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.