SAP AMERICA
Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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SAP AMERICA
February 20, 2003
10:00 a.m. CST
(Accents made transcription difficult.)
Coordinator
Good morning, and welcome to the SAP Labs BW Know-How Network
conference call. All participants will be able to listen only until the
question and answer session of today’s call. The call is being recorded. If
you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.
I would now like to introduce your leader, Mr. Lothar Schubert.
L. Schubert
Hello, everybody. My name is Lothar Schubert. I am the manager of the
BW RIG in the U.S. It’s my pleasure today to introduce the main speaker
for today’s BW Know-How Network call.
Some people are new on this call. , BW Know-How Network calls are biweekly calls, which are held by SAP on selected topics around BW. They
are typically not for the beginner, but for the advanced person working
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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with BW. … calls can be downloaded from the SAP Marketplace, the
BW area, under Know-How Network. For two weeks after the call the
call transcripts are made available as well on the SAP Marketplace and
can be downloaded from there as well.
Today’s topic of … call is going to be Selected Aspects of SAP BW 3.0
OLAP Analysis. It’s going to be about a 30 to 40-minute presentation,
and afterwards we will have a Q&A session. Today’s speaker is going to
be Gerd Danner. Gerd is with the BW Regional Implementation Group of
Europe. And, Gerd, now I want to hand it over to you.
G. Danner
Thank you, Lothar, for the introduction.
As Lothar said, the topic for today will be Selected Aspects of SAP BW
3.0 OLAP Analysis. The agenda for the call is as follows. We will have a
look at pre-calculated value sets in BW. That’s a new feature with 3.0.
Very similar to replacement of variable with query result that we already
had in 2.0. I want to show you the little differences in this new method of
handing over a query result to a variable value. Then we have a quick
look at elimination of internal business volume. We will see the
difference between BW elimination that the business consolidation
system, BCS, provides, and have a look at constant selection with a little
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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example of calculating a market share. Next topic will be the business
case, slowly moving articles, especially showing you how we can display
things that did not happen, or, for example, which customer did not buy
any products in a specific period. And last topic for today will be showing
you a slight improvement in currency translation that we have in BW 3.0.
So let’s start with pre-calculated value set. First slide on pre-calculated
value set shows you what the preliminary step is. One of the reasons for
pre-calculated value sets is you want to filter a characteristic in a query
with characteristic values that you determine from another query. For
example, you have a pre-query that shows you the top five customers with
respect to number of ordered items. And the result, these top five
customers you hand over to second query, and filter in the second query
the sold-to party characteristic for these five characteristic values that are
selected with the first query.
First is to create this pre-query. When you have created the pre-query,
we go to the next slide, You go to the back-end system, enter transaction
RSA 1. That is the administrator workbench. You go to the reporting
agent. In the reporting agent you say you want to pre-calculate a value set
and you create a new setting. In there you have to specify what
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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characteristics you want to create this pre-calculated value set for. In this
case, the characteristic is the sold to party, so the customer that we sell our
product to. Then we have to tell the system where it gets the values from
for this pre-calculation setting. And in this case, this the query that is
shown in the middle of the slide. If the query needs some mandatory
variables for input, you can specify the variables with a variant, that is the
empty space there. And when you save and activate the setting, the
system tells you the name of the value set that can be seen in the lower
right-hand part of the slide. You have to remember this name since you
have to enter this name when you create a variable to access this value set.
Then, as you usually do with the reporting agent, you create a scheduling
package and you schedule the specific setting and you run it. Then it’s
available for being used in reporting.
We go to the next slide, in order to use it in a query you create a variable
for restricting characteristic sold-to party in that query. The processing,
that’s important here, is set to user entry and default value. Then you go
to the “variable represents” drop down box and you choose pre-calculated
value set from there. You have to choose that a variable is mandatory and
that it is not ready for input. On that screen you will have to enter the
name of the value set that the system showed you in the reporting agent.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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That’s how you connect a characteristic variable within a query to a precalculated value set.
