
If you're an SAP CRM (on-premise) customer interested in real-time reporting and analytics then there's a good chance that you've struggled with the question about which approach to choose to enable real-time reporting in CRM. In this blog post I'll walk you through the two options including the older CRM Interactive OLTP Reporting option as well as the new HANA Live Analytics approach. Spoiler alert: I'm recommend HANA Live Analtyics... at least in most situations. But please, read on.
Introducing CRM Interactive (OLTP) Reporting
Long-time SAP CRM aficionados may recall that SAP introduced CRM Interactive (OLTP) Reporting back in 2006 with CRM 5.2. The concept was simple, yet powerful. Instead of going through the hassle of exporting live CRM data to SAP BI systems just to be able do real-time CRM reporting, you could instead create a dedicated BI client in your existing SAP CRM system. You can read more about CRM Interactive Reporting in the FAQs OLTP Reporting document here.
With this approach, no separate SAP BI system was required for basic operational / transactional CRM reporting. Instead, the SAP NetWeaver stack that comes with SAP CRM could be used in order to run real-time operational CRM reports directly on the CRM implementation. Customers would of course still rely on SAP BI for analytical (OLAP) reporting, advanced analyses, and/or historic reporting. But simple CRM transactional (OLTP) reporting could be done directly in CRM.
While CRM Interactive reporting was a sound concept and a solid offering for its time (almost 10 years ago), customers did sometimes struggle with the complex set up and configuration process. In addition, the CRM Interactive reports were limited to certain predefined SAP business objects and the solution offered limited options for project-based customizations or enhancements.
Introducing CRM Hana Live Analytics
Thankfully SAP was able to address many of the challenges presented by CRM Interactive Reporting with the new SAP CRM Hana Live Reporting available as of SAP CRM 7.0 Enhancement Package 2 (EHP2) Support Package 05 (SP05). For example, while the CRM Interactive reporting was limited to selected optimized areas due to scalability and performance reasons, the new Hana Live Reporting covers more operational respoting areas across Marketing, Sales and Service.
In addition, with the old CRM Interactive Reporting it was not possible for customers to define their own new reporting areas without modifying the standard code; only field extensions were supported in standard. However with the new CRM Hana Live Analytics customers can easily define their own new reporting areas by building their own new Hana views and registering the OData services in the backend CRM system.
More than 40 virtual data models (VDMs) are delivered standard out of the box with CRM Hana Live Analytics to allow reporting against almost any CRM business object including those shown below. You can find a full list of the default Hana Live Virtual Data Models and Query Views in the SAP online help.
Please note that SAP Hana Live Cross-Analytics requires SAP CRM 7.0 EHP1 (SP12) or higher and SAP ERP 6.0 EHP4 (SP00) or higher.
Combining CRM / ERP data with CRM Hana Live Cross-Analtyics
One of the other benefits of CRM Hana Live Analytics is that it allows you to combine CRM and ERP data in order to do consolidated "Cross-Analytics" reporting. SAP delivers three sample cross-virtual data models out of the box including:
Extending SAP Hana Live Virtual Data Models (VDMs)
You find details in the How-to-Guide for creating new VDMs and Reports.However, the high level steps are as follows:
Please note:
Conclusions
As you probably expected, SAP Hana Live Analytics are a better choice for most new analytics projects where real-time CRM reporting and analytics are required. First of all, HANA Live Reprting is built on a newer platform that offers greater performance over the old CRM Interactive Reporting. In addition, HANA Live Analytics provide more out of the box reporting areas and coverage than CRM Interactive Reporting. And finally, whereas the old CRM Interactive Reporting provided limited ability for extension (without making coding modifications), the new Hana Live Analytics can be freely and easily extended.
That being said, the old CRM Interactive Reporting may still be sufficient for some customers. If the standard out-of-the-box reporting areas cover your requirements and you aren't looking to make a financial investment in SAP HANA quite just yet, then CRM Interactive Reporting may be a perfect stop-gap solution for you! Either way, you can't really go wrong :wink: .
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