BPC for consolidation & integration with SAP

[Former Member]

Hello experts,

I'm looking for further Information about consolidation functionality of BPC for MS. I can't find much up to date Information. Maybe you can help me.

• I understand that BPC can be integrated into the BO BI platform. Can I use alle BO frontend tools for reporting there like Design Studio and Lumira? I just know about WebI, Crystal, .. from the Master Guide. Are there any restrictions?
• Without BIP as far as I understand we can report using EPM client (Excel) and Web client? Is this right?
• Are there any connectors to read data from systems like SAP ERP/SAP BW and others? Or is everything over Excel?
• Can SAP BO Financial Information Management (FIM) be used to automate Integration of data into BPC?
• I read that BPC can be integrated with Cloud for Analytics/BusinessObjects Cloud. Is there further information what can be done here from a functional point of view (especially concerning consolidation)? What ist the use of integration? Just to deliver data to cloud?
• How far can BPC for MS handled by business? Where is IT necessary?
• Can someone tell me more about advantages/disadvantages of the consolidation function comparing MS and NetWeaver Version?

Thank you so much in advance for help and information,

Peter

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

Some of those questions will have different answers for the MS and NW version. The MS version is basically a stand-alone installation on an SQL Server. You can use any reporting tool that can work with a SQL database.

The standard way of reporting from BPC MS is the EPM Add-In in Excel and, to a lesser extent, the BPC web interface.

The NW version can import data from the BW, in the MS version you can only import flat files via the Excel interface unless you use FIM (with which I have no experience).

To run BPC MS you need IT to look after the hardware and the SQL database (backups etc). All work in BPC itself (maintenance of meta-data, rules, etc) can be done without IT.

BR,

Arnold

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Arnold,

thank you so far. Do you have any experiences with other reporting Tools on SQL database? Is MS SQL Server Analysis Server the standard database for processing the data?

So you Need to Access over MDX Interface?

Any experiences with BO tools? As far as I see both is possible in BIP CMC as a source:

-> BPC for MS

MSAS:

But I expect here that BPC would be the better option...?

Best regards,

Peter Baumann

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

I have not used other reporting tools with BPC or MS SQL, so unfortunately I can't help you there.

BR,

Arnold

[former_member186498 · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

try to answer to some questions:

• How far can BPC for MS handled by business? Where is IT necessary?

it depends how much smart are business people, they could do quite all, also mantain dimensions, modify applicataions, schedule packages etc. but normally asministration is for IT and business just do data entry, journal, package execution...

• Can someone tell me more about advantages/disadvantages of the consolidation function comparing MS and NetWeaver Version?

for users is the same thing just for IT something is different

Do you have any experiences with other reporting Tools on SQL database? Is MS SQL Server Analysis Server the standard database for processing the data?
So you Need to Access over MDX Interface?

Any experiences with BO tools? As far as I see both is possible in BIP CMC as a source:

All the admin functions (process dimensions, modify application, optimize, etc.) are made from administration, inside BPC, rarely you have to do it from SSMS or SSAS, this because bpc has connections with other tables and you risk to have issues if you do it outside BPC.

Same for reports, epm add-in is a good instrument to build also complex reports, you have also offline option, to share reports with no BPC users and distribution list for distributing or collect data extra system and insert data in a second time.

Regards

     Roberto

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter

We suggest to always use the BPC connection as data source in BO. That will give you the security defined in BPC.

Technically speaking you can also use direct access to the MS SSAS OLAP connection and query the cubes directly (which may be in fact faster since you are bypassing the BPC application server layer) but it's not recommended by SAP.

If you expose the BPC for querying via BO and expect many users running simultaneous queries I would strongly suggest to fine tune your SQL server in order to get acceptable performance.

In general it's good to remember that when querying base level members, the BPC system builds a combined SQL query directly against the fact tables and uses temporary tables to extract the base level members.Although it's a read-only operation, behind the scenes it inserts the records into the temporary table which requires careful consideration of the tempdb database and the more the amount of RAM on the SQL server the better. From what I have seen in supporting BPC for MS in the last five years, most - if not all - of SQL server installations used for BPC are seriously undersized and rarely tuned for optimal performance because people mostly use stock hardware sizing recommendations.

In reality in month end / year end situations when the systems are used heavily and when people need the fastest response times, in these situations the system is at it's slowest due to improper hardware sizing.

The common misconception that SSAS is the workhorse while in fact the SQL relational engine is the real workhorse and the real bottleneck.

RAM is cheap these days, use it generously and the users will be happy.

regards

Stefan