SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 1 SAP AMERICA March 1, 2001 10:00 a.m. CST Coordinator Good day and welcome to the SAP America conference call. All participants will be able to listen only until the question and answer session. Conference is being recorded at the request of SAP America. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. Host of today's call is Bryan Katis. You may begin when ready, Sir. B. Katis Hello. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's conference call on the BW Know How Network call. My name is Bryan Katis, I'm a consultant in the BW implementation group with SAP America. Hopefully everybody was able to download the presentation from SAP Net from the SAP.COM service marketplace. Today's call will feature using SAP BW and the MySAP retail solution. Today's speaker will be Lothar Schubert who is a platinum consultant in the BW regional implementation group. He'll be speaking on this topic. Joining Lothar for the Q&A will be Andreas Huppert, who is from the SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 2 retail development. He specializes in the extraction on the data source side. Also, Elke Schwarz from SAP retail, who works in the BW project support area. Also, Steffen Mock, who is part of BW retail development. He's responsible for business content, extractors on the POS side. At this point I'd like to go and turn the call over to Lothar. L. Schubert Thanks, Bryan. Good morning everybody or good afternoon, depending which time zone you're in. My name is Lothar Schubert with the BW regional implementation group of SAP America. I assume everybody has the presentation in front of you downloaded from SAP Net. It's a quite long presentation. However, I will not go into too much detail since the presentation itself should cover between 20 to 30 minutes, so that we'll have enough time, about an additional 30 minutes afterwards for Q&A. Primarily I want to focus this presentation on business content for BW in the retail arena, integration, MySAP retail, and project migration from former reporting solutions in retail. It's not an introduction to the business information warehouse. We're assuming in this presentation that you have the basic understanding of Infocubes, data sources, Infosources, queries, aggregates and so on. For each slide, I will let you know the slide number and the title of the slides, so that we can make sure we stay in sync. SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 3 Let’s move to the Overview slide, slide number 2. I will talk will about Infoobjects and master data in retail and then move to transaction data, Infosources for BW, then specifically (as an example) dive more into point of sale, POS data. From there move on to further application examples and talk briefly about RIS and BW migration, and also we'll mention some support we'll be offering. Two slides later, it's called retail business content overview. I think this gives a nice overview of what kind of retail applications you'll find in MySAP retail and what kind of integration you'll find with business information warehouse, what kind of business content will'll deliver for the BW. You'll see there functionality like store controlling, market data, and point of sale. Of the integration, EBG for example,... management,... integration, and customer relationship management and also our merchandise and assortment planning, which is all relevant for retail and relevant for analytics. You'll find now with release 21C, that we will have a huge integration already in terms of business content. When we talk about business content SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 4 here we talk about Infoobject that has delivered, Infocubes, Infosources,... , ..., queries and workbooks. Next slide Infoobjects, master data, Infoareas and right afterwards Infoobjects for retail. If you look at a typical organizational structure in retail and you branch down, for example, from local purchasing to distribution chains, which is retail specific combination of sales organization and distribution channels, and breaking down there from distribution center and store sites, and finally to customers and consumers. All those objects have to be modeled in the business information warehouse and this is done using Infoobjects. If you talk about business content in retail, you'll find core and also retail specific Infoobjects which are utilized. The core Infoobjects sometimes have different names than you'd find in regular core applications, for example, plant is called a site in retail. ... Products is often called article. Besides you will use standard Infoobjects like customer or consumers (where customers are referred usually to named individuals and consumers are known as non-identifiable customers). SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 5 You also have retail specific Infoobjects like season codes, department, price range, and promotional ... All those Infoobjects are connected to the master data and master data extractors, between MySAP retail, between R/3 and BW and you have the option to upload attributes, text and hierarchies into BW. Next slide Infoobjects for retail origin, gives you a brief overview from which areas actually those Infoobjects come from. You will see from the retail arena, but also from the financial etc. arena., material management, logistics etc. arena. Next slide, Infoobjects catalogs for retail. With BW 21C there are now about 10 Infoobjects catalogs delivered for characteristics and key figures specifically for retail. You can use those Infoobject catalogs for example in your data modeling, data designing processes, integrate Infocubes, you can refer specifically to Infoobject catalogs and object groupings can you look for meda-data upload and creation of hierarchies, etc., etc.. Let's move into the area of transaction data Infosources, and two slides later, we will be talking about print action data Infosources for retail. This gives an overview about main print action data Infosources, which are SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 6 used as all BW release 21C for retail business contents. I want to know at this point that there are other data sources, which are