Substring in BEx?

In the Business Explorer front end, is it possible to select and display substrings of characteristic values?

I have a characteristic "LOTID" and Key Figure "QUANTITY" denoting the lot id in a manufacturing process and the quantity contained in the lot.

The values of LOTID are of the type 'ABCEF.01', 'ABCDEF.02', 'ABCDEF.03', etc.

For example,

LOTID QUANTITY

ABCDEF.01 10

ABCDEF.02 20

ABCDEF.03 30

The requirement is to only display a single record in the BEx report by taking a substring of all characters of LOTID to the left of the point (".")

i.e. ABCDEF 30.

Can this be done directly in the front end without having to create a new info object (e.g. LOT_FAMILY) and having to populate it via a transfer or update rule?

Thanks