HANA Adoption Strategy

For most organizations,eventually it will come to a point where there will be hot debate on deciding to get HANA in or not. HANA is sometimes mistakenly took in as a new tool to improve reporting and planning performance and the investment evolves on funding the hardware, upgrade and licences. Well, it is not uncommon approach as scoping those mentioned areas already took up millions of dollars. And to take off HANA as new technology together with a strategic adoption program, it will cost triple fold of the initial set up cost.

HANA is actually a roadmap and a BI adoption program beside treating it as another 'Accelerator'. The implementation roadmap needs to be planned according to:
• Assessment of current BW environment to decide the migration strategy
• Alignment with SAP BO Upgrade and new innovations such as Lumira,Mobi & Explorer
• Alignment with Master Data initiatives
• SAP BI Governance Adoption
• Integration and adoption across other integrated systems, departments, projects
• Delivering business values and innovations in line with company long term goals and BI visions

Companies out there should avoid making mistakes to get only the hardware and tool in place without streamlining it as part of the long term BI roadmap that consist of stakeholder positioning in BI, delivering business values, adoption, governance, scalability, program sustainability in economic downturn, and global support. Having to say that, BI at the end of the day  is an expensive practice/tool/process that can only deliver back the ROI if it is strategically executed and planned.

Potential Impacts of HANA Migration to the SAP BO

This is a good article for us to refer on the potential impact on BO when BW moves to HANA. Please take note that there is effort required on changing the data connection path on the universe we have currently and this may require to be done during the cutover window.

What is HANA?

I often hear people asking around 'What is SAP HANA'?

My definition
SAP HANA is a database itself, and it only runs on SUSE Linux. It is RAM working on Write/Read Controller modules on Data Volume and Log Volume store in disk. When you write data to SAP HANA, it is written to the logs first then moved into RAM. The ‘disk’ here meaning file system on a Fusion-IO SLC or MLC nand flash card or RAID 10 controller with an array with SSD disks (depending on the hardware vendor). This sounds like a lot of Basis stuffs and yes if we see it from the sole angle of migrating the database from rdbms to in-memory, this is it , something new and exciting for Basis guys.

So what is in store for BW guys? Ok, here is where BW consultants need to pay attention to. You see SAP sees HANA as a game changer, in a way, there are so many potentials lies within the area of Business Analytic. So they introduce to you SAP HANA Studio. This is where the future RSA1 and DB02 take place. And the peak of the action happens when ECC itself sits on top of HANA and  HANA Business Contents are made accessible directly from HANA Studio. If you are a BO guy, you already know data provisioning is available directly from HANA real time data straight into the dashboard or reports.

How about ABAPERs? HANA Studio itself is built from Eclipse. So if you are an application developer, having sound knowledge on Java is crucial as I can only imagine instead of developing workflow in webdynpro , we can do it in Java. Of course, on top of all this, we can't run away from the integration with ECC in which BADI and BAPI skillsets are always hot in that area. So ABAPERs, you are always in demand.

To get to the ultimate HANA landscape, just like any technology lifespan, there is transition and obsolete.
Well, let's not dwell into the word 'obsolete' in this case (Although I do believe it contributes to a lot of worry factors among BW consultants) .Focusing on the word 'transition', that is when we start to google up on words like HANA optimized Infocube, HANA optimized DSO, Semantic Partition, 'Sidecar' approach, SLT, DXC and the favourite for BPC-ABAP developers - Code Pushdown.

Quote from Vishal Sikka:
There is another possible reality. HANA offers an opportunity to rethink business processes. The business driving elements such as decentralisation and the explosion of interrest in mobile are in play. Cloud vendors are showing us important elements of the technology with which to get the job done. Despite what detractors might say, HANA really does have disruptive potential.

Here is a list of Google search results from various sources:
WIKI
SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP AG.

Note:
Column-oriented organizations are more efficient when an aggregate needs to be computed over many rows.
Column-oriented organizations are more efficient when new values of a column are supplied for all rows at once.
Row-oriented organizations are more efficient when many columns of a single row are required at the same time.
Row-oriented organizations are more efficient when writing a new row if all of the row data is supplied at the same time.


SAPHANA.COM
SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that is deployable as an on-premise appliance, or in the cloud.  It is a revolutionary platform that’s best suited for performing real-time analytics, and developing and deploying real-time applications. At the core of this real-time data platform is the SAP HANA database which is fundamentally different than any other database engine in the market today.

Wikibon
SAP HANA Enterprise 1.0 is an in-memory computing appliance that combines SAP database software with pre-tuned server, storage, and networking hardware from one of several SAP hardware partners. It is designed to support real-time analytic and transactional processing.

Techopedia
SAP HANA is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows HANA to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk. This allows the application to provide instantaneous results from customer transactions and data analyses.HANA stands for high-performance analytic appliance.

Searchsap
SAP HANA is a data warehouse appliance for processing high volumes of operational and transactional data in real-time. HANA uses in-memory analytics, an approach that queries data stored in random access memory (RAM) instead of on hard disk or flash storage.

Cost Allocation Project

It'd been a while since I last blog. I was moving from HANA to BPC on and off in the fluid environment in my current organization. But getting into BPC was something very different from what I used to do as a SAP BI consultant. Actually there is a lot of Abap, CO config and BPC frontend and very little of BW development. Anyhow, the solution we rolled out is really neat and creative. An Abap program was developed to simulate Cost Allocation process from ECC and the data is updated in real time into a write-optimized DSO, in this case it acts as a table. These data is loaded into an Infocube and through a Data Manager package that call a BADI , the results is extracted into a BPC model. The model is used to enable planning in BPC for secondary cost.This was possible because ECC BAPI was triggered from BPC via a RFC connection and data was retrieved from AL11 back into BPC. The best thing about this program is we are able to create a snapshot view of each run for the cycle (sometimes the users may run more than one time for the same cycle after making changes in the cycle configuration or percentages of allocation), cycles are categorized for each Region accordingly (hence making it possible to have an authorization check for  user  over a particular cycle), data updated directly in BPC and preliminary check was done on dependent cycle (example a WBS Element that acts as a Receiver has to be run before a cycle that has that same WBS Element as a Sender). The checks on dependent cycle eliminates a lot of manual work in which it used to be a dreadful practice to run Cost Allocation by different focal person through a series of 'take turn' sequencing to cater for cost objects involve in inter company elimination. I got really used with tcode such as KSUB, KSU7, KSU8, KSU9,  CJI4, KAH3, KJH3, KP06 etc.The Abaper I worked with is an amazing coder who managed to have the work evolved 'beautifully' around this important function module K_ALLOCATIONS_RUN.

If the whole Cost Allocation process can be simulated from BPC , the whole planning process is possible to be shifted over from ECC to BPC. The approach is through  simulation because the BAPIs are only available in ECC contents and not in Netweaver. It can be interesting topic for licencing as if planning can be triggered from BPC, planning focals  may not be needing ECC access. Well, for existing BPC planning solutions, instead of performing extraction and retraction in and out from ECC, you can consider this approach.

*For Extraction mode, BADI that normally substitute the conversion file in Data Manager Packages is used and is triggered from transformation file (Script Logic) in Data Manager Package. As for Retraction ECC, a BW process chain can be used by declaring it in the transformation file and then run the Data Manager Package.