Unveiling the new functionality in 2024 of SAP PAPM Cloud: Welcome to Universal Model!

[JoanJabagat]

As we strive for excellence in serving our customers, we are excited to introduce the latest SAP Profitability and Performance Management Cloud (SAP PaPM Cloud) functionality. Discover the exciting enhancements with us in this blog post.

 

Memory Lane

Since May 31st, 2021, SAP PaPM Cloud has been dedicated to supporting our customers’ business, integration and Analytical calculations and processes through its robust suite of applications and integration capabilities.

Responding to evolving process and business requirements, SAP PaPM Cloud functionalities have been extended to support transactional activities and processing alongside analytical processing.

Analytical vs. Transactional Processing: What’s the Difference?

Before I talk about various topics related to SAP PaPM Cloud, I would first like to take a closer look at the following question: What exactly is the difference between analytical and transactional processing in relation to SAP PaPM Cloud?

ANALYTICAL PROCESSING – Standard Model (SM)

SAP PaPM Cloud will continue to be useful as it leverages its integration flexibility to consume analytical and transactional data from various sources such as Business Warehouse or S4HANA, enabling granular analysis and insightful calculations such as profitability. This empowers management with fact-based decision-making by providing key insights into business performance.

TRANSACTIONAL PROCESSING - Universal Model (UM)

Our current customers already experienced the SAP PaPM Cloud’s processing capabilities in meeting their business requirements; some of the customers decided to use SAP PaPM Cloud not just for their analytical processing, but even for their day-to-day business operations (transactional processing) like processing customer orders, invoicing, and inventory management.

 

This shift emphasizes the need for robust data lifecycle management within SAP PaPM Cloud. Below is a summarized version of the data lifecycle expected for a solution that performs standalone transactional processing:

To address this demand for transactional processing, SAP PaPM Cloud has been enhanced with an important new feature set called Universal Model, tailored to the needs of data lifecycle and transactional processing.

Before diving into the details of Universal Model, let me provide a high-level decision tree to guide you when to use well known Standard Model (SM) and when the Universal Model (UM).

Simple Decision Tree: When to use What?

With this decision tree in mind and assuming familiarity with SAP PaPM Cloud Standard Model, let's delve into the features of SAP PaPM Cloud Universal Model so that you have a better comparison between these two important modeling applications in SAP PaPM Cloud.

Universal Model (UM) Functionality Highlights

Spoiler

This section of the document should not be perceived as a substitute of help application. It is still highly encouraged that you visit the application help to understand all functionalities available in Universal Model via this link.

Outlined below are several examples of functionalities exclusive to UM that will address various customer demands across diverse business requirements.

(1) Granular Role Templates

UM offers granular role templates which allows customers to control who can access certain application tiles. To know more about the role granularity in SAP PAPM Cloud – Universal Model check the Administration guide.

Another thing that is worth learning in UM is the so-called user attribute. There is a certain situation in Standard Model that customers would like to link SAP PaPM Cloud Teams with an identity provider or assign to certain BTP users. This has been reconsidered in UM, so now all teams created in Manage Teams can then be linked to a BTP Role collection via user attribute.

To know more about user attribute, visit this link.

(2) User Interface 

UM is built using SAP Fiori and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP), ensuring compatibility but also a remarkable degree of flexibility. This empowers users to customize user interfaces and extensions effortlessly using no-code or low-code tools such as SAP Build.

The following general applications are available for business users to help them streamline their work processes.

 

(3) Environment

When we are to speak about Environment in UM, it is essential to recognize two fundamental types: Design-Time environment and Runtime Environment. This mechanism, exclusive to UM, empowers modelers to refine configurations during design time without interference on runtime environment (activated and being used by end-users).  

It is worth noting that individual function activation is not supported within UM. Instead, initiating a test run requires the activation of the entire environment.

Let us shift our focus from technical nuances to security. UM offers the ability to protect environments by assigning Reader and Writer teams.
Reader Team can display the environment, its functions, and fields.
Writer Team can update or maintain configuration in the environment, its functions, and fields.

(4) Field Types

Fields are mandatory for creating models and calculations. UM introduces various field types that are very useful in data modeling. Some of these field types are: Association and In-Data comment

(5) Modeling Functions

With UM, powerful data modeling functions for transactional data models were introduced, supporting tight relations between them, feature-rich input forms and on-the-fly calculations.

To help you a little, here are some “What’s new in UM” with respect to Manage Functions. You can also see the full list of functions in Universal Model via this site.

• Model Entity represents a database table with relations to other model functions in UM. It supports data lifecycle management like archiving and full traceability.
• Consuming data from model entities across different environments within the same tenant is achievable using Model Reference, which is dependent on the connection type “Environment”.
• Combining two tables is allowed in Model Join or Join. They are typically used to union data because left joins, full joins, etc. are usually represented more elegantly via model entity relations.
• Projection and Aggregation are possible in Model View or View. Row or column pruning (filter records or remove unused fields) is possible as well.
• Sophisticated calculations can be performed in Model Calculation or Calculation.
• Model Allocation and Allocation offer important types such as Direct and Indirect Allocation, Offset and Detailed Offset Allocation.
• Data enrichment of data set with calculated attributes can be executed in Model Derivation and Derivation .
• As noticed above, these information function were introduced such as Model View, Model Calculation, Model Join, Model Reference, Model Allocation, Model Derivation. These functions create HANA Views, which means no data replication takes place when using such functions. They are typically used for on-the-fly calculations and feature-rich data input forms.
• In contrast processing functions like View, Join, Derivation, Calculation, and Allocation create HANA Procedures, which means a Writer should be used to store the results in a Model Entity. Apart from that, they also support dynamic rules, which do not require model changes not activations.
• There is Currency Conversion and Unit Conversion. These functions rely on TCUR* and T006* tables.
• Reader function helps in populating models based on the connection established such as SAC and ODATA connection.

(6) Data Creation

Ensuring data integrity and data consistency is crucial for transactional applications. One of the key features provided by UM in this regard is robust input validation. Various functionalities help to achieve data integrity and consistency across an environment. 

(7) Relations in Model functions

This is a new functionality, which is available in Model Entity. It is used to reference and define dependencies to other model functions via association-to or composition-of and allows to structure data models into feature rich business objects composed of potentially many entities like orders with order items, products referring to product groups, etc.

• Association-to-one are foreign key references to other business objects.
• Association-to-many can refer to multiple other business objects.
• Composition-of-many can refer to multiple dependent entities, which belong to a main entity.

Beside modeling business objects, relations are as well a key feature to provide complex validations including fulfilled and not fulfilled checks.

(8) Field Assert Range and Formats

This is a new functionality for environment fields, which offers a convenient way to define simple validations on field level, e.g.

• A key figure “Fulfillment %” should allow only values between 0 – 100.
• A characteristic “Company Code” should only allow values consisting of 3 capital letters, like assert ^([A-Z]{3})$ .

Note: In case you need assistance on regular expression visit this site.

(9) CSV-file Upload and import

Sometimes users need to get data manually into the system via uploading and importing. This is done via upload from local computer to server as draft file, storing the file as a saved-version and finally importing the file-content. Below are the results of an exemplary simple performance benchmarking, you can use it as an inspiration.

  To know more on how to upload via Show screen, visit this site.

(10) Single record edit locking Mechanism

Transactional processing requires business object edit locking, which ensures that when one user is editing a business object, it becomes read-only for all other users. If UserA is editing a business object, it becomes read-only for other users. If UserA remains inactive for 15 minutes, other users have the option to unlock the business object by confirming a warning indicating that any draft changes from UserA will be lost.

(11) Data Storing

Data storage in the Universal Model can be facilitated through various modeling functions with the writer component.

• Model Entity with Writer You can store data in a Model Entity. However, it's important to be aware that data stored in a model entity may be erased if not properly archived before Environment deactivation.

• Model HANA with Writer You can store data in the underlying HANA Tables.

• Exposing Data to external systems Utilizing Universal Model's APIs, external systems can retrieve data from UM via ODATA.

(12) Process, Activity and Workflow

Process managers can define processes that encompass various activities spanning across different environments. The fact that activities within a process are no longer confined to a single environment simplifies the configuration of complex processes.

If a process is marked for transportation, it will be included during export and import of environments.

Process managers can design their activities depending on the actions needed, validation criteria and workflow statuses.

Finally, let’s shift our attention to workflow capabilities. The Universal Model workflow functionality is designed to handle complex transactional requirements. Below is a straightforward example demonstrating that a particular activity, like Activity2, no longer requires a single successor step. Instead, Activity2 follows an If-Then-Else conditioning which depends on the action that will be performed by the activity executors. Also in the below workflow, a possibility of re-execution of completed activity is possible such as Activity3 Activity1.

To know more on how to configure Processes and Activities, visit these sites: Manage Processes and Manage Activities

(13) Reporting

In the Universal Model, Report management offers a more streamlined approach compared to the Standard Model, which emphasizes on traceability between granular data, aggregated data, and visualizations. Reports are bound to a Runtime Environment – this is particularly vital for transactional use cases, where reports are typically set up once and utilized over an extended period. The Report section provides access to a variety of reporting tools, enabling you to create, view, update, delete, and duplicate reports within the available runtime environments. You can also transfer a report to another tenant by utilizing the Transport Report feature, which bundles the report content into a container for import into a new tenant.

For further details on configuring Reports, please refer to the following resources: Manage Reports and Manage Pages.

(14) Data Privacy

With the help of Data Locking, Data Privileges in combination with Teams, Data privacy has been more secured in UM.

(15) Audit and Change Logs

With the help of Manage Event Logs, Manage Comments, and show screen’s commenting feature tracking of actions, changes and documented comments are now transparent in UM.

(16) Data Archiving and Restore

With the help of Manage Archives, archiving and restoring of historical data records is now possible in order to complete the data lifecycle management (DLM) that is being offered by UM.

(17) Environment Export, Import

With the Environment transport function UM not only offers the full environment import to another tenant but also the so-called Delta Import. Delta import is a very helpful mechanism to avoid unnecessary lengthy environment transport from one tenant to another. It is important to note that the environment exported from the Universal Model is not compatible with Standard Model and On-Premise.

How to access and enable Universal Model

(1) Subscription

Universal Model is included in SAP PaPM Cloud as additional functionality upon subscription. As of this moment this feature is disabled by default unless you open an incident request to LOD-PER-ACE.

 Here is an example request to LOD-PER-ACE component.

Spoiler

Hi Support team,
please activate SAP PaPM Cloud Universal Model for below tenants:
Subdomain: <your subdomain in BTP>
Tenant ID: <your tenant ID in BTP>
Subaccount ID: <your subaccount ID in BTP>
Provider: <your provider in BTP>
Region: <your region in BTP>
Environment: Multi-Environment

(2) Available Regions

It is advisable that you check the fully released regions in the administration guide whenever you need to offer SAP PaPM Cloud to various customers. Geographically speaking it would always be better to offer customers the region nearest to their business 

(3) Logging into SAP PaPM Cloud Universal Model

Upon having proper role collection, logging into SAP PaPM Cloud will direct you to the Standard Model (SM). In the navigation menu, choose Universal Model (UM) to be redirected to the Universal Model applications.

 

Please note that

• provisioning (increasing of capacity unit)
• logging into the underlying runtime database

are administrative activities that can only be performed via Standard Model ¦ Navigation Menu. By design, there is no equivalent application in Universal Model that offers provisioning and database access.

If you have made it this far in the blog post, it shows your eagerness to explore further and gain insights into our new functionality SAP PaPM Cloud - Universal Model. For more in-depth exploration, don't miss our blog post on Navigate Your Way to SAP PaPM Cloud Universal Model.

Stay tuned for more exciting and detailed blogpost related to each section discussed above!
Until next time, enjoy exploring SAP PaPM Cloud Universal Model!