Hierarchies in BW 3.0 - Transcript

SAP PORTALS Moderator: Margaret Anderson May 16, 2002/10:00 a.m.
CDT Page 1
SAP PORTALS May 16, 2002 10:00 a.m. CDT Coordinator Good morning and welcome to the Hierarchies MBW conference call. All participants will be able to listen only until the question and answer session begins. At the request of SAP Portals, this conference is being recorded. Should you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would like introduce todays moderator, Mr. Schubert. Sir, you may begin when ready.
L. Schubert
Good morning, everybody. My name is Lothar Schubert. Im with SAP Portals America in the BW Regional Implementation Group. I have the honor actually to introduce todays speaker for the conference call, Mr. Joachim Mette from the European Implementation Group. Hes director of the implementation group. He will talk today about hierarchies in the business information warehouse.
As I mentioned, Joachim is director for BW RIG and hes for 12 years in the BW in the SAP arena and has been with BW since the very beginning. Hes very knowledgeable. Theres going to be a presentation about 20 to 30 minutes and then we will have enough time hopefully for questions and answers. The PowerPoint hopefully you have downloaded already. Its available on
SAP PORTALS Moderator: Margaret Anderson May 16, 2002/10:00 a.m. CDT Page 2
the marketplace on the Web in the BW arena. At this time, I want to hand over to Joachim
J. Mette
Thank you, Lothar. Hello, everyone. Todays call will be about hierarchies in BW. The presentation is actually called Hierarchies in BW 3OB. But everything I want to mention today is also available when you have the 30A version with the portal package seven. So all the technology from the hierarchies, BW 30B is equaled or to support packet seven in 30A.
The best thing is if you have the online version of the PowerPoint presentation maybe to have a look at the slide show mode because there is some animated slides, and its probably better to have this kind of view when we go through the presentation. So the agenda for today is that we have a quick look into the upload of flexible hierarchies. Next, then into the hierarchy maintenance, what is new there. Of course, if we have maintained the hierarchies, uploaded the hierarchies, we also wanted to use the hierarchies.
Most of the time hierarchies are used of course in the reporting environment. So well have a look at the functionality available there. Then theres a special feature available in the OLAP processor which is called the elimination of internal business volume where we need all of the hierarchies, and this will close todays call.
So lets start with the flat file upload off of the flexible hierarchies. So be careful when we are talking or when you can read now flexible hierarchies here on the slide. This is not a new term at all for our hierarchies. This just means that we have a different upload methodology for the hierarchies. Thats what we call the flexible upload. In the slides, its called flexible hierarchies, but we are just talking or using the hierarchies in the same way as in the past.
What does it mean flexible hierarchies? This means that we have now a hierarchy head and hierarchy nodes and that we have different attributes on the hierarchy head and we can have different attributes on the hierarchy nodes. You will see in a couple of minutes an example for this. We can extract now into the PSA and what is also new that we have the transfer rules for the hierarchies and for the hierarchy attributes available. In the past we didnt have these transfer rules.
When we have a look at slide number five, you can see that we choose now the different transfer methods. Therefore, the hierarchy upload, especially from the flat file to into the transfer rule dialogue. So we can either use CI Doc or we can use the PSA. Be careful. Only if we use the PSA tracing area as a transfer method, then we can only use the new functionality of the upload of this flexible hierarchy. So its not supported for VI Docs.
What does it mean when we go while the transfer method PSA as it described on slide number six? This means that for a data source itself, the system will generate up to five PSA tables. This means one for the hierarchy head, which is hierarchy attributes, one for the text of the hierarchy head. So you give your hierarchy a name, and of course the name could be language dependent, therefore, we need multiple table entries here. Hierarchy nodes, these are different nodes attributes, and of course the text of the different text nodes, also language dependent.
If you switch on the interval on your metadata from your info object in the test strips hierarchy, then it will also generate a special PSA table for storing the intervals during the upload. As you can see here already, we need five different tables to support this. That is also the reason why we can not use CI Docs here because we have different type of data available and different numbers of records, and therefore we need different segments and since this is only supported here by a CPSA.
What is also new is if you use foreign characteristics in hierarchies, and I refer now to slide seven already. You now have to maintain these external characteristics in the info object maintenance. Theres a new button in the info object maintenance. If you press this button, you will get a pop up where you can choose the different info objects. What does it mean? In
the past, you could add hierarchy nodes in the maintenance, in the manual maintenance of your hierarchy. Say you want to have, for example, a reference to the info object country if you are maybe in a customer hierarchy. This means youve got the text description out of a different info object, and in my example now, out of the country.
So youve created a hierarchy node with a reference to a different info object. But we are not able to upload such a hierarchy. We could maintain it only manually, more or less. There was no support from the metadata that you can do something like this. You just did it manually, and the system created this hierarchy for you. Now we have a stronger relationship here to our metadata and therefore, you have to maintain these info objects, where you want to have different hierarchy nodes from reference characteristics now in the info object maintenance.
What is also new and this is described on slide number eight, we support now the transfer rule for the hierarchy head so that we have the use of the hierarchy heads, which is the hierarchy names, the dates to, etc., and that we also could maintain, for example, the start level. This is of course only global ones for the hierarchies that you can upload, and thats why we store it on the head. On the different nodes here, we can have the attributes and of course the referred info object available.
This is so far for the upload, but many customers are also using the manual maintenance for their hierarchies to create new hierarchies, and we have added a lot or many new functions into the manual hierarchy maintenance. Thats also described on slide number ten that we support, for example, the drag and drop, and therefore the insert of a node as a child or as a neighbor for the target node, and the task we always insert the info object at the end. Most of the time, you just want to have it in a different sequence.
We also support now the multiple selections that you can use either the shift key or the control key to mark different objects, and just drag and drop it to a different sub node or move it around in the hierarchy. Thats mainly the functionality probably used by, for example, Windows Explorer, the file manager where you also can select multiple entries and move it from one folder to the other. You can see also on slide number ten on the screen shot that we show now more information like the info object, the node name, and if its for example time dependent. We show also the valid from and the valid to date.
We added also a node surge in the tree because thats very useful if you have a very, very huge hierarchy and we also support now the printing for the hierarchies. We added all of the activation buttons. If you coded in the past, you always had to go out and activate it from outside. Now also you can directly activate your hierarchy within the hierarchy maintenance
transactions.
You can maintain node attributes directly in the hierarchy maintenance, for example, the plus/minus sign reversal. This functionality offers plus/minus sign reversal, its very useful, but for the OLAP reporting that you can show your values just with the different sign. Revenues and cost in the R3 system for most kinds of reporting are just shown with the wrong sign, at least for the managers. You can just do an optical sign reversal along your hierarchy and just show your values with a different sign in front. Of course, you can adjust the column widths just with a simple clicking on the columns headers, so if you need more information to be shown during the maintenance session.
There is some other functionality available so you can directly jump into the master data maintenance. Im referring now to slide number 11. You can directly jump into the info object maintenance for the beta characteristics, and of course you can go out directly from the hierarchy maintenance to the monitor and have a look at the last loaded request.
If you entered an interval into your hierarchy, you can content enable or the system will true automatically so that the interval descriptions from the two value of the interval. Very nice function is also available now that we can have several moot nodes in your hierarchy. This is also shown on the screen
shot where I have Europe in my sales hierarchy and US on the same level. So there is no top node available.
During reporting, now you have two possibilities either to show a grand total of these two, which is the yellow line, the overall results. In this example, its 6,818 pieces. Or for each info object, like this organization, you can say that you want to suppress this grand total. This can be set up by each query on the properties of each individual info object and of course can be changed during run time of the query so you can display it or hide it.
We also support now the subtree upload. In the past in this, we had only the subtree insert. This was available. This will support pack 16 of BW20C and the according, of course, for 21C. There was no update possible so far. Thats something what we have added in BW 30A. You can also see a short screen shot on slide number 12 here. From this cache you can choose the update method, either full update subtree or update subtree.
