Disclaimer: As a member of the SAP certification engagement & influence council & SAP Mentor I was selected as Learning Hub Champion. As such SAP provides me with free access to SAP Learning Hub. In return I provide feedback to SAP and share knowledge on this topic with the community at large
A use case where SAP Learning Hub is very interesting for me personally is covering the basics of a specific SAP product. A request I had received was if "Can you automate the reporting of a number of key performance indicators for a set of SAP systems?". In this specific case, the team requesting this had already defined KPI's so I was handed a list of KPI's along with the thresholds they wanted to have on those.
The most logical option, at least so it seemed at first, was to leverage Service Level Reporting (SLR) to build a custom SLR. You can use EarlyWatch Alert (EWA) as a source for SLR data and there is an option to build custom queries there as well. Unfortunately, after trying it out, I came to the conclusion it's not really a great choice. There are restrictions in whay you can do with the key figures so you can only build pretty basic queries. Another problem is the lack of logging if a query fails you just see a blank spot and you don't know why. Besides that, it's not flexible nor fast enough so it takes too long to make an adjustment, recalculate the result (run the SLR in other words) and check what has happened.
So the SLR option was put aside. The question then becomes what else is there to use? Lots of options still because SAP Solution Manager stores data in BI. Either configured inside SAP Solution Manager itself as an embedded BI or in a BI system outside of SAP Solution Manager. In general this translates into the fact that you can consume this data in lots of BI related products that SAP offers. The data can be consumed in SAP Lumira, Business Object BI Suite, Bex Query Analyzer and so on. Keep an eye on future blog posts as I'll be discussing around this more in one or more posts in the SAP Solution Manager space.
I decided to check out the Bex Query Designer / Bex Query Analyzer option to be able to report using custom queries without the need for any additional product except Microsoft Excel. So the next problem arrives, I was not that knowledgeable on how to use those Bex tools.
Full stop...
This is exactly where SAP Learning Hub comes in and is super interesting. Laying the foundations of what you need to know and depending on the topic, even going beyond those foundations. I followed through the e-learning course E-Learning BW309_EN_Col96 and got the hang of the Bex Query Designer. Once the foundation was laid out, it was time to continue. For more advanced things, I contacted some friends (thx Tammy, Wouter, Els, ...) who have lots of BI experience to move the needle where the course couldn't push the needle further. I find that this combination works well and gets me up to speed quickly on what I want to know.
A sample of the end-result:
- SAP Managed Tags:
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