Integration of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise Edition

[miraoui_reda]

 

Last year we have achieved a new milestone in the integration between SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud, by going beyond just a technical integration aspect, but offering a seamless experience for business users

Since then, we have received tons of positive feedback from our customers and partners, but also the ask for a how-to guide, which is the subject of this Blogpost.

1. High-level overview

The integration is based on the live data connection between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA which ensures the real-time access to the operational data of SAP S/4HANA  exposed through analytical ABAP Core Data Services (CDS) Views.

And since we are using the live data connection, we leverage the SAP S/4HANA  authorisations are applied to ensure data access security. Single-sign-on is recommended to provide a seamless workflow without the need to log on separately.

High-level overview

As you can see, we still have the same persistency and modelling layer in the access layer as in the cloud, the main difference lies in the visualisation layer

Before creating our SAP S/4HANA applications based on the Stories from the SAP Analytics Cloud enterprise edition tenant, the following pre-requisite must be met:

• the connection and the configuration were already created and configured


• you have already created a story on SAP Analytics Cloud on the side, based on a query from the connected SAP S/4HANA system

Note: listing the stories from the SAP Analytics Cloud enterprise edition tenant and the support for intent-based navigation were delivered as SAP S/4HANA 2020, but the full functionality with also creating tile with the target mapping and configuration of the Intent-based navigation directly from the Manage KPI & Reports app was introduced with SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS1

2.Step by step guide

Now assuming that the pre-requisite is already prepared and met, let’s start the process of embedding your stories into the SAP S/4HANA Fiori launchpad, so that your business user can seamlessly consume it just any other SAP S/4HANA app

I would like to start by previewing the SAP analytics cloud story I want to use for our application, for the purpose of the demo I’m going to use the “SAP Procurement off Contract Spend” story which is part of SAP Content that can be acquired to the Analytical Content Network, note that alternatively, you can use an own created story if it is Public

 

Now from the Manage KPI & Reports, you can see the list of stories that are in the SAP Analytics Cloud enterprise edition tenant that is connected to your SAP S/4HANA system, among these I can already see the story I’m interested in

The next step is to navigate to the story details, where I can see 3 sections, the first section “Definition” contains the business information and the queries used within the story

The second section is the “Configuration” section where I can see the preview of the story:

but the most interesting section for this Blogpost is the third section “Applications” as this is the section, we will use to create our SAP S/4HANA applications and their respective tiles in the SAP Fiori Launchpad

By clicking on Add tile, I get to choose the different tiles format that fit to my requirement

For simplicity's sake, I’m going to choose a simple “Static Tile” and move to the next step.

 

Here we have 3 different things to configure

1. The definition of the tile represents the title and the subtitle of the Tile and in which Business Catalog.


2. The target mapping part refers to which semantic object and action will be used to navigate to this app


3. The Intent-based navigation part allows you to configure navigation targets to other SAP S/4HANA applications, here I choose the semantic object “Supplier “and an “*” as semantic action which will allow me to navigate to all the applications that have the semantic object “Supplier” with any available combination of semantic actions

After saving the tile configuration we can be launched from the SAP Fiori Launchpad and by using the context menu, the business user can use the Intent-Based Navigation to navigate to the applications that are part of his role

 

Now once we click on” Jump To” supplier we will navigate to the supplier and pass the context (California sunrise Inc) to the target app.

Supplier

 

I hope you can now create your SAP S/4HANA applications based on your SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise Edition Tenant(s) stories, if you have more questions please use the comment section.

And I also encourage you to post your SAP S/4HANA questions under All Questions in SAP S/4HANA | SAP Community