The big difference between replacing a variable with a query result that
was already available in 2.0/2.1 with this new mechanism of a precalculated value set is that in this case the values are actually precalculated. In the old version, what we had in 2.0, the two queries were
actually run sequentially when you wanted to see the query result, and you
had to enter the select criteria for both queries one after the other. So
there’s a big performance gain here, especially if you think about many
users using this pre-calculated value set. You only pre-calculate it once,
but you use it many times.
So let’s go to the next slide, elimination of internal business volume. We
support multi-entity consolidation for multiple simultaneous hierarchies.
We’ll see in later slides what that exactly means. The BW eliminates the
key figure value, and the result is put on a special key figure that you have
to define. This is definitely different from legal consolidation, which is
part of SEM BCS or EC-CS. The big difference here, or the biggest
difference that I personally see, in EC-CS or SEM BCS you actually get
postings for the eliminations, postings that can be looked up by your
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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auditor, for example, postings that have to be there for legal requirements.
In BW this is all done on the fly, so there are no postings generated.
Pre-requisite for internal business volume elimination is that you need two
InfoObjects, a sender and a receiver InfoObject. They have to share the
same master data. Examples are sending cost center and the receiving cost
center or business area and partner business area. Additionally, you need
a special reference key figure, so a key figure that is defined with
reference to another key figure. This stores the result of the elimination.
You add it to the info cube, but actually the system does not store values
for it in the database, but only includes this special key figure in the
InfoCube’s structure.
Let’s go to the next slide, it shows you how to define the special key
figure and how to define the elimination rules. So when you create a new
key figure, on the first pop-up window you tell the system, “I want to
create a key figure with a reference.” There, you have to define the source
for your elimination. And the key figure you are currently defining is
actually a destination for your elimination rule. If you define a key figure
with reference you get a fourth tab strip in key figure maintenance called
elimination. In there you can specify between which two characteristics
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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you want to eliminate. So in this case we want to eliminate values from
profit center to partner profit center. You could also specify more than one
characteristic, and in this case specify whether it should be an AND
condition, that is elimination of all characteristics pairs, or it should be an
OR condition, which is elimination of each characteristic pair.
Let’s go to the next slide, which shows you an example. Let’s have a look
at the example data records. There’s one data record marked with that big
arrow.. Profit center PC 301, or with country UK. And partner profit
center is PC 102 with partner country DE and a revenue value of $50. The
following slide will then show you how to eliminate that according to
hierarchies, such as you see on the bottom. The first hierarchy is a profit
center hierarchy, with profit center 301 being in the PC 03 node. Profit
center 102 in the PC 01 node. Note, and the second hierarchy is a country
hierarchy with UK and DE both in the Europe node.
So let’s go to the next slide. This shows you some elimination examples.
The first elimination is simple elimination by profit center. So the value
of 50 that is posted for PC 301 is eliminated against the PC 102. PC 102
is in a completely different hierarchy node. The first common hierarchy
node in the profit center hierarchy is the very top node. So you see in the
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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right column that the value of 50 is only eliminated for this very top
hierarchy node.
Next example, lower left-hand side, shows you elimination for country.
Remember, UK and DE were within the same hierarchy node called
Europe, so the value of 50 in this case is eliminated already with this
hierarchy node, Europe.
Upper right-hand side shows you elimination for profit center or country.
In this case, it’s eliminated—this is difficult now without showing you.
On the UK and Europe and country node, it’s eliminated all because of the
country rule. This is actually the reason why all these rows here are blank.
If you look at the lower right-hand side, profit center and country, the first
blank line is blank because of the profit center and because of the country
node. The second blank line is also blank of profit center hierarchy node,
which applies for that row and the Europe node. You remember the
Europe node is already enough for the elimination of the value. If you
have a closer look at this example after this call, you can probably very
easily follow the example.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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Let’s go to the next topic, constant selection. What is constant selection
all about? In query design you select data that you want to show for the
run time of the report. The problem is when you further navigate within
the report, for example, when you filter within the report, the basis for
some calculations might change, for example, the basis for percentage
calculation, and in this case, the percentage value that you currently show
also changes. But in some cases, for example, market share calculation,
you always want to see the absolute market share of a specific product in a
specific market, no matter whether you’ve currently filtered on some
materials, on some products, or whether you don’t do that.
