Ebook - Simplifying SAP BO

 

Introduction

A brief history of SAP BO 

Business Intelligence has existed for 30-40 years. Business Objects just celebrated its 35th anniversary (1990). Practically since its inception!

The inventors' brilliant idea: to make data understandable and readily available for professionals with just a click.          

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 in to interface with them. Complexity, and even hypercomplexity, becomes the norm. And trust erodes.

The versions (BO 3.0…. 6, XI, XI R3, 4.0,1,2,3 …) have followed one another for almost 40 years without truly revolutionizing the initial concept.

SAP BO vs. "market trends" 

The profession demands autonomy, the ability to leverage vast "sandboxes" of data, and the ability to 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 a promise of scalability, low prices and above all a delegated infrastructure.

Big Data platforms complete this inventory with the promise of exploiting massive amounts of data, whether structured or not.

Business Objects (BO) retains its loyal supporters, but a growing number of voices are challenging this previously popular solution, deeming it too complex and static. How can SAP BO significantly improve its platform and quickly achieve its objectives? How can it be made sufficiently user-friendly to be moved to the cloud or migrated to third-party tools?  

Massively simplifying SAP BO: the pitfalls 

The business teams have established routines, and despite some difficulties, SAP BO still works very well!

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

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

Our approach: to fully automate the introspection of an SAP BO platform 

An SAP BO platform can consist of hundreds of thousands of Documents, Data Providers, and hundreds of 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 any audits that may have been carried out obsolete. 

It is much more efficient to automate the reading and understanding of your platform: dynamic scanning (parsing) of universes and documents, continuous audit analysis ("Auditor"), in order to build powerful, always "up to date" responses and add means of action! This is what we offer through our {openAudit} software .

Granular analysis	Low impact	Continuous analyses
{openAudit} analyzes the structure of dashboards, the metadata they contain, therefore the intelligence, the structure, the sources, etc.	This parsing is done at the "delta" level to avoid overloading the servers. All the collected metadata is centralized and stored historically.	{openAudit} continuously scans only the dashboards that have changed. A single version is performed daily on a Git repository.

Platform analysis methodology

1. {openAudit} will directly parse *.wid, *.unv, *.unx files to retrieve intelligence, document structure and semantic layer (universe);

2. {openAudit} will also access the repository to maintain ID consistency between different objects (universe, data providers, documents, instances, others);

3. An openAudit probe will retrieve certain logs from the audit databases (Auditor). 

 

OpenAudit features for Business Objects

To control its platform

• An inventory of the SAP BO platform 

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 document weight is indicated in the right-hand column. 

• An impact analysis grid 

This filtered grid allows for quick analyses to understand the interactions between each of the elements used by BO, from the source databases to the document cell:  

The database table field in the BO source / The actual use of the object / The origin of the object (result and/or filter panel) / The data provider (query) that retrieves the object / The document, which includes such and such an 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 on hover. 

• The data lineage in the document

This interface allows you to highlight all the calculation rules involved in constructing a piece of data in the document. 

At the beginning of a document, you will find:

• All of its physical and semantic sources,

• The final impacts, i.e. the cell presented in the document, 

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

To simplify its platform

• Document archiving / data provider cleanup

Document archiving is done by selecting individual documents, or by selecting a large number of documents to be archived (obsolete, broken, etc.) according to filters (typically by the date of creation, refresh, or modification of a document). 

Archiving allows the document to be set aside, which will be automatically purged and will be subject to individual archiving in "BIAR" format indexed in {openAudit} .

Similarly, it is extremely easy to perform mass cleanups of data providers that retrieve unnecessary objects, i.e., objects considered "polluting." This significantly reduces the size of queries. 

• Replication detection

A number of documents can be used quite well, recent, uncontaminated, but very heavily replicated. 

{openAudit} compares all documents with each other, and this replication is established as a 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 perform mass archiving from this interface. 

• Cleansing the universes

The feature allows sorting based on whether or not objects are used in documents. The interface allows objects to be hidden in bulk within the semantic layer.

To learn more: Migrating SAP BO to the Cloud

{openAudit} automates a set of essential tasks to optimize data management and migration. These actions include:

• The creation of connections on the new platform;

• Remapping of target connections to universes (UNV, UNX);

• Modifying the SQL of objects using native database functions in universes (UNV, UNX);

• The Migration of Universes;

• The bulk processing of planned and published documents;

• Modifying destinations in publications and instances;

• Mass correction of security rules (LDAP, Win AD, access levels);

• Remapping objects in documents in case of identifier inconsistency.

If a regression is detected, {openAudit} performs an impact analysis to precisely identify the affected objects and documents, then updates the processes automatically and in bulk.

Also: Migrating SAP BO to a third-party tool

Most BI tools – such as SAP BO – have:

• A semantic layer or a data-prep layer that interfaces between IT and 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 migrations from BO to Looker, Power BI, soon Strategy, etc. 

Conclusion

SAP BO remains a widely used solution in business, and is still appreciated for its robustness and security, even though today Cloud hyperscalers have brought other solutions to the forefront.

To ensure an optimal user experience and prevent skyrocketing maintenance costs, a more streamlined administration process that automates certain steps will be a definite advantage. It could also involve simplifying the platform to facilitate migration to the cloud itself, or to a third-party solution.