mostly from the core business content of BW, which might also be useful in the retail environment, however, unutilized at this by business content. That's why I didn't mention them here. With those transaction data Infosources, which I've point out here obviously, they're referring all to the new so called extraction mechanism as compared to the older LI type extraction mechanism. The... BW release 20B or higher. With those extractors there is no reliance on RIS components at all. That means you do not have to have RIS active in the R3 system, return information system. The basic structure of those extractors still stay the same as you had them before in return information system. That means if you already have return information system alive and you're migrating to BW it will be an easy migration since you can utilize the same data models basically from the Cube perspective into... perspective that you already have in your system. Looking at the transaction data Infosources we have here purchasing, data distribution, inventory management, accounting, retail, point of sale, and also MAP Infosources. If you look at purchasing for example, you will SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 7 see that there's header, item, schedule line item, and usually you will pick just one of those Infosources. To populate if you use this one with the most detail that you want to use. For example, if you use schedule line you will not use header and you will not use item. However, if you're just interested in header information you do not have to use item and SCL, seeing as you do not want to transfer that level of detail to BW. Those data sources are delta supported. That means you can do delta loads into BW. Let's move to the next slide, transaction data extraction from SAP applications. This gives an overview about how this new extraction mechanism with all those data sources actually works with BW. An important point is that the upload is de-coupled from the application. Whenever you create a document on the application side (that you can find on the left hand side), those data are temporarily stored in communications structure environment and from there transferred into the central delta management queue using the V3 update. Then from there, from the central Delta management queue on the R3 side finally using the extractor, you'll pull the data over into the BW system SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 8 An important transaction code to note here is SM13, for example, where you can use the data before transferring them into the central data management, and transaction RSA7 that gives you an idea about your contents of the delta queue. Also I want to note the initial set up that you do before you start using delta mechanism. First you have to do initialization, actually all Infocubes. For this, there will be a specific report available in the environment for statistical set up. This will not use the V3 update. One exception on the slide here is the stock initialization from stocks, which is essentially required for cubes that use noncummulative values, they still use LIS structures. There is no need to have any new extraction mechanisms, since it is not used for delta... Let's move to the next slide, customizing cockpit. That transaction is available in R3, transaction code LBWE and it allows you to, first of all, to maintain data sources for that extraction into BW. You can for example append fields of communication structure, which are not included by standard. You can also extend data sources here, and also from this transaction, you will actually execute the V3 update into the delta queue. With V3 update it's usually recommended to do this at least once a day, although it depends on data volume. You can also execute this a couple of times a day. In this area, I also want to point to some specific OSS notes. SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 9 One for Q&A, question and answers on the delta queue, pretty new OSS notes, and I mentioned two collective notes for the plug-ins 2001 and 2002. And another OSS notes talking about ODS that means if you want to delta load into ODS, you should look at this OSS note here. If you want to keep a log about a data transfer, you can set also an environment variable, which is called MCL. You can send this to ‘X’ and then you can really see in the log the latest stuff which was executed. Let's move to the next slide, which is called process keys and transaction keys. Those of you familiar with RIS already know of our process keys. It was introduced I believe in the purchasing area at first, and for BW those process are also transaction keys are used for a very, I would say elegant ways to transfer data into the business information warehouse. They really use also to improve performance for data transfer. When you will look at your initial communications structures in the R3 environment, you will find from many of the data sources, from many of those tables and structures you will have lots of key figures in those cases mentioned like 20 plus key figures, which have to be transferred. SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 10 If you look at those key figures and you would look at the record, actually you'll find many of these key figures are actually emptied and zero is in there with a bank. To have a better performance to bring those data into the business information warehouse, the data are analyzed in advance in the R3 system and encoded using the process key. Think about it, the data initially as Swiss cheese and we take out all the holes and make it more compact. It reduces then into data source, which just contains six key figures, in this case. And only together with a specific process / transaction key this specific BW key figure has its significance again in the return environment. Once the data are transferred into the business information warehouse, the data sources into the Infosources, then finally when the data are moving into the InfoCube, they're deflated again and expanded again into 20 plus key figures. If you move to the next slide, called process key example. It's..., it mentions, for example the six key figures where we have transferred quantities and transferred