The enterprise IT industry is undergoing massive transformation strongly influenced by the way software is being delivered and used. The traditional on-premise software, which has been the backbone of the industry in the last decades, is transforming into services available in the cloud, ready to be used. However, we are at the beginning of that long journey and companies are doing it one step at a time. For the upcoming years, it would be common to see hybrid IT landscapes incorporating both on-premise and on-demand solutions tightly integrated to ensure smooth operations for the business. Following that line, the current blog discusses how you can use SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP’s in-memory platform as a service, to integrate and analyze such data. In our sample scenario, we are using human capital management (HCM) data and respective SAP products but you can apply a similar approach for other enterprise systems as well.
The following table summarizes the SAP products we are using for this scenario:
Product | Use in the Scenario |
Hosts on-premise HCM data. | |
Hosts on-demand HCM data. | |
Enables moving data from the on-premise system (SAP ERP) to the cloud (SAP HANA@HCP). | |
Installed at the ERP system to enable HCI for Data Services. | |
Hosts the combined data from the on-premise and on-demand systems. | |
Add-on for SAP HANA that visualizes data from the SAP ERP system. | |
Generates reports from the combined data in SAP HANA. |
The following diagram illustrates the components of the system and their interaction.
The transfer of ERP HCM data to the SAP HANA database is facilitated by the HCI-DS & HCI-DS Agent. Then the structure of data is improved using SAP HANA Live.
The transfer of SuccessFactors data to SAP HANA is done over a REST API, using a scheduled XS job.
From the two data tables, we generate an analytic view, which we then visualize using SAP Lumira Server.
In our scenario for data replication we are using SAP HANA Cloud Integration for data services (HCI-DS). The procedure is basically the following:
Replication of SuccessFactors (SFSF) employee data to SAP HANA is done using SuccessFactors OData REST API. A custom XS Job in certain time period triggers an XSJS function that queries SFSF, and updates the users’ data. You may see the setup below:
Having the HCM data in SAP HANA at HCP, we may now analyze it. For this purpose SAP offers already prepared SAP HANA calculation views based on the tables of CRM (Virtual Data Models for HR Renewal). This gives us out-of-the-box analysis capabilities for our scenario. Because we want to count the employees in our organization, and be able to drill down by organization and department, we are using ‘sap.hba.apps.hcmrenewal.views::HeadcountForManagerByEmployeeAndDate’ calculation view. On the other hand, we want to count the SuccessFactors employees as well. For that, we have created a custom calculation view that joins the ‘HeadcountForManagerByEmployeeAndDate’ view and SFSF employees’ data table. The custom calculation view gives employee number as a measure, and organization and department as drill down attributes. You may see the results in the data preview below.
SAP Lumira gives us the power to analyze the data provided by SAP HANA calculation views. In our scenario, we have created a custom calculation view that joins the data for employees in ERP, and SFSF. Business analysts can easily access this custom calculation view from SAP Lumira, and apply filters, drill down, slice and dice. SAP Lumira allows also creating reports with live data, and sharing them with colleagues. In the picture below you may see a sample SAP Lumira report from our use case.
In the current document, we described how a smooth on-demand-on-premise integration for an HCP reference scenario could be achieved. The powerful combination of tailored HCP products, the design paradigms described above, and constantly growing SAP HANA Live content (currently there are 22 industry-specific variants available) allows many valuable use cases and scenarios beyond the current scenario and industry to be covered in a standardized manner with low efforts.
dobrinka.stefanova
SAP HANA Cloud Integration for data services: http://help.sap.com/hci_ds/
SAP HANA Cloud Integration for data services Tutorials: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-47511
SAP Lumira 1.22: http://help.sap.com/lumira
Virtual Data Models for HR Renewal (New): http://help.sap.com/saphelp_hba/helpdata/en/78/885451d600ff50e10000000a445394/frameset.htm SAP HANA Platform: http://help.sap.com/hana_platform/#section6
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.
User | Count |
---|---|
38 | |
19 | |
13 | |
13 | |
11 | |
10 | |
10 | |
10 | |
8 | |
8 |