When using BPC application, customers sometimes run into issues. It is understandable that every customer wants to get his issues
resolved as soon as possible.I am a support engineer in BPC product support team.I would share some hints regarding this and hope it helps.
Hint1:Always search for SAP KBAs and Notes.
SAP notes are the fixes from the development organization.
SAP KBAs(Knowledge base article) are the documented solutions to all the known
issues.
The error you get is very likely a known issue.Searching for KBA and notes is always the quickest way to resolve this kind of issues.If you can’t find a KBA suitable, please try changing the key words you use and search several times more.As a SAP support engineer, my experience is that quite a few customers’ issues would have been resolved at the early stage before they create incidents to SAP support if they did more careful search.
Refer to blog below:
http://scn.sap.com/community/epm/planning-and-consolidation-for-netweaver/blog/2015/03/19/how-to-eff...
Hint2:For consulting issues,search on SAP BPC sdn.
As you know,SAP BPC sdn (this place) is the place where many experienced SAP consultants exchange ideas. It is a good resource
you can find help from and there are a lot of useful contents available. It is especially helpful for consulting issues. To search these contents,you can use
Google because they are visible to public.
According to service contract signed by SAP and customers,consulting issues are out of the scope of SAP product support.So SAP
support won’t process incidents regarding consulting issues.Refer to SAP note 83020.
Typical consulting issues are :How to achieve particular business requirement;errors related to customized BADI,Excel macro,script
logic,process chain and other non-standard feature;Error got when following SAP how to guide provided on SDN;Performance tuning.
Hint3:Do some pre-analysis before creating an oss incidents.
If you do some pre-analysis and provide the results to SAP product support in the OSS incident, it would greatly speed up SAP
support engineers’ investigation and shorten the resolution time.For BPC,typical pre-analysis include:
1, Do some cross-checking to narrow down the issue.
If you get an error with one reporting
template,check in another template to see if it is template specific; Check in
another model or environment as well; Check by another User ID to understand if
it is caused by the user’s authentication or client machine.
2, If you get an error in BPC front end, check if an ABAP dump is generated at the same time by T-code ST22.ABAP dump sometimes
helps us to understand the root cause of the error and help to find a quick work around.I will explain this in detail by another blog.
3, If you get a problem with EPM Addin report,you can create a similar web report to check if this issue is from EPM Addin or backend.If it is from backend,it is normally caused by BW OLAP.You can get MDX query and execute it in T-code ‘MDXTEST’ to check if it works.Regarding how to
get MDX,please refer to SAP note 1449668 and 1742110.
4, If a script logic you have developed doesn’t work as expected, please don’t create an incident to SAP support saying that the whole logic doesn’t work. As explained earlier, this kind of problems are normally considered as consulting issue because customer should be responsible for the scripts they developed.But if you think the problem is from the syntax of the script,please narrow down the problem to a particular block and provide it as an example to SAP support.At the same time, provide the input data/out
data result to explain the problem.
5,Configurations of BPC consolidation is complicated.
If you run into a problem with BPC consolidation,please check your
configurations according to my previous post below:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56719
If you still think your configurations are correct and it is a problem caused by the software ,please provide following detailed
information to SAP support:
->The screenshot of the source data before running
consolidation.
->The screenshot of the EXACT business rule you
configured for the source data to be consolidated.
->The output after executing the consolidation.
Especially, explain why you think the result is not correct (This is because
according to my experience,some customers just have misunderstanding of how BPC
consolidation works and the output result it should be).
->If possible attach some screenshots to explain
the ownership data have been maintained correctly.
Hint4,Open remote connections immediately after you create an OSS incidents.
Remote connections enable SAP support engineers to login to customers’ system and investigate the root cause quickly. They are very important for the investigation of the issues.
As a SAP support engineer, a very common situation I face is :Customer run into a critical problem and create a very high incident to
SAP but spending quite a lot of time at opening remote connection. This should be avoided.
Especially take note of the following:
->BPC have both front end and back end .If the problem is purely related to back end ,you only need to open R/3 connection to
your SAP BI system according to SAP note 812732.
->If the problem is related to front end ,besides R/3 connection,you need to open Http based tools connection(Refer to
SAP note 1787981) or WTS connection to a client machine with EPM Addin installed(Refer to SAP note 605795).
->Don’t forget to provide user credentials in secure area for SAP to login. Especially take note of the authentications of
the user ID you provide, for example, if the user ID has been provided required SAP BI authentication to do investigation and BPC authority to reproduce the issue(correct data access profile and task profile).
Hint4,select appropriate priority when you create an OSS incident.
Especially,take note of the priority of ‘Very high’.SAP cares much about customer’s business operation by SAP systems and we always
spend resource as much as we can to help customers on the most critical issues
to minimize the impact to customers.So for Very High incident,SAP provide 24*7 support.
Please use ‘very high’ priority in case it is really the most critical situation such as:
1, a production down issue
2, the imminent go-live or upgrade is jeopardized.
3,The core business processes of the customer are seriously affected.
And no work around is available.
To ensure prompt processing of incidents with the
priority "very high", customer should:
->Remote access to the relevant system must be ensured.
->A contact person must be designated for opening the system who must be available and can
provide the required logon data.
->A contact person must be available to provide information about the problem.
->The problem should be described in as much detail as possible: The incident should contain
instructions about how to simulate the problem.
->To ensure 24/7 processing, the incident must be written in English.
Please note,if the conditions mentioned above are not satisfied,SAP support engineer will downgrade the priority.
These are some points come to my mind now,I will keep updating the blog and provide more hints in the future :smile:
