of structure <ls_line> to <rowindex>. counter = <rowindex>. sort <lt_data> by ('ROWINDEX'). clear <ls_line>. loop at it_hier_nodes into ls_hier_nodes. counter = counter + 1. <rowindex> = counter. move-corresponding ls_hier_nodes to <ls_line>. insert <ls_line> into table <lt_data>. endloop. refresh ct_hier_nodes. ct_hier_nodes = <lt_data>. * break-point. endmethod.

Cut and paste the above code into your method and save.We now need to create the Attributes of our class.

Hit the back button until you see list of methods that you have been working with.

Click on the Attributes Tab and create the class attributes detailed in the below matrix:

Attribute

Level
Visibility
Typing
Associated Type

P_APPSET_ID
Instance Attribute
Private
Type
UJ_APPSET_ID

P_APPL_ID
Instance Attribute
Private
Type
UJ_APPL_ID

PO_MODEL
Instance Attribute
Private
Type Ref To
IF_UJ_MODEL

P_DIM_TARG
Instance Attribute
Private
Type
UJ_DIM_NAME

Save your work. Finally, navigate once again to your Methods tab and enter the implementation for the IF_UJD_ROUTINE~RUNROUTINE method where our END ROUTINE will be executed from.

method if_ujd_routine~runroutine. data: l_success type abap_bool, l_tabname type tabname, l_log_msg type string, l_hier_name type uj_hier_name, ls_dimension type uja_dimension, lo_dim type ref to if_uja_dim_data, lo_hier type ref to if_uja_hier, ls_dim type uja_s_dim, lr_data type ref to data, lt_hier_nodes type uja_t_mbr_node, ls_hier_nodes type uja_s_mbr_node, lsn_hier_nodes type ujn_s_hier_node, ltn_hier_nodes type ujn_t_hier_node, lt_hier_info type uja_t_hier, lt_hiers type uja_t_hier, ls_hier_info type uja_s_hier, lt_package_paras type ujd_th_value, ls_package_paras type ujd_s_value. field-symbols: <lt_data> type standard table, <lt_final> type standard table, <l_hienm> type any, <l_account> type any, <l_newaccount> type any, <l_signeddata> type any, <l_newsigndta> type any, <ls_line> type any, <ls_newline> type any. " PUT IMPORT VARIABLES INTO MEMORY p_appset_id = i_source_info-appset_id. p_appl_id = i_source_info-app_id. read table it_package_paras with key fieldname = 'DIMNAME' into ls_package_paras. if sy-subrc eq 0. p_dim_targ = ls_package_paras-value. else. " If the dimension being loaded into isn't found something is wrong so exit the BADI er_data = ir_data. exit. endif. " CREATE MODEL REFERENCE FOR APPLICATION SET " Create a reference for the Application Set Model. cl_uj_model=>get_model( exporting i_appset_id = p_appset_id receiving ro_model = po_model ). if po_model is initial. raise exception type cx_ujp_process_exception exporting textid = cx_ujp_process_exception=>ex_no_appset_found d_appset = p_appset_id. exit. endif. ** "Read Target Dimension Data lo_dim = po_model->get_dim_data( i_dim_name = p_dim_targ i_appl_id = p_appl_id ). lo_dim->get_hier_list( importing et_hier_info = lt_hier_info ). assign ir_data->* to <lt_data>. create data lr_data like line of <lt_data>. assign lr_data->* to <ls_line>. create data lr_data like table of <ls_line>. assign lr_data->* to <lt_final>. assign component 'HIER_NAME' of structure <ls_line> to <l_hienm>. loop at <lt_data> into <ls_line>. read table lt_hier_info into ls_hier_info with key hier_name = <l_hienm>. if sy-subrc eq 0. delete lt_hier_info where hier_name eq <l_hienm>. endif. endloop. loop at lt_hier_info into ls_hier_info. l_hier_name = ls_hier_info-hier_name. lo_hier = lo_dim->get_hier_ref( i_hier_name = l_hier_name ). lo_hier->load( ). lo_hier->get_all_member( importing et_mbr_node = lt_hier_nodes ). ltn_hier_nodes = convert_to_n_format( lt_hier_nodes ). add_to_hierarchies_to_be_updat( exporting it_hier_nodes = ltn_hier_nodes changing ct_hier_nodes = <lt_data> ). endloop. <lt_final> = <lt_data>. get reference of <lt_final> into lr_data. er_data = lr_data. endmethod.

Copy and paste the above code into your class method and save and activate the entire class.

Navigate back to SE19. Display the BADI Implementation and you should now see the Methods that were just created. Double click on the Filter Val. Button.

Add a name to your end routine which you will later use in order to reference the routine from your transformation file. For the purposes of this blog we will use BPCHIEUPD however the name is arbitrary.

Activate your Enhancement Implementation and we are now ready to test our workaround.

Login to your BPC Administration Console and navigate to the dimension member sheet for the dimension whose hierarchies you wish to load from BW.

Notice that the dimension member sheet has three hierarchies and only two that are to be loaded. The standard behavior of this data manager package will be to delete the third manually maintained hierarchy. By employing our newly created End Routine we will be able to preserve the third hierarchy.

Navigate to the BPC for Excel Client and the transformation file associated with your BW hierarchy load package.

Within the transformation file specify the name of your endroutine as illustrated in the screenshot above.

