SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics: An Overview

In this blog post I will discuss the overview of SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics which  is one of the key innovations of S/4. It is a collection of SAP Fiori tiles in SAP S/4HANA that enable real time operational reporting in your transactional system. There is no ETL (Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) and batch processing required, compared to traditional reporting landscapes involving ERP and data warehouse systems. Embedded Analytics uses SAP Fiori as the front-end user interface and SAP has delivered standard content known as Fiori analytical apps for various functional areas. Standard content can be leveraged right out of the box as an accelerator for your implementation and can also be personalized and extended based on business requirements.

Why should I use SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics?

◉ Business Innovation through Radical Simplification

◉ Agility and Creativity for the Business

◉ Scale and Trust for the Enterprise

Making use of an Active/Active (read only) HANA database in S/4 HANA part 3: The client decides

In the preceding part of this blog series, I introduced the client imperative: The client decides if it is willing to accept data from the SAP HANA secondary database, which may have a few seconds of delay. Let me now have a more detailed look at this.

Making use of an Active/Active (read only) HANA database in S/4 HANA part 2: Architecture Overview

In the first part if this blog series I described the motivation to use a secondary SAP HANA database for executing expensive analytical queries. In block diagrams, I showed the major building blocks:

Making use of an Active/Active (read only) HANA database in S/4 HANA

Introduction

At SAP, we thought about creating additional benefit for customers who run SAP S/4HANA on premise.

Many of them in fact run two SAP HANA databases in a SAP HANA system replication setup: the productive SAP HANA database (aka the primary SAP HANA database), and an additional ‘hot standby’ SAP HANA database (aka the secondary SAP HANA database). The latter is part of their high availability strategy and allows business continuity in case of a failure of the primary SAP HANA node.

Step by step how to create a local SAP HANA connection with Analysis for Office 2.x

Create HANA local connection to an SAP HANA server with Analysis for Office 2.x version it easier and simple to configure. A local SAP HANA connection is created in the Select Data Source dialog.

With right click on the “select data source” you will be able to create the connection as you can see on the below images. Before create the connection you need a specific configuration that you can see below:

Internet of things in Manufacturing using SAP Hana

How Internet of things ( IoT ) are relevant to manufacturing space is a widely debated topic. As a goal of IoT  tries to deploy vast network of sensors, actuators and connect them with wire or wirelessly leveraging internet protocol. If you look at this basic goal or need then its obvious that there is major scope in manufacturing IT domain. Looking at the trends in manufacturing for two decades or so there is tremendous increase in usage of automation technologies or robotics. At larger context primarily all these IP enabled equipment’s and systems need to be integrated interms of data and hardware with larger SAP system. Its a interesting way to utilize SAP Hana in a cost effective way for real time manufacturing data.  I am proposing to utilize SAP Hana for collection and analysis of real time manufacturing data  and integrate the same with enterprise level SAP platform. I am sure seasoned enterprise architects  in manufacturing environment can put more light from technical perspective to make this solution work.

SAP HANA Authorization Tracing

This document will deal with issues regarding analytical privileges with SAP HANA.

So what are Privileges some might ask?

System Privilege:

System privileges control general system activities. They are mainly used for administrative purposes, such as creating schemas, creating and changing users and roles, performing data backups, managing licenses, and so on.

Constant Selection in SAP HANA Using Dynamic Join

In SAP BW, there is this concept of “Constant Selection” where you can mark a selection in the Query Designer as constant. This means that navigation and filtering will have no effect on the selection at runtime.

In SAP HANA, there is no feature that directly supports this functionality. We have to model it ourselves. One way to implement it is through “self joins” and “dynamic joins”.

Does your CFO need a real time geolocation report?

In a constantly evolving world, CEOs and CFOs must adapt continuously to their new market dimension. Having access to real time reporting gives a serious advantage on its competitors. Thus, CFOs can obtain the necessary information to have a real-time picture of their finance.
Real time reconciliation introduced by SAP Simple Finance solution increases the confidence index of financial reporting. In a more and more competitive world, CFOs can detect earlier business lines profitability decrease and take appropriate decision.

The Parent Child hierarchy in HANA

There are two types of hierarchies supported in HANA:

• Parent-Child hierarchy
• Level hierarchy

In this document, I would like to take the readers through the Parent child hierarchy: to create a very simple Parent Child hierarchy and to use it in a reporting tool that supports multidimensional reporting, like A-Office.

SAP HANA: Exploring data using SAP Visual Intelligence

SAP Visual Intelligence is SAP’s latest innovation in the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer solution family. It is a desktop-based visualization and data manipulation solution that allows business users to acquire data from a variety of corporate and personal data sources and manipulate without any scripting.
They can then analyze this data, with beautiful visualizations, quickly discovering unique insight that can be easily shared, shaping the business faster than ever before. -- As mentioned by SAP

Let us see what SAP says that we can do with SAP HANA using SAP Visual Intelligence:

New Hierarchy SQL enablement with Calculation Views in SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 10

SQL enabled hierarchies with SAP HANA Calculation Views

Modeling SAP HANA Calculation Views is the key approach to successfully exploit the power of the SAP HANA Platform and leverage key SAP HANA capabilities. With SAP HANA SPS 10 (find enhancement overview here), calculation views provide a deeper integration of hierarchy objects and their exposure for usage within SQL. By leveraging the SQL integration of hierarchy objects, hierarchy-based filters, aggregations and hierarchy-driven analytic privileges are enabled.

