Connecting Design Studio to Your ERP/ECC System, Like BW Using Operational Data Providers

[TammyPowlas]

First this blog would not have been possible if it weren't for the efforts of SCN community member raf.boudewijns4 here: Building your own Embedded Analytics application - part 3.

This is on ECC enhancement pack 7.

I really hadn't tried activating anything until yesterday.  I had some success activating HCM analytics inside SAP ERP but I am not familiar with that data.  So I successfully activated some of the Financial Enhancement packs and their Operational Data Providers ODP for Accounts Payable (FI-AP) - Operational Data Provisioning for Financials - SAP Library

I had some success but not without issues.  It is not working with some tools right now but for sure it is working with Design Studio.  The steps are listed below:

Inside ERP I used transaction RSA3 (extractor data):

That means success, I do have data.

Then I create a BEx Query against this data:

The enhancement pack comes with pre-delivered queries but for this example, I decide not to use them.

Then go to Design Studio and use this ECC BEx Query.

Here is how it looks at run time:

Of course this is just sample data from the sandbox.  It would be more useful to look at vendor line items and balances by actual vendors and periods but to hide the data I picked something easy.

So to me this is interesting in that I am running a BEx query using SAP Business Content (which on the surface looks very good for Accounts Payable) without leaving my ERP system.

These are operational data providers (defined here ).  The SAP Help says "You can use Operational Analytics to perform OLAP analyses on the application data locally in the application system"

I hope to learn more and get things working soon.