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10/03/2015
Solution
SAP® HANA as a boost for the ERP system – PROMOS.GT is available on SAP® HANA/SimpleFinancials 1.0 AddOn
With the provision of the SAP® HANA in-memory technology, SAP has started down the path of making transactional processing (OLTP) and complex analyses and reporting requirements that had previously been solved with the use of SAP® BI or other Business Warehouse systems (OLAP) available in a single system landscape again.
Generally, SAP® BI is available within an
SAP® ERP/Business Suite installation based on SAP NetWeaver® (as of a certain
release level of the SAP® base technology). This is used, among other things,
in SAP® ERP as of Enhancement Package 6 with a new form of CO planning, in
which SAP® BI software technology can be integrated into SAP® ERP CO and used
for planning processes. Business functions are also available to use BI Query
for financial reporting. The use of these functions is always restricted by the
performance of the system in use. Thus, for these scenarios, careful use is
necessary to avoid impacting the dialog and batch processing of the SAP® ERP
system.
Figure 1: Parallel access to financial
information from SAP® ERP and SAP® BW.
Figure 1: Parallel access to financial
information from SAP® ERP and SAP® BW.
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SAP® HANA as a sidecar
As an initial technological solution to improve this situation and provide high-performance reporting based on the SAP® ERP data updated online using SAP® BI, one possibility would be to use the SAP® HANA database as a “sidecar”. The data required for reporting is synchronously replicated in the SAP® ERP tables in real time and in an SAP® HANA database running in parallel. This data can therefore be used in the dialogue for analyses from SAP® ERP or from a SAP® BW function that is activated in the same instance. SAP® provides examples for this scenario with the FI accelerators. These are also still available if the SAP® ERP has been fully migrated to an SAP® HANA database.
From the perspective of application requirements, the line item browser contained within this has remarkable new access to the information available in SAP®, as it is now possible to determine the OI situation across all customers in the system with a single transaction call. It is then possible to branch from the aggregated display to the open items/line items of the specific customer. A new strategy for using mass data can therefore be mapped on the basis of the in-memory technology available in SAP® HANA at a performance level that had not been possible within the SAP® ERP dialogue system.
Figure 2: Line item browser for
customers – sidecar.
Simplified data model
The next logical step is the solution available as an add-on with “SAP® Accounting powered by SAP® HANA” (currently available as SmartFinancials or SimpleFinancials in Version SFIN1.0). With the development of this solution, the core application SAP® Financials is dispensing with some of the underlying tables that had, until now, been necessary in the SAP® ERP world as a technical basis for providing high-performance analyses of line items, totals and balances or line items. The index tables (BSID, BSAD, etc.) and totals tables previously needed for accounting (GLT0, FAGLFLEXT) are replaced with real-time analysis based on the line items. The information from FI documents and CO documents that had previously been updated separately will now be merged in one document that can be searched by every column and viewed in aggregated form with the aid of the SAP® HANA database technology. This simplification of the data model for the core application of SAP® ERP Financials (FI & CO) gives rise to technical opportunities for new methods of processing and analysing the application data.
PROMOS on SAP® HANA
Over the past few months, PROMOS consult has migrated the SAP® ERP-based solution PROMOS.GT as well as easysquare workflow, which is available within it as an integrated solution, to this new technology basis. The real estate solution is based on flexible real estate management (RE-FX) in connection with SimpleFinancials 1.0. Classic real estate management (RE-Classic) is no longer supported in this solution.
The two development steps for the use of the SAP® HANA database were implemented and tested one after another. First we connected the SAP® HANA database as a “sidecar” and performed tests with the available accelerator scenarios. The analysis tables available in PROMOS.GT with accesses from SAP® BW, which was activated in parallel on the system, were also replicated in the SAP® HANA database and tested successfully in this context.
After transferring the separately built demo system to the SAP® HANA database and performing relevant tests, we implemented the migration to SFIN1.0. In this context, a few technical adjustments to PROMOS.GT programs are initially required (because the programs available for RE-Classic can no longer be used). This will ensure the availability of PROMOS.GT on SAP® Accounting powered by SAP® HANA. Further optimisations of the PROMOS.GT solutions and development of solutions that will only become possible with the underlying SAP® HANA database technology are the next milestones for the future solution based on continued development of the SAP® Business Suite powered by SAP® HANA. The integration of SAP® ERP transaction processing (OLTP) and SAP® BW Reporting & Planning (OLAP) in a single installation has thus been implemented.
Details of the individual solutions, the
use of the new interfaces including SAP® FIORI apps and the continued
development of the available PROMOS.GT solutions (account balances, analysis
tables, etc.) will be published in the coming weeks.
Author:
Magnus Temme
Director SAP Consulting Münster
PROMOS consult
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