What’s new in SAP HANA SPS12 – SAP HANA Graph Engine

What’s new in SAP HANA SPS12 – SAP HANA Graph Engine

SAP HANA Graph is an integrated part of SAP HANA core functionality. It expands (the functions of) relational database management systems, with native support for graph processing, and allows executing typical graph operations on all data stored in a SAP HANA system; which is automatically optimizes execution plans to execute highly performant queries, and built-in graph algorithms based on flexible schema property graph data model, to traverse on relationships without the need to predefined modeling and complex JOIN statements.

Smart Data Access- A new feature by HANA

In Today's world, Companies are facing challenges to optimize cost and processes in order to sustain in this grim economic condition. Business has to be dynamic and agile to keep pace with the market and technology. Business has to get information in real time to make quick decision on time and at the same time, we need to keep control over cost for IT and Technology.

Keeping Business need in view, SAP has recently introduce Smart Data Access in SAP HANA which is a Virtualization Technique. This feature is introduced from SPS6 in SAP HANA. Smart Data Access enables SAP HANA to combine data from heterogeneous sources like Teradata, Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase Adaptive Service Enterprise and Hadoop.

New Hierarchy SQL enablement with Calculation Views in SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 10

SQL enabled hierarchies with SAP HANA Calculation Views

Modeling SAP HANA Calculation Views is the key approach to successfully exploit the power of the SAP HANA Platform and leverage key SAP HANA capabilities. With SAP HANA SPS 10, calculation views provide a deeper integration of hierarchy objects and their exposure for usage within SQL. By leveraging the SQL integration of hierarchy objects, hierarchy-based filters, aggregations and hierarchy-driven analytic privileges are enabled.

Enabling hierarchies for SQL access

Within the SAP HANA calculation view general properties, there is a new checkbox “Enable Hierarchies for SQL access”. With that hierarchy views from shared dimensions used in a Star Join Calculation View are enabled for SQL access.

SAP HANA, S/4 HANA, IBP, cloud, IoT, DevOps, … BINGO!

SAP R/3 – a pioneer era

The current times within IT feel somewhat similar to what the first colonists felt when they started their journey from a struggling Europe to the new world. Everything must have been so different, so innovative, so much better. Everyone tells you what you can do, buy and strive for. Yet at the end, as always, it is just a matter of money.

LEARN WITH US : S/4 HANA Analytics!!

What it is?

S/4 HANA stands for Simple 4th Generation Business suite solutions from SAP which will run on SAP HANA. SAP HANA is one of the preferred product among the companies seeking for an optimized enterprise solution because the product has come a long way from its previous predecessors which had its transaction processing and analytical processing in different platforms, that meant more time on data output and decision making.

It is very well known as The Next Generation Business Suite and it is greatest innovation since R3 and ERP from the SAP world. It unites the software and people to build businesses to run on real-time, networked and in simple way. It has got built-in analytics for hybrid transactional and analytical applications.

HANA Live implementation (sidecar scenario)

In this “how-to” post I am aiming to cover additional parts that arise while using HANA Live models in a sidecar scenario to your main (mature) SAP installation on a different DB. This blog post is of lesser interest for those cases, where an existing ECC / CRM system is migrated to HANA DB due to the fact that required tables are readily available under SAP_ECC / SAP_CRM schema. All you need to do is – install the HANA Live content and start using / modifying it.

Just a short recap, the scenario I am trying to cover here is the least-risk (and, possibly, cost) approach to leverage advantages of HANA with minor changes to existing ECC/CRM landscape, when an additional HANA instance is connected to the “main” system, running on traditional relational database. It may be an own HANA box, or any of the cloud solutions on the market.

Parallelization options with the SAP HANA and R-Integration

Why is parallelization relevant?

The R-Integration with SAP HANA aims at leveraging R’s rich set of powerful statistical, data mining capabilities, as well as its fast, high-level and built-in convenience operations for data manipulation (eg. Matrix multiplication, data sub setting etc.) in the context of a SAP HANA-based application. To benefit from the power of R, the R-integration framework requires a setup with two separate hosts for SAP HANA and the R/Rserve environment. A brief summary of how R processing from a SAP HANA application works is described in the following:

• SAP HANA triggers the creation of a dedicated R-process on the R-host machine, then
• R-code plus data (accessible from SAP HANA) are transferred via TCP/IP to the spawned R-process.
• Some computational tasks take place within the R-process, and
• the results are sent back from R to SAP HANA for consumption and further processing.

Real-time Sales Operations for the pioneers of Flash Memory

SAMRAT SENGUPTA
SENIOR DIRECTOR - IT
OPERATIONS AND SALES APPLICATIONS
SANDISK CORPORATION