E-book / Control & Simplify an SAP BO platform with {openAudit}
Introduction
A Short History of SAP BO
Business Intelligence has been around for 30-40 years. Business Objects just celebrated its 35th anniversary (1990). Practically right back to the beginning!
The inventors' brilliant idea: to make the data intelligible and put it within reach of the professional.
Initially, each company implementing SAP BO has a small number of users, but the platforms are quickly overwhelmed by their success. Business analysts are added to the interface. Complexity, even hypercomplexity, becomes the norm. And trust wanes.
The versions (BO 3.0…. 6, XI, XI R3, 4.0,1,2,3…) followed one another over almost 40 years without really changing the initial concept.
SAP BO vs. “Market Trends”
Businesses want autonomy, want to be able to exploit immense "sandboxes" of data, and obtain instant and reliable answers. We have entered the era of data visualization, self-service BI, and so on.
For some time now, the Cloud has been sweeping everything before it with the promise of scalability, affordable prices and, above all, delegated infrastructure.
Big Data platforms complete this inventory with the promise of exploiting massive data, whether structured or not.
BO retains its loyal supporters, but more and more voices are challenging this previously popular solution, deemed too complex and too static. But how can you significantly improve your SAP BO platform and quickly achieve your goal? How can you ensure it's sufficiently understandable to be ported to the cloud or migrated to third-party tools?
Massively simplifying SAP BO, the pitfalls
The business teams have habits, and despite certain difficulties, SAP BO still works very well!
IT fears a monumental project, with high risks of load disruptions: investigating each of the existing dashboards, their dependencies, and carrying out massive purges is complex.
Changing things is wishful thinking, but rarely a reality, given how complex BO platforms have become.
Our bias: to 100% automate the introspection of an SAP BO platform
An SAP BO platform can consist of hundreds of thousands of Documents, Data Providers, hundreds of thousands of Objects.
The platform's administration tools do not allow for granular impact analysis between each layer or for massive cleansings.
The platform is evolving at high speed, making any audits that may have been carried out obsolete.
It is much more efficient to automate the reading and understanding of its platform: dynamic scanning (parsing) 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! This is what we offer through our software {openAudit} .
Platform analysis methodology
{openAudit} will directly parse *.wid, *.unv, *.unx files to recover intelligence, document structure and semantic layer (universe);
{openAudit} will also access the repository to maintain consistency of IDs between different objects (universes, data providers, documents, instances, others);
An {openAudit} probe will retrieve certain logs from the audit databases (Auditor).
{openAudit} features for BO
To control your platform
An inventory of the SAP BO platform
This grid continuously inventories the entire SAP BO layer
Many 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.
An impact analysis grid
This filtered grid allows for rapid analyses to understand the interactions between each of the elements used by BO, from the source databases to the document cell:
The field of the database table in the BO source / The actual use of the object / The origin of the object (result and/or filter panel) / The data provider (query) which retrieves 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., i.e. the “identity card” of the document is found in a pop-up that opens when hovered over.
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, i.e. the cell presented in the document,
All intermediate transformations: nesting of variables, expressions (the formulas can be viewed on hover).
To simplify its platform
Document Archive / Data Provider Cleanup
Document archiving is carried out by a single selection, or a mass selection of documents to be archived (obsolete, broken, etc.) according to filters (typically by date of creation, refresh or modification of a document)
Archiving allows you to discard the document which will be purged automatically, and which will be the subject of a unitary archiving in the “BIAR” format indexed in {openAudit} .
Likewise, it is extremely easy to perform mass cleanups of data providers that return useless objects, i.e. "polluted" objects. This keeps queries as light as possible.
Replication Detection
A number of documents can be used perfectly, recent, unpolluted, but very heavily replicated.
{openAudit} compares all documents with each other, and this replication is established by percentage according to 5 criteria: Degree of replication of contents > Degree of replication of containers > Degree of replication of formulas > Degree of replication of filters > Degree of replication of filter data.
It is possible to perform mass archiving from this interface.
Cleaning the universes
The feature allows for sorting based on whether objects are used in documents or not. The interface allows for massive hiding of objects in the semantic layer.
To go further: migrate SAP BO to the Cloud
{openAudit} automates a set of essential tasks to optimize data management and migration. These actions include:
Creating connections on the new platform;
Remapping target connections to universes (UNV, UNX);
Modifying the SQL of objects using native database functions in universes (UNV, UNX);
The migration of universes;
Mass processing of scheduled and published documents;
Changing destinations in publications and instances;
Mass correction of security rules (LDAP, Win AD, access levels);
Remapping objects in documents in case of identifier inconsistency.
In case of detected regression, {openAudit} performs an impact analysis to precisely identify the affected objects and documents, then updates the processes automatically and en masse
Also: migrate SAP BO to a third-party tool
Most BI tools – like SAP BO – have:
A semantic layer or a data-prep layer that acts as an interface between IT and the business;
A visualization engine (the dashboard itself).
Based on these two layers, {openAudit} builds a single, agnostic (technology-agnostic) repository to simplify and automate migration.
{openAudit} then relies on this “pivot” repository to automate certain BO migrations to Looker, PowerBI, soon Strategy, etc.
Conclusion
SAP BO remains a widely used solution in businesses, and still appreciated for its robustness and security, even if today Cloud hyperscalers have brought other solutions to the forefront.
To ensure the user experience remains optimal and maintenance costs don't explode, over-administration that automates processes will be a definite advantage. It could also involve simplifying your platform to facilitate migration to the cloud itself, or to a third-party solution.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire