Options for ABAP report output in Dashboard type presentation

[Former Member]

Background

Monash University environment is SAP ERP ECC6 - no BW. The University has undertaken considerable analysis of spend as part of developing a strategic approach to procurement. The data used to undertake this analysis was extracted from SAP MM and FI using a developed ABAP report which collates, categorizes and consolidates all spend information from MM (for our Purchase Order based commitment and expenditure) and FI (for direct invoices and Corporate Credit Card expenditure). This information is then currently exported to MS-Excel to produce a report containing graphs, pie charts etc.

Requirement

To present output from our Spend Analysis Report in a more readable dashboard type presentation. This facility should allow easy manipulation (slice and dice) and drill down of the data.. Our requirement is to have something operating within a very short time-frame, say within a month or two. Although you might suggest Web Dynpro Business Graphic or SEM /BW (as the optimal solution) we understand the set up time for either of these solutions is prohibitive. Visual Composer has been suggested as another option but we have no in-house expertise to determine if this is a viable solution.

Some colleagues visited a conference a couple of weeks ago and saw a demonstration of a product call XenoCube http://www.inlogik.com/downloads/XenoCube_Brochure.pdf

which was proposed as a quick way to present SAP 'raw' report output in a more readable form. Other solutions in this space that have been suggested include:-

Zycus - Actionable Spend Analysis – Zycus.com

Emptoris Spend Analysis - emptoris.com

ONIQUA Enterprise Analytics– oniqua.com.au

Ariba Buyer – ariba.com

SAS Spend Analysis – sas.com

Etesius – SpendGuardian etesius.com

Can anyone provide advice as to their experience of SAP solution, integrated partner products or any of the about products to satisfy a similar requirement to that which I have outlined? The main selection criteria will include a product which is:

a) quick & easy to implement,

b) presentation and manipulation of ABAP extracted data

c) is scalable and

d) is reasonably priced.

Grateful for any advice regarding a solution .

Thank-you

[former_member195888]

Hi Phil,

as you mentioned using SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence would be the optimal solution and generally you may want to evaluate which investments would contribute to a long term solution for these and other requirements. Dashboards can be generated by many tools/ applications/ products. Most of them have similiar features - my perception is that you may not look for the "best" dashboard tool, but for those which integrate best with your SAP applications and are easy to deploy and use. In any case I suggest also to look at an overall vision on what can be expected as future needs to extend the use of the dashboards/ data.

SAP has assembled a full solution for Corporate Performance Management using some of the "existing" SAP components and some new products recently added to the SAP suite. You can find a high level overview for example here - not to recommend this as necessary solution, but to get a view on how some of the needs could embedded into a broader vision: http://www.sap.com/community/pub/showdetail.epx?itemID=8938

Part of the CPM portfolio is comming from a product formerly called Pilotworks which is regarded as very user friendly and easy to deploy - this includes also dashboard features (http://www.pilotsoftware.com/pilotworks/features/dashboards/).

If you are looking for more information about the SAP Visual Composer there is really a lot of information available on how to use it on your own (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/visualcomposer). The visual composer allows not "just" analytical dashboards, but also to build applications embedded with analytics. Existing SAP "interfaces" (BAPIs, RFCs, BI queries, ...) are more or less usable as "plug & play".

A colleague from Healthcare made a pretty nice blog as an example on how to utilize the Visual Composer for a dashboard application: