Real-time reporting through SAP HANA with SAP Fina...

Stephane_Neufcourt · ‎2014 Oct 28

SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 Support Package 15 (SP15) is available since October 15, 2014 and one of its key new features gives you the ability to run your reporting in real-time with SAP HANA. The support of SAP HANA as an underlying database, in addition to Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases, had been released with Support Package 12 in Q4-2013. For more than a year our R&D team worked on a proof of concept with one of our most strategic customers to leverage the in-memory technology in SP15 from a reporting perspective. Today with SP15, we bring SAP HANA integration to the next level and help you unleash the power of real-time analytics on consolidated data.

Simplified IT architecture

SP15 leverages SAP HANA to power a new class of real-time analytics. The SAP HANA in-memory database instantly analyzes huge volumes of data without complex layers of data management and storage. And for reporting purposes SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15 is a true game-changer: it leverages SAP HANA to dramatically simplify the IT architecture required for reporting purposes. Consolidation data can be directly accessed in real-time, even massive amounts of records.

Illustration: simplified IT architecture of the reporting with SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15 powered by SAP HANA

Outcome: instant business intelligence (BI) and Microsoft Excel reporting

Finance teams are looking for super-fast reporting capabilities. They need tools that enable high-speed analysis reports for their day to day job, sophisticated geo maps, business charts, dashboards or official statutory statements that can be updated in real-time once their financial consolidation software has run and consolidated data is available. With SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15, data is directly retrieved in real-time by reporting applications. With the add-in for Microsoft Office, you can use Microsoft Excel documents and query financial consolidations in real-time by directly accessing SAP HANA views.

Illustration: report real-time in Microsoft Excel through the add-in for Microsoft Office

You can also use business intelligence (BI) applications such as SAP Lumira or SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence to directly query SAP HANA views and have your analytics reports, graphs, geo maps or dashboards updated instantaneously.

Illustration: SAP Lumira bubble chart

How SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15 and SAP HANA connect

SP15 leverages SAP Cube Designer as a user interface to help you define and deploy the SAP HANA views required to run your reporting in real-time. Once created, the SAP HANA views are ready to be accessed by any reporting application. Moreover SAP Financial Consolidation data, dimension members and security properties are updated in real-time, e.g. new accounts, additional reporting units or updated data access rights. In the diagram below you can see how SAP Cube Designer is used to create the relevant SAP HANA views based on SAP Financial Consolidation.

Illustration: automated creation of SAP HANA views through SAP Financial Consolidation, Cube Designer

Technical architecture model

The four-step technical process is perfectly streamlined:

SAP Financial Consolidation metadata automatically creates the right SAP HANA attribute views including dimensions, attributes and hierarchies. When metadata changes in SAP Financial Consolidation, the update in SAP HANA is automatic

SAP Financial Consolidation data automatically fills SAP HANA cubes called analytic view. Data is generated through a stored procedure which can be added to your SAP Financial Consolidation scheduler (for example each time the consolidation ends)

Very importantly, SAP Financial Consolidation user right settings are automatically synchronized with SAP HANA roles and analytic privileges to ensure the same segregation of duties in SAP HANA