Run your data manager package and specify the hierarchies that you are going to load into PARENTH1 and PARENTH2.

· STDHIER = PARENTH1

· ALTHIER2 = PARENTH2

Run your data manager package and you will see inside of the Admin Console that your target dimension still has all three hierarchies.

With BPC 7.5 NW there are quite a few new BADI’s that can help consultants and customers meet different business requirements. I recommend that you familiarize yourselves with these new BADI’s and the various business cases in which it makes sense to use them.

Scott Cairncross is a Senior Director within the EPM RIG team and is responsible for the EPM RIG Americas.

I am very interested to hear the communities comments and constructive feedback. Thanks for your comments!
Comment on this weblog

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Does it also work for manually created members?
2010-09-08 01:07:39 Dries Paesmans Business Card [Reply]
Hi Scott,
good thing there are workarounds being developped ... One question, we have the problem that for manually created members in BPC, which do not exist in the BW hierarchy, its PARENTH1 column is always deleted when running the load hierachy package. Can we use this workaround to solve this problem as well?
- Does it also work for manually created members?
  2010-09-08 15:22:23 Scott Cairncross Business Card [Reply]
  Hi Dries, I am not 100% certain but I believe this methodology could work for your scenario. Cheers, Scott

Error in importing hierarchy from BW infobject into BPC
2010-08-19 20:10:05 Dalil Khan Business Card [Reply]
Thanks for the very useful blog. I was wondering if you may be able to help me with my situtation.
I am importing text hierarchy from BW infoobject into BPC. In my datamanager I specify the top level of the hierarchy = TCTB, Empty & Member ID = TB(the top level). It is rejecting all the records. Following is the error log. All records rejected. Is there any way I can import these records. Thanks

/CPMB/MODIFY completed in 0 seconds
/CPMB/BW_IOBJ_HIER_SOURCE completed in 0 seconds
/CPMB/IOBJ_SOURCE_HD_CONVERT completed in 3 seconds
/CPMB/BPC_HIER_DATA_TARGET completed in 4 seconds
/CPMB/CLEAR completed in 0 seconds
[Selection]
------------------------------------------------------------
INFOOBJECT=0CS_ITEM
SELECTION=<Selections><Selection Type="Hierarchy" ImportText="1"><Hierarchy><ID>D8IGJYZMI5W3TJ2UBMZGCL6QF</ID><MemberID>TB</MemberID><Level></Level></Hierarchy></Selection><KeyDate>20100820</KeyDate></Selections>
FORMAT= No
TRANSFORMATION= DATAMANAGER\TRANSFORMATIONFILES\PILOT\forHier_Account.xls
DIMNAME=P_ACCT
[Messages]
------------------------------------------------------------
Task name HIERARCHY DATA SOURCE:
Info: Hierarchy node includes text node or external characteristics
Record count: 2724
Task name CONVERT:
No 1 Round:
Record count: 2724
Accept count: 2724
Reject count: 0
Skip count: 0
Task name HIERARCHY DATA TARGET:
Hierarchy nodes include dimension members that do not exist
Submit count: 0
Application: PLANNING Package status: ERROR
- Error in importing hierarchy from BW infobject into BPC
 2010-09-08 15:24:54 Scott Cairncross Business Card [Reply]
 Hi Dhalil, I would need to see what the actual error was to be able to help more. I am not certain. It seems as if the text nodes in your hierarchy are not being created as real nodes in the BPC hierarchy. That would cause this error, however I am uncertain of the root cause without doing a deeper analysis.
 Cheers, Scott

Nice Workaround!
2010-07-30 12:59:07 Jim Link Business Card [Reply]
Scott,

Nice work - this appears to be a pretty straightforward work around for these particular issues.

We're running the BPC 7.0M version now, with plans to move to NW in the future. After reading this and Jeff's How-To Guide, I'm excited with the direction things are moving with regards to master data.

Questions:
1) Our organizational structure allows for a set up where both Cost Center and Profit Center reside in a single dimension called Entity (Cost Center as a child of Profit Center). I presume that if we set up the same way in 7.5NW that there is no way to take advantage of the master data and/or hierarchy DM packages since there are two infoobjects pointed to a single dimension?

2) Forgive me as I'm not terribly technical (and it wasn't obvious to me), but would I need to implement the above steps for each dimension that I'd like to load a hierarchy for? Or is it done once and then it applies to all dimensions?

2a) Depending on the response to #2, are there any plans to make the above work around part of standard configuration in future releases? It would seem to me that if it's set one time for all dimensions that it would be good to just have it in place from the get-go.

3) I assume that if I left out the "ENDROUTINE=BPCHIEUPD" out of the transformation file that it would remove the manually maintained hierarchy, correct?

4) Any plans for shared infoobjects in future releases so that we can just skip loading master data into BPC from BW altogether? That's probably far-fetched given the challenges of separate name spaces, but a guy can dream.

5) Your last sentence mentions a number of new BADIs and that you recommend becoming familiar with them. Any particular place you'd recommend to learn more about them?

Thanks,
Jim Link
- Nice Workaround!
  2010-09-08 15:33:57 Scott Cairncross Business Card [Reply]
  Hi Jim,
  Trying to answer the best I can here...
  
  1) You are correct you would not be able to use the standard however you COULD build a nice workaround in the ROUTINE badi (similar to this workaround) to merge the hierarchies based on a set of rules (attribute relationships, potentially)
  
  2) You do this once and then you include the ENDROUTINE in each of the Transformation files for the individual Dimensions. The workaround is generic and should work for all cases.
  
  2a) Agreed -> this is not my call though, I think this is best taken up in the EPM Customer Council ASUG meetings.
  
  3) Yes
  
  4) Good dream, but I believe that is a bit farther off
  
  5) Sure - the Articles/How To Guides section of the EPM workspace is a good area, also with SP3 of BPC 7.5 NW there are now "SAMPLES" that are delivered. When you create a new BADI implementation it will ask you if you want to inherit from the SAMPLE. Say yes and you have a nice set of code to tinker with and get familiar with.

How to debug 'Business Rule(Table Based Logic)' in BPC for Microsoft platform

2011-04-17T15:54:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I visited one of our customer sites and did some technical consulting.
While I was working with them, one of customer told me that Business Rule didn't work suddenly. That business rule was working properly before I visited. :(.
So I checked business rule (It was for currency conversion) and found nothing that needed to be fixed. .
As we know, it is really hard to find out the root cause because Business Rule just returned 'FX-XXX' error message. Even though it gives some clues but sometimes it is not the root cause then user will be lost what they need to fix..
So I tried to find how to debug easily for escaping this situation because customer started to suspect me that I had ruined that logic. (Of course I didn’t!!!) .
As we know, All Business rule stored procedure is encrypted so customer and partners could not debug it in the source code level of stored procedure..
BUT... (There is always BUT. :) .
We can get more detail error message from the management studio using my method that I will explain..
First, we need to create temporary scope table.Usually Scope table will be created automatically based on the passing parameters but we need to create it to run it in management studio..
Here is scope table structure. You can give any name for it because we will use it when we call stored procedure..

Second, fill some values in the table.
This value should be same value when you run that Business Rule..

Third, Execute SPRUNXXXX stored procedure in the management studio..
You need to specify correct one because there are several stored procedures in BPC. For example, Currency conversion is SPRUNCONVERSION, Account Transformation is SPRUNCALCACCOUNT etc. Now you can see the result as below screenshot.

Please remember when you run SPRUNXXXX stored procedure, you should use scope table name that we created. Below example shows that scope table name is 'Test_Scope'

As you can see, you will find more detail information here.In this example, it says Currency_type is invalid column. It means mbrrptcurrency table should have currency_type column (property) but it doesn't have.
Therefore, if we create Currency_type property for RPTCURRENCY dimension and fill in proper value, we can solve issue.
By the way, the customer that I addressed earlier had wrong property value in their time dimension but it was processed properly because it was a property value. I also solved that case using this way.This is not the solution for all cases but I am pretty sure it will give more hints.

If you have any questions. Please comment it.

How to Setup Business Process Flow E-mail Notifications in SAP BPC 7.5 NW

2011-04-17T15:43:00.001-07:00

Business Process Flows (BPFs) are an exciting new feature available in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5, version for SAP NetWeaver (BPC 7.5 NW). BPFs are made up of task steps and sub-steps which guide planning and consolidation users through a sequentially defined business process. In the BPC 7.5 NW system, four main BPF functions are provided:

My Activities
Monitor
Reports
E-mail notifications

The first three topics are documented well in the SAP Help documentation and demonstrated in an SDN How-to article called How to Configure and Execute Business Process Flows in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5, version for SAP NetWeaver. However the BPF e-mail notification function described in the BPC 7.5 NW Operations Guide does not explain all the necessary steps to enable e-mails from BPF's. So I will explain how to set up e-mail notifications here in this weblog.

A) From the SAP BPC Server Manager application on the .net server

1) Maintain the Web Server Name and Port. This will be used by the backend Business Warehouse (BW) system to send a URL link in the e-mail notifications triggered by the BPF task.

Note: When the BPF is activated, the web server name and port will be transferred automatically to the BW system into field SERVER_NAME of table UJA_SERVER_INFO. As of BPC 7.5 NW SP02, this field length is only 20 characters. So if your server's fully-qualified domain name is too long, then you may be able to use a short name. Or you could also simply input an IP address and port. In BPC 7.5 NW support package 03 the field length was increased to 60 characters in the BW system.

B) From the SAP BPC Web Administration landing page

When you launch the AppSet Parameters maintenance screen, there are several items which are used to setup e-mail notifications for Work Status, such as APPROVALSTATUSMAIL and APPROVALSTATUSMSG, as well as the ABAP SMTP service. These parameters are NOT used by the Business Process Flow e-mail notification framework.

There are also several parameter items that start with "SMTP...". These also are NOT used by the BPF programs.

In fact the SAP Help documentation currently states that these AppSet parameters which start with SMTP... are only used in BPC for the Microsoft platform. However that conclusion is not believed to be accurate. Recent findings shared by a colleague indicate that these SMTP related parameters are also used by BPC 7.5 NW for the Distributor and Collector function to e-mail reports or input schedules.

C) From the SAP Business Warehouse system

1) Maintain the SMTP connection settings from the SAPconnect Administration screen. From transaction SCOT double-click on the SMTP node. In the pop-up dialogue screen input the Mail Host, Mail Port, and Code Page which is appropriate for your network.

Note: It is possible to test the SMTP settings using telnet following the procedure outlined in SAP Note 607108 Problem Analysis when sending or receiving e-mail.