So let’s go to the next slide. It shows you the problem. If you define a
market share analysis without constant selection, for example, using the
percentage function %CT. If you filter for the materials, in this case
Notebook, Speedy 1, Speedy 2 and terminal P400, the second column of
the report changes, so the market share seems to change, also your only
filter, and you don’t want to have that.
So let’s go to the next slide. How can we avoid that? We can avoid that
by defining a selection in the query design as being constant. In this case,
the selection, the key figure is sold products total. And in the query
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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designer, within the context menu and properties of that selection, you
define it as being constant, and on right-hand side you see how the market
share in this case is defined.
Let’s go to the next slide. What happens is when you filter in this case the
market share actually remains the same, so dynamic filters that you apply
in query runtime don’t change the selections that you have defined to be
constant in the query designer.
As another specialty, with constant selection, as shown on the next slide,
in this business case we saw that we defined a whole selection as being
constant. That is actually just an abbreviation for defining every single
characteristic within that selection as being constant. You can also open
the definition of that selection that is shown on this slide and choose an
individual characteristic, in this case, the characteristic material, and only
define this individual characteristic material as being constant selection.
Then only filtering for that specific characteristic material wouldn’t
change the value that is displayed in the report. All other filterings would
change the value for that selection.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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Let’s go to the next slide. Next topic is the business case, slowly moving
articles. The business scenario on these is you want to display articles that
weren’t sold at all or that were sold only in very low quantities. While the
second one is easy, only low quantities, but the first one, displaying
articles that weren’t sold at all, is quite a difficult task, showing things that
did not happen, things that are not contained in your fact table. This can
be solved with BW 3.0, using some new functionality. First thing is using
the functionality info object as info provider. This functionality is
basically that you can define an info object, master data of an info object,
directly as an info provider that you can then use in the query designer to
build master data queries upon. You can also use that info object as info
provider in a multi-provider, and that’s what we’re going to do here, and
use new functionality, “selection of constants”, and new functionality to
“display values not posted”. We’ll see all that on later slides.
The last solution then is to create a condition to show the slow moving
articles, so articles that were sold with a quantity that were less than ten.
Let’s go to the next slide. The next slide shows you the characteristic
definition or InfoObject maintenance. In order to define a characteristic to
be an InfoProvider you have to go to the master data and text tab strip.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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And in the lower part of that screen, you have to check that little
checkbox, characteristic is InfoProvider, and you have to specify an info
area name there. When you do that, save it and activate it, the
characteristic is available in the query designer and it’s available in the
admin workbench in the info providers tab.
Next slide, this tabular info provider automatically contains a key figure.
That is called 1ROWCOUNT. It’s automatically visible. For example, if
you open that info provider on the query side, you automatically have that
key figure 1ROWCOUNT available, and it basically counts the number of
rows in a tabular info provider. Examples, again, for tabular info
providers are ODS objects and info objects, and the row counts as a key
figure in the tabular info provider.
On the next slide we create a multi-provider. This MultiProvider consists
to the multi-dimensional data provider containing our facts and the tabular
InfoProvider with the master data. Make sure that on the identification
button here we choose the right sources for this characteristic, so we have
to actually choose it both from the basis info cube and from the tabular
info provider.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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Next slide, when you create a query on that multi-provider, while here we
create a simple query, sold-to party in the rows, and open orders and value
in statistical currency as key figures, and we also have this special key
figure called number of records that comes from the tabular info provider,
sold-to party. And when you run the query, shown on the next slide, you
see what the result is of that query. On the upper right-hand side you more
or less see already what you want to see. So, for example, the fourth row
of the grid you see Thomas Bush, Inc., and that they haven’t bought
anything in the periods. But the problem is as soon as you set a filter, and
that is shown in the lower right-hand part, and this filter could also be a
fixed filter in the query definition, and that is actually even a bigger
problem, as soon as you do that, these rows actually vanish. I’ll now show
you how we can avoid this problem. So let’s go to the next slide.
In the query designer for that specific key figure, number of records, you
choose from the context menu the edit option. Then you go to the edit
selection screen and you add the InfoProvider characteristic to the
selections. The InfoProvider characteristic is a characteristic that
automatically gets added for multi-providers in 3.0. You restrict that info
provider to the name of the tabular info provider, to the sold-to party info
provider, and in the context menu for the characteristic info provider,
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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that’s the second right arrow here, you choose selection of constants and
display values not posted, these two options.
Next slide … again characteristics here are InfoProvider automatically
added for each multi-provider, like I said, and selection of constants on
this characteristic has special semantics. Actually there are two options
here that you can choose. First one, selection of constants, has the special
semantics that the system selects key figure values, ignoring all selections
on characteristics that are not provided by this specific info provider. So,
for example, the calendar day, remember? So if you select on calendar
day, this selection is ignored for this specific info provider and we still see
the values that are coming from this specific info provider. The second
option here, display values not posted. So the special semantics is, it
selects characteristic values, ignoring all selections on missing
characteristics on this info provider. Actually, for our business scenario
you have to select both options here.
Let’s go on the next slide, it shows you a query just with selection of
constants, so just the first option. And here we see as soon as we filter for
specific calendar year months the Thomas Bush, Inc. vanishes, so that’s
one thing that we don’t want to happen. Next slide shows you the result
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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when we switch on both the display values not posted and the selection of
constants. When you now filter for specific calendar year month you
actually get the result that you expect. You still see all the customers who
bought products from you, but you also see the customers who haven’t
bought any products in a specific calendar year month. So in this case,
Royal British Rail, they didn’t have any articles bought in May 1999.
And let’s go to the last slide for this business scenario. In order to get the
slow moving articles you have to define a condition. In the condition you
specified that the net value and statistical currency should be less than, say
ten, for example. In this case you not only get as a result customers who
didn’t buy anything, but also customers who bought for a value less than
$10.
Let’s move on to the last topic of this conference call. The last topic is
currency translation, improvement in currency translation. Let’s go to the
first slide of the currency translation, it shows you the time reference for
currency translations. Time reference, how it used to be, was a fixed time
reference and a variable time reference. Time reference generally means
when the system wants to transfer from one currency to another currency
it needs to have a transfer rate. And the transfer rates are time-dependent,
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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so yesterday could have a different transfer rate as today. And to resolve
the time dependency here, in the first case you either take the current date
or you can enter a fixed key date in the currency translation. Or in the
second case, for a variable time reference, you can choose a standard info
object, where this variable time reference comes from. So, for example,
you could choose 0CALMONTH, which is a standard time info object.
You could also specify a special info object, which could be a self-defined
info object with time saved in there to get a variable time reference.
One thing that is missing here and what many customers would like to
have, shown on the next slide, a third option, unfortunately it’s in German,
not translated into English. English translation would be query key date.
So starting with BW 3.0 B Support Pack 7, you can also define the query
key date as a time reference for currency translation. So when you run a
query and you enter a query key date that you also might use for timedependent attributes or time-dependent hierarchy, the system
automatically takes this query key date for choosing the currency
translation rate from the time-dependent currency translation system table.
That’s it for the presentation. Thanks for participating in the call. We
now switch over to the question and answer session.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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Coordinator
Thank you. Our first question comes from Aaron Benner.
A. Benner
I had a question about the currency translation, a little bit different issue.
Do you have any solutions for loading currency rates from multiple R/3
systems, if you have several different R/3 systems to one BW to get
basically a combined currency rate table?
