This post is about geovisualization and spatial analysis of BEx data with SAP BusinessObjects BI Location Intelligence.
SAP BusinessObjects BI Location Intelligence is a geomapping extension for SAP BI (See SAP website).
We are going to see how to get the following map:
This post is specific to SAP Webi on BW/BEx.
You can look at this post to get a similar topic specific to geomapping with Design Studio:
Interested in Location Analytics for Design Studio? Take a look at this blog
It is assumed that 80% of enterprise data is geo-located and this will increase in the future with mobility, Internet of Things, and smart grids amongst other factors.
So what is a geolocated data
The most common geolocated data is a point location with Latitude/Longitude coordinates.
Note that coordinates can be defined according to different coordinate systems such as Lat/long in degrees and X/Y in meters just to give a couple examples.
Geolocated data can also be related to geographical areas such as zip code, counties, administrative boundaries or your own business location such as your points of sale, territories, technical assets or networks.
If you have the above type of data in your BW/BEx systems, you should be interested by this post.
Let's see how we can leverage this data through the power of SAP BI 4.x Web Intelligence and its Location Intelligence extension.
Step1- Build your Webi document using a BEx query
Here is a broad overview as the purpose of this post is not to go into the complex details. Refer to the following document to get more information about this:
http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4sp7_bex_queries_en.pdf
1. Build a BEx query with location lat/long coordinates and associated business measures.
This is done in SAP BEx Query Designer.
Check that your lat/long coordinates consist of numerical data.
2. Define a BICS connection to your BEx query
This can be done in the SAP BusinessObjects CMC or in the SAP BusinessObjects Information Design Tool.
You can define a connection to a single BEx query or to an InfoProvider containing several BEx queries.
3. Create a Web Intelligence query on your BEx query
- Go and connect to the SAP BusinessObjects BI Launchpad
- Create a new Webi document using the Rich Internet Application client
4. Add the appropriate data in your Webi query
- Open the query panel to access the BEx query data
- Add the lat/long coordinates and the required business measures
- Add prompts / filters according business needs
- Test your query to check that you get one record per location with coordinates and measures
- Save and close your Webi document
And now, let's go for geomaps!
Step2- Add a geomap in our Webi report
1. Open your Webi report with the HTML Viewer (See user preferences)
2. Insert a map container in your report
- Add a blank cell in your report
- Define its sizeand properties according online help
Your report should look like this:
3. Go to the Cartography menu and choose Map Document:
4. Define the different settings in the map wizard below:
- Choose a cartographic view among the ones made available by the administrator
- Choose the viewer to use (Flex for advanced use, HTML5 for more intuitive UX)
- Choose your Query with BEx data in the pick list
- Choose the fields to use for X/Y coordinates
5. Submit your settings and refresh your Webi report to display the map
6. It's time to visualize your business data on your map
- Go to the Menu Layers
- Open the Thematic Manager
- Add a Layer
- Define the settings of the map visualization (Business measure, color, size...) in the following wizard
- Apply to see the map as below:
In conclusion, you can get more insight on your BW/BEx data with dynamic geovisualization by taking advantage of the power of Webi and its Location Intelligence extension
Have a look on the new map we've got in a few seconds!
Just have refreshed the Webi query and subsequent BEx data and changed the background map and the visualization settings to a heatmap.
- SAP Managed Tags:
2 Comments