2) If the BPC to BW communication user BPC_SYSADMIN is setup in Active Directory (which is not required for installation of BPC) then it can be used as the sender of the BPF e-mail notifications. To do so requires that you define a default domain from transaction SCOT. Follow the menu path Settings --> Default Domain and enter the appropriate domain. For example if BPC_SYSADMIN was a valid e-mail account at SAP (which it is not) based on a default domain such as exchange.sap.com, then all BPF e-mail notifications would be sent by user BPC_SYSADMIN@exchange.sap.corp.

3) If user BPC_SYSADMIN is not an Active Directory user, then it is necessary to assign an e-mail address to BPC system administration user directly in the BW user profile. From transaction SU01 for user BPC_SYSADMIN enter a valid e-mail address to be used as the sender of the BPF e-mail notifications.

Note: You can have some fun here with a buddy while testing the BPF e-mail setup because you can use any valid e-mail address within your organization (e.g. your boss or even the CEO). This setting together with the designated BPF step owners and reviewers can result in some curious e-mails making their way into your friend's inbox having been triggered by BPC :).

Of course, I don't endorse such pranks. So I suggest you be cautious in your actions.

4) Customizing the E-mail Templates

The BPC 7.5 NW system comes installed with 16 different pre-defined BPF e-mail templates which correspond to the many possible events (activation, task completion, review, etc) that occur throughout the lifecycle of a BPF from setup to execution to archival. Each template has one system default version and allows one customized version. This means all BPF e-mails can be customized. But keep in mind that the templates are used system-wide and are not Application or even Application Set specific.

To customize the e-mail templates follow the steps below.

4.1) From transaction SE38 execute program UJB_MAINTAIN_EMAIL_TMPL
4.2) Leave the selection parameters blank and click execute (F8)
4.3) Note that you cannot modify the type "S" or system-generated templates.
4.4) Select from the list the appropriate template ID and click on the create icon. This will create a template of type "C" for customizing. (It is a good idea to have a second session of SAP BW open concurrently to display how the standard templates are maintained. In which case you can use CNTL-C to copy and CNTL-V to paste between sessions from the system template and the customized one.)
4.5) In customized e-mail templates, multi-language texts can be used in the e-mail body.
4.6) E-mail templates can be enabled or disabled through a status indicator.
4.7) Save your custom template.

D) From BPC Administration

Before you can create a BPF template which should trigger e-mail notifications you have to decide which dimension will be used to store the owners and (optionally) the reviewers of the BPF steps. The entity dimension is typically used for this purpose.

As opposed to Work Status which expects the Owner property be named Owner, the owner property for Business Process Flows can be any name you wish. The same is true for the reviewer property, it can be any name. Simply add these properties to the appropriate dimension. Then maintain the dimension members to assign the owners and reviewers either with a valid BPC username(s) or team(s). You can enter multiple names and teams separated by commas. Usernames must also include the domain or server name in the path. Team names should be input within square brackets. Afterward save and process the dimension.

With the properties setup you can now create the BPF template and instance. I won't go into the details here, refer to the SAP Help and the How-to guide I mentioned above.

Conclusion

If you setup the e-mail notifications as I described and you successfully define your Business Process Flows, the BPF owners and reviewers will begin to receive e-mail notifications from Planning and Consolidation 7.5 NW

Optimization with Zero Elimination

2011-04-17T15:39:00.001-07:00

In BPC 7.0 for NW data entered through Input sheet and various other sources are stored in BW cubes in the backend. These data gets stored in delta fashion which is a common feature of BW system.

That is, if 1000 is there in the system for any account say X and it is overwritten by 0, 0 doesn’t get saved in the system instead the delta value between 1000 and 0 is saved in the system. i.e. -1000.

This increases the number of data stored in the system instead of having 1 record it has 2 in the back end. When the number of records in the system increases the performance degrades.

So to avoid this BPC has optimization functionality which helps compressing the data in the cube and maintains the number of records in the backend.

The Standard process chain for Lite and Full Optimization involves only in compressing the data and remodeling the application (in case of Full Optimization). It does not eliminate the zeros after compression.

Presence of zeros which are not going to be of any use will also impact the system performance. These zeros after compression can be eliminated by updating the process chain corresponding to optimization.

Steps involved in updating the Process chain for zero elimination:

1. Select the process chain for optimization.

2. Double click the Collapse process and change it to edit mode and select "switch on zero elimination" check box.

3. Now save the collapse process and try executing the optimization process the compressed zero values will get eliminated.

Note:

1. Changing the Collapse in either of the process chain will affect the other also.

2. If you want zero elimination to happen for only one of the optimization proces follow these steps,

create a process chain by copying the existing standard chains for optimization,
Create a new process variant for collapse and update that.

Thus the optimization process chain can be used in optimizing the application with zero elimination.

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How to create Dimension Formula in BPC 7M with SQL2008

2011-04-17T15:38:00.001-07:00

'Dimension Formula' is one of the BPC term that is for calulated members.

For example of calculated member, ROA is one of famous KPI for measuring business peformance.

This dimension formula is using 'Custom Rollup' feature in the Microsoft Analysis services.

Due to change of architecture of Microsoft Analysis Services from SQL2000 to SQL2005, BPC customers could not use simple dimension formula like
Account A = Account B X Account C (or X constant value like 1.5).

