As promised in our previous SSM article, I will now walk you through another interesting objective we have achieved while working on our SSM project: populate Strategy Management KPIs with a Data Services job.
Currently SAP BO SSM does not provide a connector to SAP Business Objects tools even if both SSM and Data Services are SAP BusinessObjects products.
The solution we designed for our customer in UAE provides them with the option of loading the data from any source into SAP BO Data Services and of finally dumping the values into an SSM PAS Cube (via E&A PAS schedule).
The solution recommended by SAP for its latest version currently in use, SSM7.5 SP08, allows loading the data into the PAS cube by creating an IDQL script.
The concerns we were faced with in our project were related to the actions required for the maintenance of IDQL (scripting language).
For a non-trained customer, IDQL sounds like a black box and sets off many alerts especially when it comes to maintenance.
I was caught in the midst of a question storm which ended thanks to our “problem solving attitude” and rapidly blew off all questions.
It didn’t take us long to learn how the SSM data model works for the KPIs as we had already studied them while working on the initiative.
The first step taken consisted in creating a cube in the SSM “Cube Builder” console. From here we proceeded to mapping the KPIs ID that we have in SSM SQL and in our original source (i.e. ERP, Excel, and Other DBs).
The process of creating a source and sending it out with a data integrator was a straightforward and pleasurable task and has delivered great results.
Now, this solution allows me not only to insert the current data but to introduce the historical data just as well, it’s absolutely fantastic!!!!
I was able to visualize in my “Entry and Approval” panel the data I was inserting on an excel file and on the ERP tables.
At this point my data was not added into the “Balance Scorecard” yet, so the last action I had to perform was that of publishing those values.
I used the “Entry and Approval” scheduler that was running right after the ETL job.
Reached this stage, I had my SSM Context populated with my values.
In the image displayed below I have outlined the steps we followed (IDQL is marked in red since it hadn’t been utilized throughout this process) and as you can clearly notice, we are now capable to create reports and dashboards from the SSM Database by generating a universe on top of the SSM tables.
Integrating SSM with Data Services
Please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@clariba.com for more information about this article or for SSM consultancy.