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Accurate and timely measurements of business performance is the overarching goal of business intelligence (BI) systems today. This need for measurement of how a business is performing against corporate goals and its visualization in the form of interactive dashboards has become a major driver for the selection of BI tools available in the market.

Even with highly capable BI systems installed and operational at most companies, one of the top challenges reported by SAP end-users is the inability to easily access real-time SAP data in the transactional system. Enabling end-users to easily and securely query and extract transactional SAP data is critical for many purposes beyond BI for corporate performance measurement, including:

• Ad-hoc operational reporting
• Rapid response to challenges driven by business changes
• Prototyping steady-state BI reports

This white paper addresses the various options available to the SAP users for accessing data in their ERP system while highlighting the usability and security implications of each of these options. This paper is intended for business decision makers and assumes the reader has a basic familiarity with the SAP architecture.

Current SAP Query and Reporting Options

For a business user of SAP, the most obvious place to search for a report or a data extract is within your company’s preferred BI platform. Whether this platform uses a data warehouse or data mart, such as a SAP BW/BI, or is simply a metadata repository such as Business Objects or Cognos, most companies today have adopted one or more BI platforms as the preferred reporting and analytic engines. By replicating the native SAP security and authorizations, these BI platforms should have resolved security issues around table access and organization-level access to data. The one problem with business warehouse-based reporting is that the data may be old, incomplete, or aggregated, and thus may prevent the user from getting the necessary real-time reports.

If an existing BI report does not meet your data extraction requirements, the next best option is to access the transactional system data via the various SAP-provided tools such as the table browser (SE16/SE16N/SE17), or the SAP Query (SQ01 or SQVI) tool. While these tools can be quite effective, and preserve table-level security, they are not easy-to-use and they do not respect organization-level security. Due to these security issues around organization-level controls, access to these tools is denied for most business users. Moreover, query results and reports built using these tools are not easy to deploy on an organization-wide basis and exporting these results to external files, such as Excel or Access can involve extra manual processing steps.

Another way to extract SAP data that is used in conjunction with some BI tools is a direct connection to the database layer via an ODBC connection. This is unsafe and is never recommended as a way to access SAP data as the native SAP security and authorizations are not preserved with this method.

The final option left to most business users is to petition their technical teams to build a new BI report (or a new BI model) or to write a custom query to get to their data. These custom queries can be written via SAP Query and reporting tools or via ABAP queries. Security of data access is typically programmed manually within the custom-coded query.

However, the problem with business users petitioning IT for ad-hoc reporting requests is that it adds a significant amount of work to the already stretched IT support teams, and often the users don’t get their reports in a timely manner. The situation is particularly troublesome for data extracts that are for one-time use only and are needed urgently.

Looking at the various query and reporting options available today and after interviewing many SAP customers, we found that if a standard available SAP report or BI report does not meet the users’ needs, the users are generally stuck. We find SAP users painstakingly copy and paste SAP screen data manually into spreadsheets to create their reports. We also find IT support teams overwhelmed with data extraction and query-related requests.

Another persistent issue that we find at many companies today is that their SOX-audit requires companies to eliminate users’ access to SE16, SQVI, etc. query tools for security reasons. Before these companies are able to turn off these tools, they are struggling to find alternative tools for the user community.

An Easy and Secure Ad-Hoc SAP Data Extraction Alternative

To address the limitations of the currently available query and reporting options and to fill the needs of the SAP user community, a new tool has been developed by one of our partners. This tool is designed for operational ad-hoc reporting from the SAP ERP system and is meant to complement your existing BI systems.

For ad-hoc operational reporting from the SAP ERP system to complement your BI system, a new tool is available and enables business users and technical users to download live SAP data in MS Excel, Access, and other common formats for immediate analysis and action. The key design principles and features of this tool are:

• SOX-compliant security around user data access leveraging standard SAP security profiles. This not only • preserves the table-level security in SAP, but also organizational-level security in a user’s standard SAP security profile. The tool does not require the user to have SE16 or SAP Query (SQ01 or SQVI) access.
• Process optimization that minimizes performance impact of queries on the SAP server. Multiple levels of • validity checks ensure the correctness of the query and pre-assess the performance of the query before execution.
• Ease-of-use via a simple, intuitive user-interface. Extensive search functionality helps users identify the tables • and fields they require.
• Automatic determination of joins between tables for multi-table queries.
• Ability to schedule either periodic or one-time extracts.
• Availability of a run-time version to allow an “execute-only” mode, with no ability to modify existing queries or to create new queries.

This query tool authoring software is designed to be used by SAP business analysts, super users, power users, support team members, data stewards, and data administrators. The prerequisites are that they are familiar with the SAP data model and have a working knowledge of SAP tables, as well as basic concepts of relational databases.

Please contact us to learn more about this too or download your free trial version now!

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