SAP Business Objects SPM : What, Why, How Document

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This document provides an overview of SAP Business Objects Spend Performance Management.

SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management is an analytical application that helps companies gain a comprehensive view of their spend data. Using the spend performance management application, organizations can gain better visibility into their total spend for supplier rationalization and cost savings.

Spend relevant data is distributed over many different systems and data sources ranging from FI/GL, SRM, procurement to Travel and Expenses (T&E) systems. To accurately capture all spend within a large company, data from all these data sources needs to be consolidated and semantically integrated into a single system.

SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management accepts spend data from a variety of sources into a SAP NetWeaver BW based data model, which can be analyzed through a web browser-based client.

The backend of the application resides on top of standard BW, that’s where the data model gets deployed. The user experience is managed through the Adobe Flex based rich client user interface. The application provides a rich reporting and analysis environment that offers both out of the box and ad hoc analysis capabilities for analyzing all spend data. SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management comes with a set of predefined reports that covers the most typical spend analysis scenarios.

High level architecture diagram of SAP Business Objects Spend Performance Management:

The following diagram shows the data model architecture and the data flow in SAP NetWeaver BW:

1.   Inbound Layer:

   Data upload for the transactional objects: Contract , Purchase Order, Invoice , Budget and Forecast, Projects, Payments, and External Factors using the application's data management tool into the inbound layer.

   The inbound layer consists of several DataStore objects (DSO) (one for each transactional object) that correspond to basic or primitive application objects such as purchase orders, invoices, and contracts.

   All of the DataStore objects in the inbound layer are Direct Update.

2.   Detail Layer:

   The detail layer consists of a one-to-one replication of all of the DataStore objects from the inbound layer. The difference being, the detail layer DSOs are standard DSOs and hence support change log. The invoice detail DataStore object is enriched with additional information from purchase orders, contracts, product master data and other master data, whereas the purchase order DataStore object is needed to calculate the committed spend key figure.

3.   Reporting Layer:

   Aggregation into an InfoCube-based data marts layer takes place. The reporting layer consists of several InfoCubes that support reporting on all dimensions of the data, and provide additional key figures that are derived during the transformations. There is a one-to-one correspondence of the cubes with the DSOs from the detail layer, with the exception of the Invoice Counts cube that is populated from the same invoice information.

4.   Reporting through a web-based client for spend analysis.

   Within the BW part of SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management, a MultiProvider builds up a data union of all InfoCube data in the data marts layer.

Details of Transformations and Delta Upload

• Data Management to Inbound DataStore Object

During this upload phase, only basic BW transformations take place:   

•   Conversion of amounts from transaction currency to reporting currency
•   Concatenation of master data IDs: Source System ID and Source System Master Data ID

Delta Upload

This is a full load every time. Older records are not available in the inbound layer because of the ‘Direct Update’ nature of the DSOs.

• Inbound Layer to Detail Layer

During this upload phase, look-ups on database tables and key figure calculations take place.

Delta Upload

The corresponding data transfer process supports the extraction mode Full. The data is extracted from the active tables of the inbound DataStore objects, and is filtered by the field Upload ID. This setting assures that the after-image records from inbound DataStore objects are used for data integration.

• Detail Layer to Reporting Layer 

During this upload phase, data is aggregated and key figure calculations take place.

Delta Upload

The corresponding data transfer process supports the extraction mode Delta. The data is extracted from the change log of the inbound DataStore object or integration DataStore objects. This setting assures that only the delta value of amounts and quantities are added to existing values in the InfoCubes.

SPM User Interface

Browse menu

Browse menu is the place where all out of the box as well as user created objects reside.

• SAP is the folder where all Out Of the box content resides.
• Public is a folder where in users can create objects and place so that everyone can see.
• Groups is the folder where content can be organized so as to enable a particular group of users access the content as per the roles and user rights.
• Private is the folder wherein a user is allowed to place content that is only visible to the user who created it.

The content is placed in folders and subfolders organized as per the business area. For example, as depicted in the screenshot below, within the SAP folder, content is divided in Reports and Dashboards folders. Further, if we look at the Reports folder, the reports are organized according tobusiness area like Spend, Off Contract Spend, Non PO Spend, etc. The dashboards are also organized in a similar fashion.

Dashboards

Dashboards are UI elements that can be used to display multiple reports within a single screen. The idea is to have few reports relevant to a particular Business user collected in a single screen so as to make all relevant information available for analysis via a single screen.

SAP provides some dashboards out of the box; however, business users are allowed to create their own dashboards to display information that is relevant to the role of the business user. All the various charting and reporting options available on individual reports can be used via individual reports within the dashboard. The business user is also allowed to drill down to a single report from a dashboard

Briefing books

Briefing books enable the business users to take snapshots of data at a given point in time and store it for later use. Multiple reports and dashboards could be added to a single briefing book, alternatively, business users could create briefing book per business area. The electronic print of data in the form of reports and dashboards grouped within briefing books could be shared with stakeholders via email.

Data Loading in SAP SPM

SPM data management tool is a

mechanism of loading data into SPM. The data management tool does the following three things:

1. Reading Data:

• Flat Files: Data is read from specified folders and then it is converted to a structured format
• Data Sources: Data Load is triggered from info package (which does a pull from the source system) and then the data is read from PSA, package by package

2. Processing Data:

• Field Concatenations: Source System and others (specified in OPMDM_TYPES and OPMDM_TYPES_KEY)
• Currency and Unit Conversions: For Global Currency and Global Unit (per product).
• Raw, Classified data processing: Uploading specific columns based on whether it is raw load or enriched load

3. Writing Data:

• Write Mechanism: BW APIs to write into DSOs or Masterdata infoobjects
• Data Targets: Based on the type of upload (OPMDM_TYPES), the tool writes the data into either the raw or the cleansed data targets.

The

SPM data management tool also additionally allows for import and export of data to and from data classification services.

Advantages of using the SPM data management tool:

• The basic conversions on data for Global Currency and Unit of Measures and the key concatenations are performed out of the box along with validation rule checks.
• The import and export for data enrichment is managed by the tool
• It provides a unified interface for loading data from both flat files and BW data sources
• Built in support for Delta management
• No custom effort is required for loading data
• Even though this tool is a programmatic in nature, once it writes the data into the inbound layer, the process is same as any other BW data load and can be traced by looking at the respective process chains (defined in OPMDM_TYPES table)

Below mentioned figure depicts the recommended data flow in SAP SPM with Data Enrichment.