S/4HANA - what impact on BW and BW/4HANA??
Previous blogs have highlighted the complexity and challenges of migrating a BW system to a BW/4HANA system along with the substantial effort that this requires.
In this blog, I’ll detail another issue linked to the migration of a system but in this case, it is the migration of ECC to S/4HANA and the impact this has on the BW and BW/4HANA systems.
The main impact on BW and BW/4HANA after upgrading ECC to S/4HANA is on the BW datasources (DS) object type.
Even if you’re not considering migrating to BW/4HANA (from BW) but just migrating from ECC to S/4HANA the impact assessment still needs to be completed (i.e. the impact is the same if on BW or BW/4HANA).
To review this impact on BW, SAP have provided an OSS note 2500202 - S4TWL - BW Extractors in SAP S/4HANA.
Attached to this OSS note is an excel sheet (which is updated on a periodic basis by the SAP development team) with the latest status of all SAP business content DS’s. Currently, not all business content DS’s that are technically available are covered yet - SAP are planning to provide clarifications for these DS’s along with updates on any modifications they deploy on existing DS’s. These updates will be shared on new versions of the excel sheet via this note. Hence it is recommended to review this note for updates.
The OSS note contains two attachments:
Guidance to the Excel list in SAP Note 2500202.pptx – this is a power point presentation that provides an overview of the excel list produced by SAP (second attachment) to highlight the impact of S/4HANA.
2500202 3.1 - S4TWL.xlsx – latest excel version of the impact of S/4HANA on BW DS’s produced by SAP. This contains 3 tabs
Read me – provides an overview of the excel sheet.
Overview – this tab contains all the relevant information on all business content DS’s (provided by SAP Development).
Your SE16| ROOSOURCE – download the latest active DS’s from table ROOSOURCE in your SAP ECC production system and add into column A on this tab. There are several VLOOKUP’s done on the overview tab (which contains the information for the business content DS’s).
Once you’ve downloaded the active DS’s from table ROOSOURCE in the ECC production system and added them into the Your SE16| ROOSOURCE you can now start reviewing the impact of the S/4HANA upgrade on your DS’s from tab - Your SE16| ROOSOURCE.
Your SE16| ROOSOURCE
The following is an item overview of two of the main columns on the Your SE16| ROOSOURCE tab – Classification and Categories.
To summarise the above table, whitelisted means that the DS is working or is working with limited impact. The Generated DS means that the DS is working but needs to be regenerated in the system. The Not whitelisted is that the DS is not working, and work is in progress by the SAP development team to possibly fix the outstanding issues. The deprecated and not relevant for BW extraction means that the DS can’t be used after the S/4HANA upgrade. The last value (that is not in this table) is the N/A value which means that the DS is a customised DS or the business content information has not been updated (on the overview tab) for this DS by the SAP development team yet.
The following are a few observations:
Customised Datasources – all customised datasources have a value of N/A in the Classification and Category columns. Basically, all customised datasources need to be impact assessed manually after the S/4HANA upgrade.
Business Content DS missing – As mentioned already, I found several DS’s missing from the overview tab (for example 0FI_TV_01 and 0FI_TV_02). The value N/A appeared against these DS’s in the Your SE16| ROOSOURCE tab. An update for these DS’s will be on future versions of the excel sheet attached to this note.
Active Datasources not used in BW – a good starting point would be to review all the active datasources in ROOSOURCE table in ECC are being used by your BW solution. Just because the datasource is active (in table ROOSOURCE) does not mean that it’s been used in your BW solution (potentially you could check your BI Statistics to see which datasources are been used).
To offer you a high level view of the impact of the S/4HANA on a BW system, the following is a breakdown of an assessment done on a SAP BW system (BW 7.5) that has a 6TB DB.
To summarise this example, the client has 865 live DS’s that extract data from ECC into BW. From the 865 live DS’s, 278 DS’s (865 – 587 (Whitelisted)) could be potential impacted and an assessment of each DS will be required to determine the exact impact of the S/4HANA migration will have on each DS.
To conclude, if you’re upgrading your ECC system to S/4HANA system (with or without upgrading BW to BW/4HANA) then this is a mandatory step that needs to be executed to ensure no impact to your SAP business intelligence users after the upgrade to S/4HANA. As you can see by the example that I’ve provided, 32% of the clients DS’s could be potentially impacted by the S/4HANA migration.
Dónal Geraghty operates SeaPark Consultancy. SeaPark offer bespoke SAP BW/4HANA migration support and solutions. We work with your existing on-site team & external vendors to optimise BI operating processes and ensure the highest levels of ROI.
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