What is the idea behind these subtrees is that you have a root node maintained in BW and the underneath lying hierarchy maybe comes from different systems. I have added an example on slide number 13, where we have hierarchy maintained in BW, which is the world, in the US and Asia and in Europe. Thats something that you would maintain in BW. So you have the top level, which is the world, and on the next level of your hierarchy, you just
maintain three nodes in BW. For example now, you have three different source systems. From one source system you get the US hierarchy, from the next source system you get the Asia hierarchy and from the third source system you will get the Europe hierarchy.
Of course, you get not only the hierarchy data, the master data, you get of course of the transactional data uploaded in your info cube. During reporting, of course, you want to see the constant update view over the world. Of course, you do not want to maintain the hierarchy for the world including US, Asia, Europe manually. So the idea is now that you just create the hierarchy world, US, Asia, Europe in BW and that you upload these subtrees from the different source systems. So the first one of course is in the U.S., the second one is the Asia, and then you get the Europe.
Lets say that something gets changed in Europe, so you have a different hierarchy, and now of course you want to replace the Europe hierarchy and thats something what we support now with the BW 3.0 update functionality. So you can update a substructure of the tree.
So lets have a quick look in the reporting area for the hierarchies, which is slide number 15, what we support now. We have added a lot of functionality in the reporting for the BW 3.0 release in the hierarchy area. For example, the first screen shot shows you two hierarchies. One is on the same
organization, and the second is on the calendar year/month. You can see that I have my note Canada and in my second column, I have the year 1999 and I have opened 1999 for the first quarter. You can see January, February and March information.
You can see that for Toronto and Vancouver, which are two leads here in my hierarchy, I have a different drill-down date on the second column for calendar year/month. So we are now able to have multiple hierarchies in our lead column. Of course, this could be not only two like here shown on this slide, I could have many. I can mix it also with non-hierarchical info objects here in my drill down. For example, I could have now another column added, which maybe says actual object seeker or something like this.
You could have in the first column a hierarchical info object in the next column and nonhierarchical info object, and in the third one, again, a hierarchical info object displayed here. So we are very flexible to show the different possibilities. So you can have any amount of structure characteristics. You have active presentation hierarchies and characteristics without active presentation hierarchies, just on the different axis.
The second example is also here. I moved the year. We see quarters and the periods over the columns. But we can have all of the same functionality across the
columns. This is also not restricted now to one hierarchy as shown here on the slide. You can have many hierarchies across your column structure. So the message is that the characteristics with and without the hierarchies can be freely combined in any way and on any axis.
We have added another functionality. Thats what we call the universal presentation hierarchy. This is displayed on slide number 16. We show here in this small example a very basic query with a drill down by division and material. So what we can do now during the run time of our query to display these two characteristics, which is division and materials as an example in a hierarchy.
So to do so, we used the context sensitive menu. Here we call the query properties. In the query properties dialogue, we have an area which is called data formatting. You will see the displays of rows are vertical and expand too, and I can say to which level of the hierarchy I want to get my multidimensional view displayed. In this example, here you can see in the drop down box, I can see the division and the material because I have two info objects in my drill down characteristics. When I apply the function, you can see now that we have a hierarchy on the division electronic parts and we have the high tech. Now I can individually expand and collapse the hierarchy by division, and I can see the different materials behind. So on the fly, we generate internally a hierarchy across these info objects.
Of course, you can set this up directly all in the query builder. So if you want to have your initial few like this, you can have it. Of course, its the end user that would like this kind of view. He can go to the query properties and remove the setting so that he has again, these two info objects and two lead columns separately displayed.
We also added another feature across the structures, which is shown on slide number 17. We have created contribution match and scheme where we have contribution match one and contribution match two. What we can do now is just move the different key features, which are now the member key in my example of the structures underneath my contribution match one. This is now a just for display purposes.
Be careful. This is a different kind of hierarchies. Thats why I used on the title here hierarchies in quotation marks. This is not a hierarchy which gets maintained in the hierarchy maintenance. This is something what we do directly here in the query builder.