It was working in SQL2000 but dimension formula didn't work with SQL2005 if dimension has multiple hierarchies.

Therefore, SAP released ‘HOW TO GUIDE' for creating dimension formula in SQL2005 but there were some problems as below.

a. Formula should have complex IIF statement
b. If length of formula is too long, user should make cascade account and it will make slower performance.
c. It is hard to maintain because can't read it easily.

Note : URL of Dimension formula with SQL2005.
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/008d665b-94bf-2a10-78b2-b32ffe04ba73;jsessionid=(J2EE3414900)ID0541202550DB10246661973771485801End

In SQL2008, Microsoft seems to fix that internal calculation issue with multiple hierarchies.

I will explain how to use dimension formula with SQL2008. (Note : Based on the test result, some complex formula still needs same IIF function as SQL2005 so you need to test it after change formula based on this article.)

Here is a test scenario that developer has used it for testing SQL2005 dimension formula.

Dimension formula exists in the entity dimension as below.

Entity hierarchy structure will be same as below screenshot.

Here is EVDRE result. As you can see, there is no IIF in the dimension formula but all calculation result is correct.

If we are using it with SQL2005, it should have IIF statement to get correct calculation result like iif(Acct.H2.CurrentMember is [Acct].[H2].[All Acct.H2],Acct.H1.Cost1+ Acct.H1.Cost2, Null)

BPC Microsoft platform with SQL2008 is the best combination for better performance and easy maintenance than using SQL2005.

Especially, for the dimension formula, we can use it like SQL2000 so we don't need to use IIF statement for the MDX dimension formula.

I hope it will help all consultant who is struggling with BPC dimension formula.

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BPC Allocation Logic – Analyze results in Cube

2011-04-17T15:31:00.001-07:00

BPC Allocation Logic – Analyze results in Cube

The log for the script logic executed using the data manager package is maintained by the system, but does not provides complete details of allocation script execution. These logs are very useful in analyzing the data updated in the backend if the script has normal REC and MDX statements. But the log for allocation logic is not easy to trace which is bit difficult in analyzing the set of accounts updated after the logic execution.

This blog helps in sorting this problem easily and helps the coder to debug and analyze the behavior of allocation script logic easily.

Steps to be followed,

Before executing the script with allocation logic, Login to the BW system and enter to Data Warehousing workbench using the TCode RSA1.
Right click the BW cube corresponding to the BPC application and select manage.

Select the request tab and click the request status which is yellow and set it to green.

Now execute the data manager package from the front end and check the log which gives only the number of records generated and not the line item were the record has got generated.

Once the package is executed successfully go back to the SAP Logon and refresh the requests of the application.

The new request id with the status yellow gives you the set of all data updated after executing the logic.
The data can be checked in the back end by moving to contents tab and fetching the data for the new request.

Thus the analysis of BPC script for allocation logic has become easier and this helps in tracking the execution of the logic. The same logic can be used for debugging any kind of scripts from the back end.

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Reporting Plan and Actual values in BPC NW

2011-04-17T15:29:00.001-07:00

SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation version for Netweaver effectively leverages the Netweaver infrastructure and we can use the data stored in the infocubes in the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) layer. Typically ‘Actual' values are stored in the EDW Infoprovider whereas ‘Plan' values are stored in the BPC generated Infoprovider. However the reporting requirements many times demand that we report the actual and plan values in the same report. In this blog we will discuss various options available to us to do this actual versus plan reporting in BPC and the Pros and Cons of each of them.

Copy Actual from BW to BPC:

The first question to ask is where we are storing the Actual data. Traditionally, those who have SAP as the ERP system, extract the Actual data from ECC and store it in BW with the help of delivered business content or custom infocubes/data store objects. If that is your situation, then you already have the Actual data in your BW system. In that case, the first, the simplest, the most straightforward option is to copy the actual from the EDW infoproviders to BPC application using the delivered data manager packages. You can learn more about this option at: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs;jsessionid=(J2EE3414700)ID1897954850DB00258195100095085303End?blog=/pub/wlg/14002. This option is fraught with the least amount of risk when compared with the other options that we will discuss later. You can copy the Actual data from BW Infoprovider to BPC application and then use BPC reports to report Actual vs Plan values from BPC. This will work with 7.0NW as well as 7.5NW in the same way. Another ‘Pro' for this approach is that the data models for BW Actual and BPC Plan are typically different. BPC Data Manager functionally (delivered packages for data migration, transformation files, and conversion files) can be helpful to take care of common data model issues (BW fiscal year period vs. BPC YYYY.MMM format, for example) while importing Actual into BPC. If this is the simplest, easy to do and well supported scenario, then you may ask whether it has any limitations.

The biggest argument often put forth against this option is that it involves data duplication. Let us analyze this argument. First of all, in general, the Actual values are at a much granular level than the Plan values. Planning is generally done at a higher level - for example it may be done at product group level rather than SKU level whereas the transactional data is at the lowermost level since that is where the transactions occur. Hence even if we end up copying the Actual data from EDW infoprovider to BPC, we may end up copying such aggregated values that match with the level at which planning is done. To that extent, it is not a complete duplication. Secondly, most of the customers begin the planning process by ‘seeding' the plan either by previous plan/forecast or by Actual values. If they are seeding the plan by actual values anyway, then the data is getting duplicated anyway to begin the planning process. In that case we are just retaining those Actual values there with different category for reporting purposes. Thirdly, this process of copying Actual from EDW cube to BPC can be automatic and in the background so that the end users may not be affected. This can be a daily or weekly job as the case may be or even multiple times a day if that is the requirement. Finally, if you are using 7.5NW, then you can always drill through from a BPC report that shows the aggregated actual copied over from EDW, to more granular BEx report on the Actual EDW cube using the drill through functionality in 7.5NW

Now here we are assuming that the Actual values are stored in an EDW infoprovider in BW. What if all or part of the Actual values are not stored in there? In that case, if those values need to be brought in from the source system anyway, why not bring them over to BPC directly using the data manager packages to import the data? In that case, the Actual values will be in BPC and BPC reports can easily report Plan vs Actual data.

Let us consider some other Cons of this approach of copying Actual values to BPC. In some organizations, especially those who have BW running for years, BEx may be the tool of choice for all reporting needs and such organizations may be hesitant to provide BPC licenses to their reporting users only for Plan vs Actual reporting. Moreover these users need to be trained in using BPC reports. This is a very valid concern and we will discuss this more in detail in the next topic ‘export BPC data'. Another Con is that, ostensibly, this approach requires BPC clients to be installed on all the client machines that need to view the Plan vs Actual BPC report. However a possible workaround for this may be to use Live reporting feature of BPC or Distributor and Collector' functionality to view offline reports

Export BPC data:

One of the frequently asked questions is whether we can use BEx reports for BPC NW data. Please note that using BEx queries and reports for reporting BPC data contained in the BPC namespace infoproviders (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs;jsessionid=(J2EE3414700)ID1897954850DB00258195100095085303End?blog=/pub/wlg/11279) is not a supported scenario. Please refer to the restrictions in note 1392259 also that talks about the limitations on using generic BEx with the BPC generated virtual infoprovider. Hence, in general, we should NOT create BEx queries on /CPMB infocubes. If BEx is the preferred reporting tool and if for any reason, the internal policies require you to use only BEx for reporting any data contained in BW, then there is another option available. That is to export the data from BPC to regular (non-BPC) BW cube and then report the data from that non-BPC cube using BEx. For 7.5NW, there is a data manager package that you can use to do so. For 7.0 NW, there is how to guide that talks about exporting data out of BPC (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/b0427318-5ffb-2b10-9cac-96ec44c73c11). The exported BPC data can then be loaded into the EDW infoproviders using ETL tools of BW. In 7.5NW, this also can be automated since therein we have a data manager package that can help us execute a native BW process chain to import the flat file to EDW infoprovider. Then these data manager packages doing export and import can be linked together in a package link in data manager in 7.5NW and can be automatically executed as a sequence. This way we can use BEx reporting for BPC data if we have to. If we want to consider the Pros and Cons of this scenario then the first Pro, if applicable, is that you can use BEx reporting for Actual and Plan values. That way we can use one reporting tool across the organization. Cons include the additional design and administrative overhead associated with creating the export structure, duplicating the plan values and the transformations needed in the ETL configuration to map the exported BPC data with the characteristics/key figures in the EDW infoproviders as well as administering additional BW security as necessary.

Creating virtual Infoprovider:

One of the other project or implementation solutions can be to use a virtual Infoprovider to pass through the Actual or Plan values instead of copying or exporting them. The options discussed above are either copying Actual values from EDW infoproviders to BPC application or export Plan values from BPC to EDW infoproviders. Using virtual infoproviders can avoid whatever data duplication these approaches entail. A virtual infoprovider built within the BPC generated multiprovider can be used to report Actual values from EDW infoproviders using BPC reports or a virtual infoprovider built in EDW can be used to report Plan values from BPC application in order to use Bex reports. If this option avoids data duplication completely and it can be used in both the scenarios of using BPC report and BEx report, then why is this not a preferred approach? Well because all this comes at a price. The first Con for this approach is that building such virtual infoproviders requires substantial ABAP coding (to facilitate the handling of data model differences between BW and BPC). Secondly, if the planning model changes then all this ABAP code needs to be changed. (In the earlier options where are using delivered data manager packages, if the planning model changes, then we can use the transformation file/conversion file in BPC data manager to a great extent to take care of the changes). Thirdly the query performance from virtual infoproviders is considerably lower than that of the non-virtual infoproviders. Moreover, special consideration will be required for transporting such virtual infoproviders that are within the BPC multiprovider. Last but not the least; please refer to the note 1392259 regarding the restrictions about reporting with virtual infoprovider. Hence please be careful before adopting the virtual infoprovider as the reporting solution.

Creating designated separate cubes within BPC multiprovider:

Here is one more option on Plan vs Actual reporting. Instead of copying the Actual data from EDW infoproviders to BPC application, can we load it to a custom infocube created within BPC multiprovider? The answer is ‘yes' if that suits your requirements.

The advantage over here is that we can leverage BW ETL constructs to load data from EDW infoproviders to the custom infocube. Further, we have the flexibility to create more infocubes if needed - for example, one infocube for each year etc. One big Con here is that with this approach, we have to be very careful while handling the transports. Also this may require the target system to be open for modification if necessary to activate the multiprovider etc. Another Con is that every time the planning model changes, the ETL may have to be modified.