prices, also a number of transactions, which can be used for a calendar, for example, statistical and analytics all support data quality management. From the last ten, in example, process keys are SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 11 not chosen well really on this slide. I would rather look at purchasing arena where the process keys were introduced originally and they're most frequently used. You will have, for example, process key one, which stands for purchase order, two for goods receipt, three for invoicing, etc., etc. Beside the SAP delivered process keys there's also name range for customer specific process keys, which start 500 to 999 and you can populate those process keys using an exit, which is exit for example *_SAPLEINS_001 in the purchasing arena. If you want to see how SAP create and utilize the process keys for those of you technical minded, you might want to look into function group MCRS. There's also an OSS note out there 353042, which talks about initial activation of process keys and transaction MCB0 shows you an overview about the different process keys by application component. Next slide, process decoding and... talking about this original Swiss cheese of documents that took out the air and compressed those and sentences a bottleneck then to business information warehouse, and now you want to deflate them again. This is done in this update rules for the Infocubes. If you look at the delivered update rules into the coding, which is the... SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 12 coding you will find those “if" Statements which I mentioned to you on the right-hand side. If communications shuts your process key equal to etc., etc, etc., and specifically those process keys are used here to reveal the original structure and this way you will arrive again at 20 plus key figures for the Infocube to do analytics against. Next slide, point of sales. Next slide POS analytical applications. Specifically for point of sales you also find two of those look like new extractors in the BW environment, the 2LIS_44*... for receipts and the2LIS_43* for cashier. In the business content, you will see quite a few Infocubes which are populated by those Infosources and there's also a... cube example, which utilizes both Infosources. Looking at the receipts POS Infosource it populates cubes like call receipts for customer frequency analysis and analysis of KPIs and you have..... for example, you use it for article analysis, shopping basket analysis, campaign monitoring, and also interface for data mining, which I will talk later about. The cashier Infocube can be used for sales volumes analysis, store comparisons, and for example, loss prevention analysis. You'll find the margin cube there, the POS controlling cube also referred to a sales audit SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 13 sometimes, which allows the comparison of those receipt values and POS, accounting values. Moving to the next slide, POS data flow. Of course, we talked about inbound POS data flow here in the R3 environment. You'll see again you will have communication structures which are populated by the POS interface and then moving using extraction structures and R3 update into the central data management. From there the data sources… and.... extract the data and send... respective and Infocubes on the right-hand side. With customizing, you also have the option to pull in an additional field, which are not delivered by standard content. You have two exits available, one standard BW extraction exit, which fits directly before the data pulled into BW after the central data management, but you also have an application specific exit which sits directly after the communication structure, which is executed before the data actually moves into the delta management. Here you will actually have access to the all the iDOC information and it’s very handy. ... In this case your POS extraction you can pick either one of those two exits before or after data management. The general recommendation is use the one before POS because of good performance SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 14 (access to internal tables) and you also have the timely implementation basically. Loading data from POS into BW, you could also take the short cut and go directly from the POS system into BW. You have the data sources available; you have the Infosources and everything available. Obviously you could do this. However keep in mind SAP designed those data sources specifically for connection to R3, so it will be the most easy way to connect it to R3 and also going with R3 you will have access to all of the data if you require, plus audited data.. The next two slides I don't want to go into detail here. Basically it shows just an example how Infosources look like, in this case, for cashier and for receipts. You'll find more information in general about Infosources and data sources in the documentation in a white paper in retail business content and also if you look directly in the system under business content activation. I want to move to the next slide, two slides actually. For the application examples, one of the next examples, the next slide is called BW and MAP, merchandise and assortment planning, which also is taken into the SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 15 business content of the business information warehouse. In BW, you'll find the so called MAP cubes, which are populated using actual data from the logistics data extraction and those extra data also serve as reference in the beginning of a new planning cycle. The beginning of the new planning cycle data can be extracted out of the MAP queue, using an interface into the R3 system into the MAP tables. We execute planning, using the planning process and most plan data then can be reloaded actually into the business information warehouse and you can execute analytics on those plan and an actual data. For example, for shelf optimization,... planning, merchandise planning you might want to create a plan in actual against your targets. Another example of business content, moving to the next slide is knowledge discovery in data mining. Data mining which is pretty important, specifically in