We used just the right mouse click on the member of the structure in ways that we want to append it. Then it just gets moved underneath and what happens during run time of reporting, you can see that my query comes up here only with a line for contribution match one. I can expand my
hierarchy to see the detailed information. Of course, I can expand and collapse each node individually, and we can have multiple levels here so theres no restriction to have it also here, only by two or three levels here. It depends on your business requirements how deep you want to set up your hierarchy here.
Again, be careful that we do not do any calculations here that we do not calculate between the net revenue material direct costs and variable production cost to calculate the contribution margin. The contribution margin one, for example, you can see on the left-hand side is a calculated key figure that is just used with drag and drop, and brought over to our structure. So theres no calculation here in between as long, as this hierarchy is just for display purposes. Every node can be expanded or collapsed individually.
So in general, its also very useful to know that after refreshing a query in the solution workbook or after calling up a Web application, the system will reproduce a hierarchy expand status as it was in solutions saved or in direct reporting, of course, you can use our book mark functionality and the user will exactly get the same few as before. Maybe the ones of you who have used hierarchies in BW 2.01, every time and youve saved, for example, a workbook with a certain drill-down stage and you made a refresh later on, you always came back to the initial stage. Now with BW 3.0, the system will really keep your settings, your drill down state, your collapse and
expand state of the hierarchies.
Also for the Web reporting, we have added a new item, which is the hierarchical context menu. So when you go to the verification designer, you will find in the items list a new object, which is a hierarchical context menu. Just drag and drop it over to your work area, go to the properties. You have to specify your characteristics, your hierarchy name and if its reversal dependent or state dependent, of course. Then you have also to set up your properties. Here on the slide is also a quick example, like here in the region where you can drill down along the hierarchy, and the user can make his selections either by a hierarchy node or by the leads. I think thats a very useful for the end user. It sets the filters across the hierarchy.
Lets have a look at another area, the elimination of internal business volume. What we have added also in BW 3.0, a functionality which maybe some of you will know from the R3 system, there is implemented in the report writer and also in the drill-down reporting, be careful when you read here all the elimination. This is not a combination function. Its really an elimination function. This means we eliminate records during the reporting time. I will come back to the difference in a second between elimination and combination.
The elimination functionality supports the accounting principals of multi-entity
combination for multiple simultaneous hierarchies. So what is a prerequisite for this? You need always to info objects, what we call a sender and a receiver. They must share the master data. Normally, you want to eliminate internal business volume across senders, across profit senders, company codes, business area, these kinds of things. This means you need either receiving cost sender and a cost sender, which is also very often the receiving is called the partner cost sender. All of the business content is already this kind of information available, for example, in controlling what is in the info cubes.
So both of them needs sharing of a master data though they must have the same hierarchies as the master data enabled in the background. Thats what we normally get when you use the reference functionality when you create an info object. Now, we need a special key figure for doing the elimination process. Thats what we call a reference key figure.
When you create a new info object, a key figure and you say new, then we have added a new entry here in the pop up, which is now called reference key figure. If you do so, you will get in the info object maintenance for the key figure a new tab strip which is then called elimination. Here, you have to be across each info object. For example here the profit sender and the partner profit sender. These are the two info objects for business content. You want to eliminate along these two info objects.
What you can do now, is you can see it already here on the screen shot, is you can add multiple info objects. This works also multi-dimensional, not only across two info objects. You could have all the countries, for example, added and the partner country. If you add multiple info objects here, then all the regular buttons will get active whether you want to have if pairs combined with and, or whether you want to have it combine with the or statement. So both characteristics along the hierarchy have to be set for just one or the other.
A simple example for the elimination is shown on the next slide where I have just simply added ten data records. I trust you know the very simple example with the profit sender and the partner profit center. Ive got ten records and you can see for record number four and record number nine, there is no partner profit center. Thats something what we would probably call the external revenue to third parties. You can see my very basic hierarchy. I just have three nodes plus the top level and the different profit centers assigned to the nodes.
When we create now a query, we have, of course, the basic key figure, which is called then the revenue, which is stored in the info cube. You can see this totals up to 1,930. This is just the grand total along the hierarchy as before and now with my reference key figure, which is shown in the second column,
the records along the hierarchy gets eliminated. The grand total is now only 180. This is very simple to explain because record number four and record number nine, this is the external revenue. So there is no partner, and this will just give us the 100 from record number four and the 80 from record number nine, which totals up to 180.
So lets have a look on the 100 from the PC 0181, which was the record number one. The partner is a PC 0102. So when we look at the hierarchy, this means there was a posting from one profit center to another profit center which belongs to the same father node, to the next top-level node, which is a PC 01. So on the level of the PC 01, this revenue gets eliminated. This means that we have a zero value shown here on the level of PC 01. But if you go into the detail, you can see that we had the 100 but on the higher level, it just gets eliminated. Thats now why when I came back and say what is the differentiation between the elimination and the combination you can see we just eliminate the record. We set it back to zero.
In the combination module, you would be able also to maintain percentage shares since they this kind of combination only 80% would be eliminated and 20% maybe should be the rest. So we do this here on what we call the management level that we just eliminate across this hierarchy. You can have a further look into the different records and have a look at the different examples and see for example why we have on PC 02 only a 680.
What happens with the PC 02 01 records as profit sender because we had, for example, a wrong posting probably which is record number six which got posted from one profit sender to the next one, which probably maybe wasnt in a location cycle. Thats something that could happen. Here, we have the rest of 200 left on the profit sender. This gets eliminated, for example, along the hierarchy to PC 02.
Before I close and we come to the QA session, I just want to add that we have also added some other smaller functions across the hierarchies in the system, which I havent put on the slides. For example on the aggregates, we have now or we support now also on the aggregate hierarchy level where the structure is time-dependent, thats the new functionality. In the past, we didnt support time-dependent objects and aggregates. Now we do.
Also for authorities or selections, we support now also in the variables just multiple hierarchy nodes where you can select multiple hierarchy nodes when you execute, for example, a query. In the past, a variable or if you use the user exit variable, you can bring over only one hierarchy node. Now we support multiple hierarchy nodes. Thats very useful if you write your own user exits for example, that you can now return a table and not only single value use.
Okay. We have 20 minutes left for today. I think we could start with the Q&A session for today.
Coordinator
Thank you. We are now ready to begin the question and answer session. Our first question comes from Muhammad Husan.
M. Husan
Hi. This is Husan from Shohans. I was wondering, my question is related to the structure of the hierarchy tables. Is there any structural changes of the tables that exist today in 21C? For example, we have HIJMK for hierarchy. Is there any additional table or any changes of the existing tables in order to support the new functionality?
J. Mette
Yes. The new fields will be added to the tables.
M. Husan
Okay. But the tables still are going to be the old tables, like HIJMK tables.
J. Mette
Yes.
M. Husan
Okay. Thank you.
J. Mette
But we have added just the new fields, like for the reversal signs. So if you switch on in the maintenance for the info object, for example, the plus
minus change field, then we just add these fields as attributes to the different tables.
M. Husan
Okay. Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Vil Woo.
V. WooHi. I have a question regarding the flat file for the hierarchy. Does that current 20B flat file has to be including the node ID, parent ID, child ID and next ID? For the 30B, do we still require that node ID?
J. Mette
Yes, you do.
V. WooOkay. So maintain those IDs, parent ID, child ID, those can be very tedious.
J. Mette
Yes.
V. WooOkay.
J. Mette
Thats true.
V. WooSo theres no improvement on that side.
J. Mette
No.
V. WooOkay.
J. Mette
Unfortunately not. But I will write it down and talk to the developer.
V. WooOkay. Thank you.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Jacque Ree Labella.
J. Labella
Hi. I have two questions. Do you have that flat file requirement for hierarchies for 3.0? Because for the existing 2.1 CNY environment, we have to specific what is a parent ID, what is a child ID and node ID. In the new 3.0 environment, it is supporting the multiple source systems. How can I remember what is the node ID from that previous source system?
J. Mette
Sorry, I didnt get exactly your question.
J. Labella
Okay. The first question is I want to know the flat file requirement of the hierarchy load?
J. Mette
When you go into the transfer structure maintenance, then you will see what the structure is. The structure is dependent now off your hierarchy properties whether you say intervals are allows, whether its time dependent and what kind of attributes you set to your hierarchy.
J. Labella
Okay. Then what type of articles can we specify for the nodes?
Any info object.
J. Labella
Is it like regular data, metadata?
J. Mette
Its actually, yes. We have the special for the reverse sign for the nodes. You can really display a value of 100S, a value of -100. This is a special of what we offer as well.
J. Labella
Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Tao Fan.
T. Fan Yes. Hi. My name is Tao Fan. Im with Shohans. My question is primarily regarding security on hierarchy. Were required to secure nodes of the hierarchy and
also save a snap shot each month of our current hierarchy. What is the best strategy to do this? I mean for example, do we use versioning, hierarchy versioning or save each snapshot of the hierarchy with different technical name without having to set up new security for each of the snap shots?
J. Mette
This means if a user uses the old hierarchy, he should already have the old authorities.
T. Fan Correct. If we save a new hierarchy version, because we have to save a snap shot of the hierarchy. So in order to do this, we have to define new authorization definitions for hierarchies for every snap shot.
J. Mette
Yes?
T. Fan Is there a better strategy to do this without having to do this maintenance every month?
J. Mette
You cannot avoid the maintenance because either you have the different hierarchies, thats what you said, or you use this kind of versioning. This means anyway, you will have a different hierarchy because you have to assign a different name to the object so that you can have two, or you need the same name or the new user versions. Therefore, although the authority object is either on a different name here or its a different version. So you
need this kind of a relation, but I dont know where do you get the information? Do you extract from R3, for example, like a cost sender hierarchy?
T. Fan Yes. Its on cost sender hierarchy.
J. Mette
Okay, because what we support in BW 3.0 although in respect of the authorities is that you can upload authorities into an ODS object. This would mean that you could upload your cost sender hierarchy into an ODS object as well. Then we have a functionality that the system automatically generates the according profiles for the end users along the hierarchy. A very typical example is that you have along the cost senders whos responsible. You have something like a responsible officer or something like this or a responsible person for a cost sender.
Now with the new functionality, you can have it also on the hierarchy nodes. You can generate out of the ODS directly the authority object, which means you could extract this information out of ODS and generate every month automatically the authorization profiles for the different users then either version dependent or via a different hierarchy name.
T. Fan Which strategy would you recommend? Using versioning where we actually give it a new version number and then same the hierarchy with the same technical
name or give a brand new technical name for each?
J. Mette
I think maybe for the end user, maybe the versioning, if you do it like 12 months. Lets say you extracted every month a new hierarchy and just call the version number one, January and version number two, February and so on. This may be easier for the end user. That doesnt have to care about the hierarchy names. He just chose the version number six and he knows that this is a hierarchy. It may be easier for the end user.
From a technical perspective, its the same. I cannot see any difference.
L. Schubert
In terms of the drag and drop, I think also we should stay open for a few other questions. This question was addressed mostly. Also, I want to mention actually in two weeks we will have a conference call about authority maybe also some questions can be addressed there. Sorry for the interruption.
T. Fan Okay. Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Rick Gardner.
R. Gardner
Hi. Ive got a question on universal conditional hierarchies. There in the slide you said that you can link between divisional and material. Is it restricted to two characteristic or you can expand to more than that?
J. Mette
Yes, you can expand it to more than that. I tried to make this an easy example to follow up. No, you can have it by as many as you like. There is no limitation. I think the limitation at the end is the user in front of the system, but he has to understand the result of the query.
R. Gardner
But itsquery when it redoes that because its on the fly.
J. Mette
Of course, but the advantage of having it in compared to have three levels further down that your result area on the screen is reduced. The amount of data in the OLAP processor will be the same as you do a three level or three characteristics drill down, but what comes to the front end is then of course only a restricted few. For example, in my example on the slide number 16, I opened only the division high tech, and I showed the material. So I get only these four materials returned. I do not get the materials for the electronic parts returned. So I see only a subset of the results. Therefore the performance is, again, a bit better because I do not send so much data back from the server to the front end.
R. Gardner
Okay. Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Vermand Bapella.
V. Bapella
Does the elimination of development business volume forspecific to 2.0B?
J. Mette
No, thats only 3.0.
V. Bapella
Okay, because have a requirement here to eliminate the internal company transactions and were trying to figure out a way to do that in the hierarchies using specifically the 2.0B, but we couldnt find a way and we want your position on that.
J. Mette
Thats why we have implemented. I mean you could do it if you have a hierarchy, which you will never change when you just add some dummy postings in to your systems. But then you are never allowed to change your hierarchy again.
In this functionality, what we have added now in 3.0 allows you to also change on the fly the hierarchy in your query, and you will get different results because the OLAP processor takes care of the elimination process.
So if you just have two alternative hierarchies or as the question was before, every month below the different hierarchy you just want to see the data, if its one or the other hierarchy. Of course, you had changes in your hierarchy structure, then the OLAP processor will take care of.
If you have a fixed hierarchy structure, you could add some dummy postings to eliminate. But I think theres not a feasible way to do it. I think you need a flexible way because no company structure will be fixed for, or no cost sender structure, profit sender structure will be very fixed for a very long time. Unfortunately, we do not know of any better solution in 2.0 or in 2.1.
V. Bapella
Okay. Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Tim McVickor.
Anile Hi, this is Anile speaking for Tim McVickor. I have a question with respect to calculations that we are finding difficult to do for hierarchies. To give you an example, we have three nodes which are sales, cost of sales and expenses. In column A, we get the respective totals for each of these nodes. But in column B, we want to express both our cost of sales and expenses as the percentage of total value of sales. We are unable to do
that. We are having to make really heavy use of Visual Basic code in our person calculations the total of sales. Is there any way out in 3.0 for this?
J. Mette
Yes. In 3.0, we support the subtle calculation. So we, like you are probably using Excel, yes, we can add cells and make references and create formulas on cells.
Anile Oh, great. I think that addresses my question. Thank you.
J. Mette
Yes. So you could mark the sales cell you want to have the percentage on this level calculated.
Anile Okay. It doesnt matter that the dynamics should there be additional sub nodes that are coming under the sales? The cell position might keep changing on the Excel spreadsheet. So do I have to keep referencing the new cell every time the calculation?
J. Mette
That means the cell calculation is only available if you have two fractures so that we can have a reference point to do the calculation. But what I showed before that we have now on the structures all of this display hierarchies thing, what I showed in my example with the contribution match one and contribution match two. So you can always switch over
this type the end user hierarchy, and then you can do all of the cell calculations.
Anile Okay, thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Kevin Bandise.
K. Bandise
I have a question about the subtree update. Can we use that to basically make a delta load for hierarchies?
J. Mette
Yes. If the source system really brings you, yes. Whatever your source system whether the flat file or whether its, yes.
K. Bandise
We have like 30,000 nodes cost-center hierarchy and we want to do just a delta upload to use the subtree update to speed it up.
J. Mette
Yes, but then who determines what the delta is? The extractor as of today doesnt know what has changed.
K. Bandise
Okay.
J. Mette
You must know that you test to replace a certain subtree.
K. Bandise
Oh, the extractor has to tell it exactly which nodes to be updated? It cant look at the before and after?
J. Mette
It doesnt do it right now.
K. Bandise
I guess you would need like the extractor to collect cost sender updates in the delta queue, something like that.
J. Mette
Yes. Thats what we would need, but thats not available right now.
K. Bandise
4.0.
J. Mette
You have to tell the system that this certain subtree has changed and that you just want to upload this one.
K. Bandise
Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Jay Robel.
J. Robel
Yes. I have a question. Since hierarchy nodes now have to be defined by an info object, could you use a hierarchy on two different info objects? For example, if I had a three level hierarchy sales or division material and I dont have material in my queue, could I still use it on division? In the past, youve always had to make duplicate hierarchies, one at the higher level and one all the way down to material level.
J. Mette
Im not quite sure.
J. Robel
Basically, you always had to have the lowest info object in the queue or the hierarchy doesnt work.
J. Mette
Yes, thats still valid that we define the hierarchy on this object, yes.
J. Robel
Okay, but now the nodes are also info objects up above. So you cant use just the top half of the hierarchy.
J. Mette
But what we do is the hierarchy itself still belongs to one info object.
J. Robel
Okay.
J. Mette
We do the same in 3.0 as in 1.2. or 2.0. Nothing has changed. But we can just reference on another info object and get the text for a node out of it.
For example, you have info objects like material group, and you have some material in the two info objects and you create now a manual hierarchy. Okay, I have material group number eight, and now you have two options when you maintain your hierarchy. You create a folder in your hierarchy maintenance. Either you just create a text folder and you type in the test for the material group A manually, or you reference on the material group info object: please fetch the text from material group A out of the material groups info object.
So when you get an upload of the text from material group, the text automatically gets changed because its only a reference on the material group text. So you do not have to change your hierarchy if something gets changed. But thats something which was available in 1.2 or 2.0, 2.1. So nothing has changed there. The only thing that weve changed now is that you have to tell the system in the info object maintenance using this button that material group can be used as a node. So we have a stronger metadata support here. But the end user just cannot do any wild things any more. So we just have it a bit more controlled using metadata.
J. Robel
Thank you.
J. Mette
Youre welcome.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Sirham Mivalla.
S. Mivalla
Hi. My question is concerning the performance when we are using several hierarchies in the past. I was just wanted to know how the performance will be? Is it just similar to that? Is it there a marginal difference or is it a considerable difference? Any tests are done on this performance issue?
J. Mette
Yes, we have done some tests. The entire hierarchy usage in the old processor was completely rewritten in 3.0 and also in the object-oriented version. We cannot see any major problems so far during our tests using multiple hierarchies.
S. Mivalla
Okay.
L. Schubert
Maybe one last question now.
Coordinator
Our next question comes from Kevin Cook.
K. Cook
I have a question about hierarchies and reporting. Has the limitation of not being able to exclude the hierarchy node in nodes or restricting hierarchy been removed in 3.0?
J. Mette
No. Youve got me on the wrong side. As far as I know, its still on the
list for 3.0B, but unfortunately 3.0B development is done because we are already in the first customer shipment. There is no functionality to exclude hierarchy nodes so far.
K. Cook
Okay. Thank you.
L. Schubert
Okay. I think this brings us to the end of this session. There might be a few other questions, but unfortunately were out of time now. So thank you to Joachim for really a very interesting in depth presentation and QA session. Thank you very much to all listeners and to all the folks who had questions here, very good questions. The transcript, the call transcript will uploaded to SAPnet. It will be published within a week or so. So you will find it there where you also found the presentation for this session.
Just let me introduce the next call. The next session will be on Thursday May 30th, which is in two weeks. The topic will be authorizations in BW 3.0 presented by Debbie Borden from SV Portals America. So thank you very much, and good bye.
Coordinator
Thank you for joining todays conference call. All participants may disconnect at this time.

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Hierarchies in BW 3.0 - Transcript

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SAP PORTALS Moderator: Margaret Anderson May 16, 2002/10:00 a.m.

expand state of the hierarchies.

The elimination functionality supports the accounting principals of multi-entity

Yes. The new fields will be added to the tables.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Vil Woo.

Yes, you do.

V. WooSo theres no improvement on that side.

V. WooOkay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Jacque Ree Labella.

Sorry, I didnt get exactly your question.

Any info object.

Is it like regular data, metadata?

Our next question comes from Tao Fan.

T. Fan Yes. Its on cost sender hierarchy.

name or give a brand new technical name for each?

T. Fan Okay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Rick Gardner.

But itsquery when it redoes that because its on the fly.

Okay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Vermand Bapella.

Does the elimination of development business volume forspecific to 2.0B?

No, thats only 3.0.

Okay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Tim McVickor.

Anile Oh, great. I think that addresses my question. Thank you.

Anile Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from Kevin Bandise.

You must know that you test to replace a certain subtree.

It doesnt do it right now.

Our next question comes from Jay Robel.

Im not quite sure.

Our next question comes from Sirham Mivalla.

Maybe one last question now.

Our next question comes from Kevin Cook.

Okay. Thank you.

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