Simply over administer a SAP BO platform

 

I-Introduction 

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Short History of SAP BO: 

Business Intelligence has existed for 30-40 years. Business Object, has just celebrated its 30th anniversary (1990). Practically at the origins!

The inventors' brilliant idea: make the data intelligible, and put it within a click of a button for the profession.          

Initially, in each company that implements SAP BO, there are few users, but very quickly the platforms are overwhelmed by their success. Business Analysts come to interface. Complexity, and even hyper complexity, are becoming the norm. And confidence is fading.

The versions (BO 3.0…. 6, XI, the day.   

SAP BO vs “market trends”:

The profession wants autonomy, wants to be able to play in immense “sandboxes” of data, and obtain instantaneous and reliable answers. We have entered the era of data viz, self-service BI...etc.  

For some time now, the Cloud has been sweeping away everything in its path with promises of scalability, low prices, and above all delegated infrastructure.

Big Data platforms complete this inventory with a promise of exploiting mass, unstructured data.

BO retains its loyal supporters, but more and more voices are challenging this hitherto popular solution, considered too complex, too static. But how can you significantly improve your SAP BO platform, and how can you quickly reach the target? How can we ensure that it is sufficiently intelligible to be ported to the Cloud (SAC), or migrated to third-party tools?  

Massively simplify SAP BO, the pitfalls:

Business teams have habits, and despite certain difficulties, SAP BO still works very well.

IT fears a monumental project, with high risks of disruptions: investigating each of the existing dashboards, its dependencies, and carrying out massive purges is complex.  

Making things evolve is wishful thinking, but rarely a reality, as BO platforms have become so complex. 

   

Our bias: automate the introspection of an SAP BO platform:  

An SAP BO platform can be made up of hundreds of thousands of Documents, Data Providers, thousands of Objects.

The platform's administration tools do not allow for granular impact analysis between each layer or for massive cleansing.  

The platform is evolving at high speed, making each of the audits that may have been carried out obsolete. 

 

It is much more effective to automate the reading and understanding of its platform: dynamic scanning of Universes, Documents, continuous analysis of the audit (“Auditor”), to be able to construct powerful responses, always “up to date”, and add means of action!

II. Platform analysis methodology

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1. {openAudit} will directly parse *.wid, *.unv, *.unx files to recover intelligence, document structure and the semantic layer (universe);
2. {openAudit} will also access (through SAP tools) the repository to keep the consistency of IDs between the different objects (universes, data providers, documents, instances, others);
3. An {openAudit} probe will retrieve certain logs from the audit databases (Auditor). 

 

III. The functionalities of {openAudit} for BO

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1.  To control your platform

1.1. Cockpit

This cockpit allows you to monitor the “health” and evolution of the SAP BO layer in a few moments. 

Each scan of the BO layer generates KPI's which overwrite the existing KPI's (logically, the historization takes place in our databases). 

1.  To control your platform

1.2. BO Report Browser

This grid continuously inventories the entire SAP BO layer

Numerous details are available: ID / Name / Excluded from analysis or not / Data provider pollution / Document quality / Creation date or last refresh, etc.). 

The weight of the document is indicated in the right column. 

1.  To control your platform

1.3. BO Impact Analysis 

This filtered grid allows you to carry out rapid analyzes to understand the interactions between each of the elements used by BO, from the databases in sources, to the cell of the document:  

The field of the database table in BO source / The actual use of the object / The origin of the object (result and/or filter panel) / The data provider (query) which returns the object / The document, which includes this or that object / The names of the objects / The name of the universe. 

The weight, the date of the last action that took place, the folder, etc., ie the “identity card” of the document is found in a pop-up that opens on hover. 

1.  To control your platform

1.4. Data Lineage in the document

This interface allows you to highlight all the calculation rules that are involved in the construction of document data. 

At the start of a document, we will find:

All of its physical and semantic sources,

The final impacts, ie the cell presented in the document, 

All intermediate transformations: nesting of variables, expressions (formulas can be viewed on hover).

2. To simplify your platform

2.1. Archive / Clean Queries

The archiving of documents is carried out by an individual selection, or a mass selection of documents to be archived (obsolete, broken, etc.)  

Archiving allows you to discard the document which will be purged automatically, and which will be the subject of a unitary archiving in “BIAR” format indexed in {openAudit} 

Likewise, it is extremely easy to carry out mass cleanings of data providers bringing up useless objects, ie “polluted” objects. Thus, the queries are reduced as much as possible. 

2. To simplify your platform

2.2. BO Replication

A certain number of documents can be quite used, recent, uncontaminated…etc, but very strongly replicated. 

{openAudit} compares all documents against each other, and this replication is established by percentage according to 5 criteria: 

Degree of content replication / Degree of container replication / Degree of formula replication / Degree of filter replication / Degree of filter data replication.

It is possible to archive files from this interface. 

2. To simplify your platform

2.3 BO Univers Cleaning

The BO UCleaning functionality allows you to sort according to the use or not of objects in the documents. The interface allows objects to be hidden or made massively visible in the semantic layer.

IV- Conclusion 

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SAP BO remains a solution widely used in businesses, and still appreciated for its robustness and security, even if today Cloud hypersacles have brought other solutions to the forefront.

To ensure that the user experience remains optimal, and that maintenance costs do not explode, over-administration that automates processes will be a definite advantage. It may also involve simplifying your platform to migrate it to the Cloud (SAC or another solution). 

movie 2'

https://youtu.be/ftEGLIefNcI