Financial reports columns

If you are a report designer, these definately sound familiar to you:
1) YTD Actual
2) Full Year Forecast
3) SPLY (Same Period Last Year)
4) vs SPLY
5) vs Previous QPR

But what does these column actually means in general?

Important factors:
i)The matrix for calculation
ii)The definition of forecast version and how many version of them in a year
iii) The same rules applies in the manual entry layout and actual reports query
iv)Use structures to have a single version of truth of the formula and calculation
v) Cross year rules & balance carry forward (controlled at backend)
vi)Conversion type and exchange rate type

Global EDWH

What is Global BI landscape means in terms of a big organization that has its own regional BI and r/3 instances? The initiative of cost cutting through the deployment of global template to regional layer seems like a strategical decision that has its own challenges. This comprises of complex regional business rules, standardization of master data,buy in of regional stakeholder, management of regional-global deployment as a BAU.

SAP BI Administration & Monitoring

What are the responsibilities of an SAP BW Administrator?

Most of the companies have BW administrators responsible for R/3 administration as well. Depending on the SAP landscape and the version of the BW system the responsibilities can vary, but most of the common responsibilities include installation and upgrade of the BW system, backup and recovery, performance tuning, setup and support the transport system, applying patches and so on.

Additional BW system administrator responsibilities could be troubleshooting R/3, handling database and UNIX system problems, and copying and renaming of existing R3 systems.

But this looks like Basis stuffs to me...

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Global Transport Strategy

Imagine having multiple projects working on your BI system concurrently. And try to consider the business release cycle that allows transports to be imported to regression and production server based on a straight timeline. Now, what happen to shared objects (esp infoobjects and datasource) being overwritten and missing manual steps before a transport went in? Surely some consideration to strategize the transports have to be done. And this is what the post is about.

Action for Pre cutover:
1) Engagement with basis on system refresh for regression server,logical system name mapping,
RFC connection
2) Engagement with different projects on the manual steps in between transport and data
loading sequence (two projects working on different solution may shared same datasource,
eg.Marketing and Finance retrieve data from COPA)
3) Preparation of transport build recipe
4) Communication to respective stakeholder on dates,system lockout and date for last transport
to be included in build recipe
5) List of users remain unlock and process chain to be 'paused' during cutover
6) Manual steps in between of cutover and party involves. Eg. replication from R/3


Action for Post cutover:
1) Compare inactive objects before and after cutover
2) Ensure all process chain run successfully
3) Reports can be executed successfully
4) Document down lesson learned. Eg. Cube content be truncated prior to sending in a change to
add navigational attribute in order to shorten the transport time
5) Raise awareness to respective party on their changes in their system that impact BI. Eg is
changing logical system name in source system might resulted in delta extraction failure in BI.
Another example is COPA realignment in R/3 will break the delta extraction in BI.

Can't have a bug-free BI system

In BI reporting environment, especially if it reports on global and regional level, there are a number of report designs and modeling techniques that needs to be considered as to prevent future pain of spending many man days and time to fix them. Most of the issues arises from frontend such as data binding in web template and incorrect variable applied in the Bex queries. The bigger issues lean towards the data standardization or cleanliness of master data across all the SAP and non-SAP feed systems. In order to consolidate the figures for global reporting, the master data has to be compounded to its source system or a single set of master data to be agreed upon from different regional master data management as the global standard. BI standards and governance play a major role here all the way from standardizing the infoobject (and its attribute),hierarchies and mapping DSO/table contents as they are the baseline for the accuracy of data churn out from the ETL layer into reporting display.There is no escape from having to perform multiple data reload or self-transformation whenever there is a change in one of those object. The always changing business process requires snapshots reporting and this introduce complexity in term of time dependence and versioning of master data and hierarchy.