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There are quiet a few companies that want to give end-users access to extract table data via SE16 or SE16N. If you decide to give SE16N, please read our blog that shoes the pitfalls & danger of giving SE16N – In addition, the auditors, security people and basis folks worry about using having transactions such as SQVI, SQ01 etc…. Why is that? For starters, users can access confidential data once they can use SQVI as it is not protecting the data to be extracted by company code or other organizational values. A guideline on how to convert SQVI report into a InfoSet query will be published on this blog.

In addition, SQVI reports, if created poorly, can have a drag on system performance as the endusers never have performance in their minds and run queries over millions of records with inadequate table joins.  The same applies to SQ01 – SQ03 transactions. These are a red flag for most of the auditors also if the user is allowed to add custom code on InfoSet level.  Security managers usually recommend that SQxx transactions are used in a development environment and the queries mapped to transactions so that these can go through Change Control and given to users via roles in a controlled manner . continue reading…

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

continue reading…