the retail arena. SAP decided to work together with partners here. In data mining you might want to use for example to analyze buying patterns like shopping basket analysis, which you can use for promotion planning, shelf optimization, chief planning, and also cross selling. Someone might want to buy another article. You can also use it to identify your specific customer groups by... them into bargain hunters, SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 16 regular customers, or strategic customers that you can then address specifically using direct marketing and marketing control. Next slide, BW and IBM intelligence miner shows an example of how the interfaces work. Start with the data requests from the data miner. You go with the business API and access the query definition in BW. From there you will go into the cube, actually, POS cube and resend the data using the business API to the intelligent miner. You'll also actually be able to back transfer resolves from the miner into business information warehouse. IBM intelligent miners uses technology like associations, sequential patterns, specifications predictions for those of you familiar with data mining and visualizes those results using their on interface. Data mining is especially handy if you want to analyze all the analyticals in your assortment rather than specific object you might want to analyze in BEX. Finally a few words return information system in BW, let’s move to a slide called RIS architecture. This is not a presentation about RIS, but I believe quite a few of you will have RIS in place right now. RIS is the retail information system based on the LIS, logistics information system, part of R3. LIS is delivered with quite some business content in a way SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 17 predefined Infostructures and queries. I would say one of the challenges with RIS environment definitely is that it runs in the OLTP environment, in the R/3 environment. of the Retail arena with huge data volumes data impact. With performance impact on the reporting, but also performance impact on the transaction processing, as executed in the same engine. That's why it makes complete sense, I think, to bring here marry business information... and the OLTP systems to complete solutions for the MySAP retail. In the RIS you'll have also the logistics applications.... inside, populate communication structures,... into Infostructure and from there you use LIS reporting and LIS planning. Now, when you move to business information warehouse and that the next slide called RIS migration to BW step by step. Of course, you want to be able to take advantage of all the work that you already have done in the R3 system, and you will be able to do that. Let's talk about the five phases for IRS to BW migration. We start with the elaboration where you see what is mentioned between the standard content, which is delivered by SAP BW and what you actually have already in the RIS and what your requirements are. Just to give you an SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 18 idea with BW2.0 about 85% of the business content then you have in RIS, you also have business information warehouse. In this phase you also will look at the level of detail and specifically will check there if any operational processes running against RIS, like pricing or replenishment for example. The next phase you will start with integration or for BW that means you have to put in some plug-ins for the extraction. You might want to activate some additional LIS extractors like some custom LIS extractors. When you move to phase three for the migration, you will do the master data transfer, develops and additional logic and new cubes where required and then followed by the integration task Recheck, specifically for content or their quality. You also check for performance using the stress test for example. Phase five you start with the initial a load of historical data and then you have a couple of options of how you want to do it. One option is to just transfer the data that you have in the Infostructures available. You can also do a archive load. Either you would have to reload the archive data into the LIS structures and transfer to BW or using some specific SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 19 programs delivered by SAP, you can directly reach the archive and transfer it directly to BW without accessing or without loading into the LIS structures. If this doesn't work for you, you have to go through the pain to rebuild a statistical setup ... and required from your data volumes. Specifically the initial load of historic data of course is relevant to work with non accumulated cubes, because you have to define initial start-up point. In general, I would say also with BW (like with any data warehouse) a circular approach is recommended and you probably want to start where time allows with some areas that identify as most critical, but a couple of the cubes before you go to full blown migration and the RIS leave behind. Last slide about SAP retail service line, just want to mention at this point SAP offers some retail, digital remote, consulting service, also the BW arena for customers, partners, and also SAP internal. This slide describes how we can order this kind of specific services. This is the end of the presentation. I would like to open now for hopefully a very interesting and productive Q&A session for the next 30 minutes. SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 20 Coordinator Our first question comes from Charles Harolton. C. Harolton We are in the process of implementing BW retail at Canada. We want to know what the best way to bring in the merchandise category hierarchy from R3 into BW? E. Schwarz Hello, Charles. This depends on what kind of analysis you later on want to have. You can either have the merchandise category hierarchy as a class hierarchy and then use hierarchy analysis in BW, or you could also chose to have the merchandise category as attributes and you can also have navigational attributes in the queries. Does that answer your question? B. Katis Charles, are there? Coordinator Our participant did drop off the line. We do have another participant who would like to ask