Tag Archives: SAP

Concept Of An SAP Business Area

Basic financial statements are created in SAP on the basis of the company code. For traditional statements, all the transactions are grouped according to the company code and financial statements like balance sheet and Profit & Loss statements are drawn separately for every company code. But at times there is a need to carry out analysis across company codes according to some criteria other than the company code.

As an example, if there is a need to generate a financial report on the basis of a product line, geographical location or divisional sales, then this can be done using Business Areas. The purpose of business areas is to report on similar activities that occur across company multiple codes resulting is cross company reporting.

However the financial statements generated on the basis of business areas cannot be used for legal reporting purposes. For this reason, it is not possible to create the legally required financial statements and tax reports at business area level. Financial statements at business area level are therefore only suitable for internal reporting.

Concept Of A Business Area: Cross Company Code Analysis

Consider a situation where there are four companies in all, ABC Apparel, ABC Sports, ABC Shoes and ABC Services.

Undoubtedly, the most important tool in a ABAP programmers toolbox is the ABAP debugger, but here in this tutorial we are not going to focus on that, rather we will focus on “Tools for Analysis”. In a later article I will focus on “Tools for Troubleshooting”.

Tools for Analysis

ABAP Code Inspector (TCODE – SCI)

With the help of the code inspector you can check your ABAP code for performance, security, syntax, error proneness and Statistical information. You can perform different code checks using this tool on a single object (simple check on programs, function modules or classes) or a set of objects (special check on set of objects).

Example of Checking a single object:

Calling code inspector for single objects is very easy, to call it from programs go to Program (SE38) then from the menu choose Check=> Code Inspector

From Function Modules go to Function Modules – SE37 then from the menu choose Check=> Code Inspector.

[quote]An SAP BW DSO stands for Data Store Object and was previously called an ODS which stands for Operational Data Store. Why has the name changed? Don’t ask me! SAP seem to change the names of there product names more often than I have hot dinners. I am sure they have their reasons 🙂 .[/quote]

A DSO is a SAP BW object primarily used to store detailed transactional data at a granular (document) level. Unlike multidimensional data storage objects like InfoCubes, DSO’s are designed as a 2-dimensional flat database table that contains key figures and characteristics. Data can be aggregated as well be over-written.

There are 3 types of DataStore Objects that are generally used in BW systems: Standard, Write Optimized, Direct Update. In this article by Roula Sawma she focuses mainly on the architecture of these three types of DSO’s and the main functions of the objects themselves.

Are you interested in changing your career, or even starting a new one? Some people may be intrigued by the SAP Basis Administrator job. As a Basis Administrator myself I know what it takes to be one and in this article I will try to make you understand what it takes to become a successful one. […]

[quote style=”boxed”]How do you highlight unusual deviations of key figure values in a SAP BW BEx Query? This question is often asked by concerned managers, marketing and sales people who want to spot these deviations as early as possible so they can act fast to changes in their business. One technique is by creating Exceptions in the SAP BW Query Designer.[/quote]Exceptions are used to identify deviations from pre-defined threshold values or intervals. Any data in your BW query that varies from these thresholds are marked with different colors in the query result. That way you can spot any extraordinary variations from expected results straightaway.

Step By Step – Creation Of Exceptions

Log in to query designer and choose the query for which you want to create the exception and click on the Exceptions button  followed by New Exception.

SAP BW - Query Designer

SAP BW - New Exception

Press the Edit button in the properties area on the right of the window. The properties screen of the exception will then appear.

The Limitations Of This CCMS Monitoring Solution

I mentioned monitoring several jobs, but there are limits to the solution I’m going to show you. My own experiments have showed that trying to monitor more than 100 jobs is not a good idea I will not work very well. You see, the major problem is that the Internal Dispatcher has to loop through many tasks including the job monitoring task within a 5 minute time period. So as long as your list of jobs is not too long and the loop can be achieved with the 5 minute time limit this solution should work just fine.

Initial Configuration

First of all, we need to select a job to be monitored and I’m not talking about a single report. Pick a real batch job; one that may contain several reports.

For this example I will first call the transaction SE16 (You may know this one, don’t you?), and in the table name field, just type ALBTCMON. See screen below:

Next, press the “F5” key, or click on the Create Entries button.

Summary: As someone with many years of experience as a SAP Basis Administrator, one of the questions which comes up quite often is, did you schedule all of the SAP maintenance jobs? This question is most often asked when a system has just been installed or when certain tables are growing in size a little too quickly.

Scheduling the SAP Standard jobs

The task of scheduling the standard jobs used to be a tedious one; you had to check the SAP Note 16083 – Standard jobs, reorganization jobs, and then you had to go through it step by step and create each job individually with the appropriate variant. Since 4.6C, this is no longer a requirement. There is now a much easier solution.

Start transaction SM36 and you should a screen similar to the one below: