Friday 29 January 2021

Model Storage with Python Machine Learning Client for SAP HANA

Machine learning models, e.g. classification and regression model, contain the relationships and patterns between features in the training dataset which could be applied to similar data in the future for prediction. Model training could be time consuming, so it is desirable to store/persist a model for future use without retraining the model.

We provide a model storage class for model persistence, such as classification, regression, clustering and time series models. In this blog post, you will learn:

Wednesday 27 January 2021

Migrating SAP Business One SQL Server to HANA

Short intro

HANA has been on the market for some time and can be used by SAP Business One customers in their new deployments. Those with SQL Server as a database have already started migrating their systems to SAP's new flagship platform.

This quick guide can help you take into account the myriad of considerations to resolve in order to achieve a successful project.

The migration project

Successfully carrying out a migration project from SAP Business One SQL Server to SAP Business One HANA is a task that seems trivial to start with, but has a lot of activities to contemplate and that are sometimes overestimated or taken into account.

Monday 25 January 2021

S/4HANA Greenfield Implementation

Overview

This Roadmap is intended for SAP BASIS team in an implementation project for SAP S/4HANA on premise. This Roadmap is comprised of different Phases and provide high-level details for each phase.

Phases include –

1. SAP Architecture

2. Maintenance Planner

3. Installation Preparation

4. SAP S/4HANA 1909 Installation

5. Best Practices Activation

6. SAP S/4HANA Migration Cockpit

Sunday 24 January 2021

How to keep SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) customizing in sync with SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA

Very often, SAP customers implementing SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) need to synchronize, at least, two customized systems in order to keep business processes that span across multiple systems consistent. In most cases, the customizing data are maintained on the operational SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA system and distributed to the SAP MDG system.

Instead of doing the work manually in each system, you can automate this process. SAP Solution Manager offers two technical solutions for this:

Friday 22 January 2021

SAP Geographical Enablement Framework (SAP GEF) – Technical Setup on SAP S/4HANA

Introduction

In this blog post I describe the steps I followed to prepare an SAP S/4HANA 1909 system for SAP Geographical Enablement Framework (SAP GEF) functional configuration. This blog post only addresses the technical pre-requisites to be able to handover to an EAM consultant for GEF configuration.

Tuesday 19 January 2021

Consignment Order in SAP S/4HANA TM based upon Advanced Shipping Notifications

In this blog post I try to show how the newly introduced document, “Consignment Order” fits into the overall procurement process.

Note: This blog post shares my personal insights based on my experience working with customers in Manufacturing and Retail industry and my insight into SAP solutions only. I have demonstrated the functionality in this blog post using system screen images with relevant data for ease of understanding for the readers. It should be noted that these screens and the data is from SAP’s internal test systems and has no relation to any external source

Monday 18 January 2021

SAP on Azure: What are the Options?

In this article I review SAP solutions offered on Azure, main approaches for migrating SAP workloads to the cloud, and key considerations when planning your migration.

SAP Solutions on Azure

SAP HANA on Azure

This service lets you run large workloads of SAP HANA on Azure. You can use SAP HANA on Azure to handle transactions and analytics in-memory on a single data copy. 

SAP HANA on Azure offers on-demand virtual machines (VMs) that are certified for SAP HANA, Azure spot pricing, purpose-built SAP HANA instances and more. Organizations use this service to accelerate business processes, simplify information technology (IT) environments, and gain business intelligence (BI).

Saturday 16 January 2021

SAP Financial product subledger overview

Overview

What is Finance sub-ledger of SAP

SAP FPSL or Financial Product Sub-ledger is SAP’s solution to support various Financial services organization to manage finance products as separate sub-ledger and enable acquiring instant financial insight at any level of detail for analytics and reporting. SAP FPSL is also dedicated multi-GAAP and multi-entity sub-ledger.

Friday 15 January 2021

SAP Business Application Studio – Using SAP HANA Tools with SAP Cloud Application Programming Model projects

In this blog post, I will show you how to add native HDB artifacts using SAP HANA tools to SAP Cloud Application Programming Model projects. We will start by creating an SAP Cloud Application Programming Model project, and then we will adjust it step-by-step to work with SAP HANA tools. We continue to improve our tools so that in the near future, there will be no need for these manual steps.

STEP 1: Add SAP HANA Tools Extensions to SAP Cloud Business Application Dev Space

The first step is to create an SAP Cloud Business Application dev space and add the following additional SAP extensions to it:

Wednesday 13 January 2021

SAP Target Architecture. A Process Based Approach.

The switch to SAP S/4HANA or the introduction of completely new SAP components is very often considered as an exclusive IT task and is accordingly planned as an IT project. In the beginning, it is often forgotten that this is much more than a purely technical system introduction (upgrade). In addition to technical changes, potential changes in the previous way of working due to new processes must also be taken into account.

The consequence of this is, that successful project implementation is dependent on knowledge and active cooperation, equally on IT and the relevant specialist department.

Tuesday 12 January 2021

Knowing the restart properties of SAP HANA parameters, change and monitor results from server level

Problem Statement & Use Case : Let’s divide the arose problems in two levels :

1. With the rise of hyperscaler managed services , if you are onboarded for a customer project only for some short term critical maintenance services like upgrades, migrations , often you are going to find several access issues for administrators specially on SAP HANA client level . And for say if you only have 2 weeks to accomplish your entire activity and raising a bug in DevOps to allow SAP HANA cockpit from your VDI and to have proper access to that and following up and eventually get that done in a completely new customer environment is quintessentially mess. It may end up with changing the firewall rules or a certain amount of unnecessary delay if you take my personal experience.

Monday 11 January 2021

HANA – hdbcons first aid hacks

A tool which got more and more power since HANA 2.0 was released is hdbcons. It should only be used by experienced admins and should be tested in non-prod systems, because it can produce system crashes. There are several known issues documented in notes which describe scenarios you should avoid the usage of hdbcons in prod systems.

This blog won’t describe the full functional scope (the central hdbcons note 2222218). I will show some general use cases which are not well known, but should be kept in mind for scenarios I call ‘HANA first aid’. At the end of the blog you will also get an example script for such a troubleshooting situation.

Saturday 9 January 2021

SAP S/4HANA: Financial Planning with Commercial Project Management

Introduction

This blog gives an overview on the process to perform financial planning with commercial project management.  As a prerequisite, you need to know the concept of master project in SAP Commercial Project Management and project management in SAP S/4HANA Project Systems.

User Role – Project Manager / Project Planner

Commercial Project Management in S/4HANA plays an important role in the complete life cycle of a commercial project. Starting from the bid preparation (creating multiple financial plans for the bid based upon various scenarios, comparing them and finalizing the most optimistic version, transferring the finalized version to S/4HANA for execution) till project handover, major aspects for the project lifecycle (financial & commercial health of the projects, variation in the planned & actual cost etc.) can be analyzed and controlled from the master project created in SAP Commercial Project Management . Apart from that various issues, risks, opportunities related to the project can be managed with SAP Commercial Project Management. Change requests along with the financial impact due to the same can also be managed in SAP Commercial Project Management.

Friday 8 January 2021

Customization of Flat File Upload Planning Function via enhancement spot RSPLFA_FILE_UPLOAD without using CR – Helpful for performance optimization.

Customization of Flat File Upload Planning Function via enhancement spot RSPLFA_FILE_UPLOAD without using CR  will be helpful for below mention two cases:

◉ Options for Customization  (Insert / Modify / Delete) for Flat File Upload Planning Function

◉ Options to populate Data without CR/DS in Planning Approach

CR/DS will be used to derive the logic, the performance will improve.

The below mention step describes how the functionality can be achieved. (BW on HANA 7.5 is used)

Thursday 7 January 2021

Version Management in SAP S/4HANA for central procurement – Central Purchase Contracts

Version management – Introduction

In the case of procurement transactions extending over a longer period of time (for example, in the procurement of capital goods), you may need to differentiate between various versions of the purchasing document. You may also need to refer to one particular version when corresponding with the supplier

Version Management enables you to generate and manage versions of purchasing documents. A version groups together the change documents generated  during subsequent processing of relevant documents. A version thus indicates the revision level of a document (version 0 = original document, versions 1 + = revisions) and provides the user with an overview of the various changes that may have been made in the course of time.

Wednesday 6 January 2021

A different take on SAP HANA Express and Docker containers

In this blog post we will learn to build a highly scalable application using SAP HANA and Docker Swarm cluster. This is first post in this series and more to come.

What will be the end result of our project?

We will able to deploy and scale an application on Docker Swarm cluster, the overall solution architecture would look like below:

Monday 4 January 2021

BW Integrated Planning – Steps to build a simple application

Overview

This blog documents step by step process to build a simple planning application using BW 7.5 on HANA as backend, Business Object Lumira 4.2 as the front-end using BW Integrated Planning framework. I understand that SAP recommended planning solution is SAP Analytics Cloud or BPC on BW/4 HANA. If for some reason you cannot use those options, you may find the information here helpful. Here are the steps to build a fully functional simple planning application including development of BW InfoProviders, Input Ready BW query, planning functions using RSPLAN and frontend application using Lumira Designer.

Saturday 2 January 2021

Google Cloud backint – Non-prod Hana DB recovery using production backint backup

Blog explains Hana database recovery process on google cloud environment. its applicable for SAP homogeneous system copy scenarios where stage or non-production database get refresh using production data backup which is located on google cloud storage bucket.

Google backint tool  – introduction

Google backint is use for HANA backup and recovery on google cloud environment. High level it directly stores backups on cloud storage and speed up backup/recovery due to use of parallel channels.

Standard backint backup configuration work for same server/SID recovery scenario but doesn’t work for different SID / server recovery scenario.  i.e. using one server DB backup to restore on other DB server via backint.  This blog will address on require setup to make such recovery easy and faster.

Friday 1 January 2021

SAP Data in Snowflake by using Azure Data Factory – A Fast & Easy way to Data Transformation in Minutes

The agenda for this blog is to demonstrate SAP data replication to the Snowflake platform to build an independent data warehousing scenario.

As we all know, Santa Clause runs on SAP, and his North pole’s supply chain data is growing every year, and the Elfs IT team started exploring Industry 4.0, Machine learning, and tractions for serverless services, including high-performance data warehouses like a Snowflake, Azure Synapse with fully automated, zero administration, and combined with a data lake so that they could focus on increasing Line of Business(LoB) on SAP S/4HANA without any trouble.

Sounds very interesting…Let’s keep scrolling to see what’s next!