a question. It's Simon Clark T. Savecheck Hello. Its' Tim Savecheck from SAP in the UK. You mentioned name of the user exits for user define process key. I didn't get it; will you repeat it please? SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 21 L. Schubert I mentioned an example for a user exit. Let me look back and find it. I think that was one in the processing that called SAPLEINS.... There's a white paper out on BW and retail content, which talks a little bit more about the different process keys and of mentioned is exit. T. Savecheck Okay. Thank you very much. Coordinator Our next question comes from David Mick. D. Mick Yes, I'm working on a project right now in New York and want to know if there's any plans of development of communication structures and exit structures, can you report on the WPUBFIB IDOC, because there's requirements here at the business to report on page ins and page out, that's the place that they're brought in at this time. A. Huppert David, Andreas speaking. We are currently doing a project where we redesigned some of the POS inline process being. Half of this project will be to revenue interface for beta from the POS. This will unify all monetary movements, goods movements and the sales into one interface. All of these different transactions will go into one information system. Does that answer your question? SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 22 D. Mick How soon is that planned on being developed and released? Do have a time frame on that? A. Huppert The first release, end of fall with limited functionality, and public release will be next year, second of that quarter. D. Mick I know it's something that's really... retail clients. It will be a little late for the project that I'm on now, but I'm very glad that something's being developed and is going to be in place for future projects. So thank you. L. Schubert Something to mention in this place is that we'll be in... soon to have interface from the payment method list through the information systems. D. Mick Okay. Is there going to be anything like that though for the financial IDOCs, the WPUBFIB01 IDOC? M … D. Mick Okay, because that's Where most of our information is coming in on and we're working on a possible solution to modify the sales IDOC or use the custom table. SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 23 L. Schubert The work around for this would be to send a copy of your financial transaction through the sales I DOC. D. Mick Okay. We're working on that with a client that's all over..., but that's just an issue that we have to work on locally. Thank you. Coordinator Our next question comes Charles Harolton. C. Harolton Hello. We're doing a retail implementation here in Toronto, Canada. We'd just like to double check, is there currently a way to bring the merchandise category hierarchy across from R3 to BW? E. Schwarz Hello, Charles. It's the merchandise category hierarchy, you can upload it by a data source. There's a data source for the category and then you upload the class 26. It's, I don't know the exact technical name, but it's something like, I'm sorry don't know the technical name, but there's a data source for this hierarchy. The standard business content you find in RSA3 when you activate the data sources. C. Harolton It starts with 0 MATL or MAT, so we look for it in there. And it east a standard hierarchy with a tree? SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 24 S. Mock Stephan Mock, hello. The correct name would be 0material_LKLS_HIER. This is the name of the data source. C. Harolton Okay, thanks. E. Schwarz Thank you, Stephan. It's not called merchandise hierarchy, it's called 0material, so you can find it. C. Harolton Thank you. One last question. Is there way to do store grouping if the store groupings have been set up on the R3 side? E. Schwarz You are talking about store planning like? C. Harolton Site groups? E. Schwarz Which kinds of grouping? I'm sorry, I don't get the question. C. Harolton I'll put you through to the fellow that's been working on that. M Hello. How to bring all the site groups we maintain in R3 for allocation in the management into BW? You have a way to do it? SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 25 B. Katis What was the question? M How to bring in the site groups which we maintain in the R3 system in retail for allocation purposes into BW? Is that a ... matter, do we need to write something? S. Mock This is again Stephen. There is a possibility to use the zero plant hierarchy data for..., so you have hierarchies on plant or stores are free and can load them into the BW with the hierarchy extractor. The... object, zero plant has a hierarchy extractor. C. Harolton Thank you. S. Mokk Okay, welcome. Coordinator Our next question comes from Simon Clark. S. Clark Hello. This Louise Stevenson here from SAP UK I was just wondering what progress has been made on development of layout reporting, space management reporting in B2B? SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 26 B. Katis Is that a question anybody can address? S. Mock Obviously, not. You're talk being about B2B specifically here, about B2B content? L. Stevenson No. I'm talking about lay out modules, and SAP retail and the analysis of sales by lay out module and area from space management. M In the business content development are you ... up any plans to do anything in this area? S. Mock Again, Stephan here. I don't know exactly, but we have 21FC business content we have to start controlling area. I know that there's a little bit content about space and management, but for a pure space management content we have to ask our space management expert there's the store controlling content... [Information given by development after the call: Space management Business Content is on the development list for the next BW release 3.0.] L. Stevenson Thank you. SAP AMERICA Moderator: Margaret Anderson March 1, 2001/10:00 a.m. CST Page 27 Coordinator At this time there are no further questions. B. Katis If there's no further questions, I'd like to thank Lothar for presenting today and our colleagues in Woldorf for joining as well. Thank everybody for attending. Our next call will be in two weeks. Thank you very much.