Finally, a note about using SAP Business Objects tools like Voyager and Webi. We can also use Voyager and Webi to report Actual data from EDW infoproviders and Plan data from BPC applications since these tools can be source agnostic and can combine data from disparate sources. However these tools have to be installed separately and do not come with the standard installation of BPC.

To summarize, we can consider three scenarios here:

Scenario 1: Copy Actual values from BW to BPC and use BPC reports to report Actual vs Plan values (this uses the delivered functionality)
Scenario 2: Export Plan data from BPC to (non-BPC) BW infoprovider and use BW reporting tools to report Actual vs Plan from that cube (this way all reporting can be done with BEx)
Scenario 3: Create virtual infoprovider on the EDW side to view Plan data from BPC if you want to use BW reporting tools or create virtual infoprovider within the generated multiprovider to view Actual values from BW. (this scenario avoids data duplication at the cost of performance and additional administrative overheads)

Thus we can see that there are various plausible options available to do Actual vs Plan reporting in BPC version for NW and the pros and cons of each should be vetted carefully before making the implementation decision.

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BW Objects technical name changeability for SAP BO Planning & Consolidation, version for Netweaver

2011-04-17T15:13:00.001-07:00

SAP Business Objects Planning & Consolidation, version for Netweaver (BPC_NW), transports operate by transferring metadata about the existing source BPC_NW configuration to a target system. Upon successful import into the target system, the metadata describing the new (or changed) BPC_NW objects described in the transport is used to recreate/change BPC_NW objects in the target system.

BW users that wish to connect to these objects should be aware of which objects will retain their original (source system) technical name, and which should not be counted upon to remain static.

DIEMENSIONS

SAP Note 1445688 advises that “… (the) BPC_NW transport is designed to guarantee the info object technames of BPC dimensions (will remain) identical between source and target system”. In other words , BPC_NW transports will not change the technical name of the BW info object associated with a particular BPC Dimension.

PROPERTIES

Likewise I have confirmed that the BW attribute technical names associated with BPC_NW Dimension Properties also will not be changed by transport. As with the BPC_NW Dimensions, the technical name retention is by design of the transport.

APPLICATION

The BW technical name of the BPC_NW Application is a different situation. These applications can be “fully optimized” and as a result the data model of an optimized application may change. The current solution is for the underlying BW info provider to be deleted then recreated with the new data model. BPC_NW transports of application configuration act in a similar manner. The technical name of the BPC_NW application in the target system is not guaranteed to match the technical name of the same application in the transport source system.

MULTIPROVIDER

The generated BPC_NW multi info provider does retain its technical name after transport. This is also by design of the transport process.

LIMITATIONS

If configuration is allowed to be performed directly in the target system the technical id coding the application (a two character designation that is unique for every application…”QW” in the examples below) may be used. As a result, this two character combination will not be available for generating the same technical id as in the source system upon importing the transport.

In summary, the following BW object’s technical name retention after transport (assuming the above limitations do not apply) is as follows:

Info Objects (Dimensions) - technical name is retained

Attributes (Properties) - technical name is retained

Info Provider (Applications) - technical name can be changed!

Multi Info Providers- technical name retained

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What you should know about transports in BPC7.xNW

2011-04-17T14:56:00.001-07:00

SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation version for Netweaver leverages Netweaver infrastructure and we can use the transport mechanism to promote configuration through the system landscape. In this blog we will talk about some tips regarding using the transports in BPC.

The first question that is often asked is whether there is any documentation available that explains how this transport mechanism works and how one is supposed to use it in the projects. Let us answer that first. A very useful document about transports is available in the Operations Guide on ServiceMarketPlace. Section 5.1 in this guide is dedicated to transports and this is useful in understanding how the transport mechanism operates and how we should use it. It also explains what happens when certain objects types are transported. For instance in case of TLOGO object type ‘TEAM' - what really happens is... "Teams that are created in development are never transported. User assignments for teams are not transported because users are configured in each environment and typically, the users accessing the development system would not be the same users to access the production system. Therefore, this TLOGO object is only useful if the team names are the same in development and production (created manually in each environment). Then the files for the team can be transported to the team in the target system. The team transport transports any conversion file or transformation files that are assigned to this team."

This document can also be accessed very easily from the SAP help portal help.sap.com. As shown below, you can go to the SAP Business Objects tab and navigate to Planning and Consolidation link and from there to ‘Installation, Upgrade, Master and Operations Guides'.

In addition to the information contained in that document, here are some more tips regarding transports:

Stay current with BPC NW notes related to transports. Check notes under component - EPM-BPC-NW-TRA Transport
Make sure to check note 1415296 for procedural changes - BPC transport and installation troubleshooting summary. In case of any issues with the transports, you can refer to this note first.
- This highlights a common issue - do not reference technical names of BPC objects in EDW based BW models.
Concerning the deletion of objects there is a different behavior between two major object types during the import of a transport into the target system.
- Table entries and Data Model objects (Application, Dimensions, Properties) will be deleted in target system when they are deleted in Development and the Appset is transported.
- Files such as script logic and Excel templates will only be updated. So changes to these files will be transported. Given it will only transport an update, the deletion of these files in DEV would not impact existing files in QA or PROD. Please note the deletion of these files in target system will not cause any harm.
Transporting specific objects within an object type is not supported - check this forum question for review of this topic... http://forums.sdn.sap.com/message.jspa?messageID=8250152#8250152 Please note that SAP is planning to change this in a future release so specific objects within object types could be transported. When this is released the framework will assist with dependencies.
If you have a requirement for copying files, such as "Reports" and "Input Schedules" to other BPC systems, without the user having to do manual steps, then here is a very useful how-to guide to do so: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/0096026f-7fc4-2c10-5c92-e75f4c13ca10
There are many SAP transport strategies. Often times a QA or PROD system is built with every released transport from DEV. My recommendation with BPC NW is to build systems with the last good transport. If one were to send 6 transports to build a QA Appset I would only move the last good transport to build that same PROD Appset. Of course there are other ways of handling this however I have not found any value and seen the potential for more headaches by using the policy of just moving all requests. Also, since BPC transport framework can gather all APPSET objects, the fear of missing something can be alleviated. In the future this strategy may not make the most sense when individual objects are transported as pieces could be missed. Currently I do not see any issue - at least for the initial build. After going live, if the changes are always made in DEV and promoted up the landscape, then this strategy would still work well.

Now here are some things to avoid in BPC transports:

Do not change the data model in target systems. A typical system landscape may contain DEV, QA and PROD instances. If changes are made to objects in a target system the transports that originate from development can be broken (in most cases it will be). Data model changes consist of objects like Appset, Application, Dimensions, Properties. If a customer plans to maintain the data model in QA or PROD system that is a customer's prerogative to do so -however that tantamounts to say that the customer has also decided to not use the transport framework since it will no longer import properly. Things like reports, input schedules, data manager packages (non-data model related) can be changed in any instance.
Do not change the structure or definition of BPC related data model objects in BW (RSA1). This would include objects such as Appset (InfoArea), Application (lMultiprovider and InfoCube), Dimensions (InfoObjects), Properties (InfoObjects). When you do this, subsequent transports will fail. In some cases transports may fail and the only way to correct the issue is to delete an appset and re-import it. If by any chance, if you land in that situation, here is a blog that you may find useful to do so: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17532
Do not be alarmed if the technical name of the InfoCube/Multiprovider changes between landscapes. This is normal. BPC does not transport technical names of cubes and the transport will work fine. If you are referring the technical names of the Infocube/multiprovider in any EDW based BW models, this may cause an issue. Hence as a general rule, please do not reference technical names of BPC generated objects in any EDW based BW models. Please note that the technical names of InfoObjects do not change as a result of a transport.

These are some of the things that one should know to effectively use BPC transports in BPC7.xNW.

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What makes a successful Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Solution?

2011-04-17T01:28:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the IT consultant-seagull joke? It runs something like this:

Q: Why are IT consultants like seagulls?

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A: Because they have big bills and hover around squawking at you, before crapping on you and flying off, leaving you with a mess.

There is a serious point here, that IT solutions, implemented by IT ‘experts' so often leave behind a system that, whilst being functionally acceptable, is rigid and a pain to maintain for the business. This is particularly true of financial planning solutions, where a key success factor is the agility of the solution and its ability to accommodate changes in the planning model brought about by the inevitable business changes resulting from fluid market conditions. Solutions that are delivered in times of financial retrenchment where the focus is on cost-reduction and profitability maintenance are often unable to support the sort of planning required in times of growth where the focus shifts to testing out new markets and/ or products.

Actualisation is the process of replacing forecasted figures for a recently closed fiscal period with actual financial results into the latest forecast. The current range of planning solutions, most of which are based on multidimensional database platforms with sophisticated ETL components, mean that this process should be fully automated. It never ceases to amaze me when I find planning solutions that require users to spend significant time each period keying in actuals figures to update their forecasts. The potential to reduce this significant manual effort (often 2 or 3 mandays per period per planning entity) is often a key benefit in the business case for introducing a more up-to-date system.

Any financial budgting/ forecasting process will inevitably require some administrative overhead. The key is to ensure that this is streamlined so that it does not become a barrier to an efficient month-end close process. Most planning applications contain a workflow component which can be used to manage the forecast process centrally. Visibility is given on the progress of the various planning entities required to submit budgets and forecasts and communication between the central administration and the planners is supported by the tool, providing a full audit of correspondence in convenient format.

Best-in-class planning applications, such as Business Object Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), are marketed as being owned by the Finance department, rather than IT. This is an important distinction as, in order for finance departments to keep pace with the changing business environment in which their organisation operates, the tools with which they predict future performance and health of the organisation must be flexible enough to accommodate those changes, and those changes must be able to be made by the FP&A analysts using the tool. Any system requiring intervention from IT in order to make small inevitable changes to a planning model, or to output reports, will cause frustration with the tool and a reversion to offline spreadsheet models. This importance must be borne in mind beyond the choice of planning tool, and through the implementation of the tool. Change management and training are key, with involvement of the business as members of the development team being essential if the tool is to be properly supported by Finance once the consultants have left.

Despite the importance of business involvement throughout the planning application implementation, consultants have an important role here - to impose the rigours of best practice software development and project management, and to bring to bear the benefit of their experience in implementing successful systems. Some areas will remain technical, most notably integration of actuals and master data into the planning application, and a limited amount of bespoke development may be introduced into the system to achieve further efficiencies, but care must be taken to ensure that these developments are future-proof and will not become a barrier to the business maintaining the solution on an ongoing basis.

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