Profitability Analysis in SAP BPC with HANA

If you have a background in SAP COPA (Controlling-Profitability Analysis) and wondered if similar planning can be done in SAP BPC, you will find this article interesting.

SAP COPA is a great tool to collect the actual data, but does not have a good user interface for planning. Users of COPA usually plan in Microsoft Excel sheet and plugin the values in COPA planning templates. This defeats the whole purpose of interactive planning. This is due to the fact the templates are not flexible and cannot be generated dynamically.

In earlier blog we discussed about 'Key Figure' limitation in BPC. 

The other limitation is COPA can have 50 Characters, whereas a BPC Model ('Application' in 7.5 am older versions) can have only 20. An Environment ('ApplicationSet' in BPC 7.5 an older versions) can have 50 or more dimensions, if required we can create multiple Models each with different sets of COPA characteristic (or Characteristic groups) and join them using a common denominator (e.g. a segment).

We have helped clients to address COPA planning limitations in BPC. Contact us to discuss your case scenario.

With HANA, many limitations of COPA using traditional database can be overcome. We will cover COPA+HANA in over next blog. 

Google BigQuery, SAP HANA- Cloud Solutions

Week of May 13th, 2013 was a big deal for SAP and Google. Two major events were held-SAPHIRE in Orlando and Developer I/O 2013 in San Francisco. 

I was lucky to get a Google I/O 2013 ticket, and be on of the 6000 participants. My objective was to learn about Google BigQuery and Google Apps Script.

Both companies are competitors in Cloud based 'Analysis or massive database' , SAP HANA has two product versions 'Appliance ' (Hardware and Software) and 'Cloud'. Where as Google has Cloud solution BigQuery. 

SWOT	SAP HANA Appliance	SAP HANA Cloud	Google BigQuery
Strengths	- Strong SAP Products/Branding	- No downtime - Good for Ad hoc requirements	- Good Enterprise Cloud offerings - No downtime - Good for Ad hoc requirements - Good Developer community
Weakness	- Maybe costs and downtime	- Dependency on AWA (Amazon web services) for cloud storage	- Provides tools, not business suits - some products are evolving (e.g. Data Visualization)
Opportunities	- Increase production adoption - Conversion from Cloud version - Use as database for other applications	- Use as database for other applications - Convert clients with web security concerns - Encourage Developer community to build solutions	- Use as database for other applications (using Compute Engine) - Convert clients with web security concerns
Threats	- Cloud products, and other Appliances	- Google BigQuery, Maybe Amazon	- Maybe Amazon

There were two client presentations on BigQuery - Gamesys and Shutterfly, these clients also use Google Apps Script for data visualization/reporting.

Here are the two Google BigQuery recordings
Big Data Mashups: Enabling Next Generation Analytics Using BigQuery
Here Be BigQuery: Building Social Gaming Infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform

Another interesting project was All the Ships in the World: Visualizing Data with Google Cloud and Maps, which integrate many Google technologies to visualize real time Data.

I see SAP ideologically now being more open, proving more resources to developers and planning more Cloud based products.

It will be interesting to see how enterprise Cloud database and analysis tools will evolve and their acceptance.