Universe Design Concepts

[former_member212897]

Good morning!

I looking for some guidance on how to go about designing a universe for our company. I'm looking for a push in the right direction, helpful posts, along with some best practices that will help me get started. Keep in mind I have no clue what I'm doing, just looking for some advice along with some guidance. And I'm using BO 4.0.

Our company is split into 3 segments and a request was made to create a universe for each segment of the business. Im not sure if its a problem or not but each segment touches pretty much every module (That we use - Sales/Manufacturing). By this I mean that I have requirements to be able to report on the following (Quoting -> Sales Order -> Production Info -> Labor Hours (HCM) -> Delivery - > Financial) all from with in the universe. From this I can see that we'll have at least 10-15 cubes that I would need to have in a universe to be able to cover all the different areas and sub areas.

Now I've been able to find some information and it suggests that there are several different ways in which you can develop a universe: Linked, Kernel, Master, and Component. I've found some older posts on Linked universes and everyone seems to suggest that they suck, although, these were older posts and they were using an older version of business objects.

So some questions:

1. Is the concept of having a universe per business segment possible, keeping in mind it will touch a lot of modules in SAP?

2. Should I avoid Linked Universes?

3. What universe approach do you prefer and why (Kernel, Master, Component, or Other)?

4. Best Practices?

5. Recommended Books? I just purchased SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 The Complete Reference 3/E 

6. Recommended Posts, Blogs?

Im open to any and all of your suggestions, advice, or anything you have to say. I'm all ears!

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi Larry,

The start should be the Universe Designer guide.

You can also refer below links.

A very useful link for learning:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-8461

Thanks

Gaurav

Message was edited by: Henry Banks

[former_member212897]

Thanks for the link Gaurav.

I've actually looked though this in the past and they are great videos for leaning how to use IDT but it apears to lack conceptual design content (Unless I missed them). Yes there are videos on how to create variables or database connections but im more interested in the design/artichect of the universe. I have actually created several sample universes based on cubes, now I have questions about how to proceed with a larger universe. I relize that a lot of this comes with experience as well as trial and error both of which I lack.

Based on my example I need to create a universe that would have connection to 15 cubes.

So is that recommended? Will I suffer from performance? Is there a better way to artichect the design of the universe so that instead of 1 universe I end up with several smaller universes that are easier to maintain in the future as well as allowing for future enhancements? Are there best practices that would say you should break up your universes into smaller subject areas (Sales, AR, AP, etc)?

After looking over the links and seeing a couple of other posts I suppose what I want to know is should I be creating 1 large multisource universe that will consist of 10-15 cubes (Which would be 10-15 connections, correct) or should I really break that up into much smaller manageable pieces?

A lot of the content that will be created for the 1st universe will be duplicated in the following 2 universes that need to be designed. So how would I go about creating reusable pieces that can be used by multiple universes?