SAP has released a new version of Business Planning and Consolidation ( SAP BPC 11) to be deployed in its also recently released product for data warehousing BW4HANA. Now if you are thinking about improving your BI solution with the power of HANA, the benefit of the cloud, and now with this powerful planning and consolidation tool, this article will guide you with some key points to understand all benefits you will get with this integration.
A short time ago in September 2016, SAP launched to the market what it said it is the NEXT GENERATION OF DATA WAREHOUSE, a tool for business intelligence named SAP BW/4HANA.
BW is the tool SAP provides to give you a powerful data warehouse to manage data in an OLAP environment. Even when in-memory database came out, a group of people thought that we could replace the way we built reports and make analysis with the power of in-memory databases and its principal benefit: fast access to the raw data. Then, with the time they realized that the concept behind the data warehouse is versatile and we still need it.
SAP gave to its clients the opportunity to move to some versions of BW running on HANA, for example: SAP Netweaver BW powered by SAP Hana and SAP BW, Edition for SAP Hana Add on (BW on HANA + SAP BW/4HANA Add-on installed), but is now when the real integration of BW and HANA comes with SAP BW4HANA.
All benefits of BW for integrating data from different sources, storing current and historical data in detail and/or aggregated and organize the information for an excellent query performance can be improved with all the potential of SAP HANA. It will enrich BW with:
- Accelerate BW data access, it holds the data that is constantly used in memory (RAM) and understand what data should be in storage but always available on request (warm data).
- Better performance to access to real-time transactional data.
- A reduction of objects to create your solution (there is no more InfoCubes, classic DSO or Aggregates); with this the result is reduced redundant data and execution time.
- Better handling of growing volumes of data.
- Complex analysis and planning scenarios can be more efficiency.
In that moment one of the questions to migrate to this new tool was: What happen with my actual BPC on a BW Netweaver installation, is it supported?.
Recently, in June 2017, a new release of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 11 (SAP BPC 11) is available with its version for SAP BW/4HANA . It is not an upgrade; it is practically another product, more oriented to the cloud and with a Fiori design front end. For this BPC 11 version you require BW/4HANA (either embedded or standard models).
Apart from all benefits we mentioned in the backend as we are using SAP BW4Hana, this tool has great enhancements that also improve our daily planning basis:
- HTML5 web interface that gives you a modern and comfortable way to see and manage your data.
- Web worksheet that lets you access your planning input data everywhere and explore your charts and reports.
- Integration with SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud), you can use self-service visualization and Predictive Analytics with the same Cloud Platform and powered by SAP HANA in-memory technology.
- The integration with Excel is still maintained, with Analysis for Office and EPM Add-in interfaces.
If you were waiting for this integration, to start switching your BI solution to BW/4HANA, we recommend waiting and evaluating going with SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 version, it will give you more mainstream maintenance (EOM 2023) that the actual version 1.0 (EOM 2019). Find out more about SAP BPC 11 EOM
If you need to migrate your actual SAP BPC and SAP BW Netweaver applications to this new group of tools, it is important to take into account that you will need to do a conversion of your actual SAP BW Netweaver to SAP BW/4HANA, some BW objects conversions, a technical simplification of your model and your BPC data will need to be moved to your new installation. SAP gives you a series of conversion tools and an excellent guide to go with that. Conversion guide.
This new way to do business intelligence is a great improvement for your business.