G. Danner
The problem is that if you have the same currency translation types but
different currency translation rates in these R/3 systems, then you’re in
trouble. So if you want to use several R/3 systems and load them into the
BW system, you have to make sure that you differentiate them with the
currency translation type. This simply is an additional key in the currency
translation rate table. So, you should use differeent translation types for
different systems. If this is not different, but the translation rates are
different, then you get in trouble when you put all that in the BW system.
A. Benner
Separate them based on the currency translation type?
G. Danner
Yes.
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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A. Benner
Okay. Thank you.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Kiron.
Kiron
Hi. I had a question on counting … results in reference to a characteristic.
For example, in your query, if I have to count the number of sold to parties
as well as number of products, two different counters, how many total
parties and how many products in the query? It’s giving me an error, so
would that be possible in 3.0, two counters with references?
G. Danner
How did you realize the counters?
Kiron
There is a how-to document that you can use a reference characteristic to
count. I was using two counters to define differently and then use two
reference characteristics and put it in one query. One is ship to account,
the other one is material count. That’s an example, but I couldn’t get it to
work. It’s giving me a compilation error.
G. Danner
Well if that’s giving you a compilation error, that should probably be
reported to OSS, because that should not happen. Personally I don’t see a
reason why it should not work with two counters in one query. The only
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Moderator: Lothar Schubert
February 20, 2003/10:00 a.m. CST
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thing that you have to keep in mind there is the performance of it, because
the counting, how it is described in that how-to paper, and how it usually
works is with exceptional aggregation. And the exceptional aggregation,
that means that you have to read data with much finer granularity from the
database than you would do without exceptional aggregation. You cannot
use as much database aggregation as you would do otherwise. So a
counter always means some performance degradation. If you put two
counters into one query, you probably double these performance
problems, so you have to keep that in mind. But personally I don’t see
really why it shouldn’t work with two counters, even with 2.0.
Kiron
It’s different info objects, not the same info objects on exceptions. One
counter is referred with sold to info object, the other one is referred with
material info object …. And it is not allowing to define such a query with
the two different exceptional aggregations. I don’t know whether in 3.0
it’s been addressed or not. That’s my question.
L. Schubert
Yes, it’s Lothar. If I understood the question right, in 2.0 you are really
limited with exception aggregation you could just use one reference
characteristic within one query. But you could not have two. It wasn’t
supported in 2.0. But in 3.0 this will work.
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Kiron
Okay. Thank you.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Francisco Rios.
F. Rios
Oh, hi. I was just reviewing your slow moving articles info objection
definition of an info provider. I’m trying to interpret these in a way that I
can relate to. It looks like a slowly changing dimension. Could you
elaborate a little bit more on this one-row count, that it becomes visible in
how we use it?
G. Danner
Well, basically the idea behind this technique is that in a dynamic drill
down, when there was no posting, you don’t see the characteristic value
for that. So you have a number of accounts, 50 accounts, but only 30 were
posted. You put the accounts in the drill down, you run the query, you
only see 30 accounts, but you might want to see all 50 for completeness
reasons. And in order to see the missing 20 accounts, you can use this
functionality. So you mix basically a master data report with a transaction
data report that is run on a multi-dimensional info provider into one report
here. That’s the idea behind. I don’t really see the connection to slowly
changing dimensions here.
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F. Rios
Okay. Yes, because I didn’t see a reference to time. And eventually your
slowly moving articles will be referenced over time, I guess, so that’s why
I’m getting a little bit confused over this concept. But anyway, thanks.
Coordinator
At this time I’m showing no further questions.
L. Schubert
Okay, if there are no further questions then I would like to thank
everybody for dialing in today, for asking good questions. And also
especially I want to thank Kurt Donner for presenting today with
informative sessions. As I mentioned, the product will also be available in
a few weeks in Softnet Marketplace for download.
I want to let you know about the next Know-How Network Call, which
will happen in two weeks from now. The topic is going to be OLAP
Engine, again. But we will focus on a different area. We will focus
specifically on aggregation topics. So the question which was asked
before, for example, exceptional aggregation, how can this be handled,
model … etc., that’s what they’re going to cover on that call. Thank you
very much, and goodbye.
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