Creating the SAP BW Project Team

Team-Fly

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The next step in the SAP BW project is building a team. First, form a steering committee, which consists of key business drivers such as the CFO, CIO, corporate data warehouse manager, SAP program manager, SAP BW program manager, business process expert, and SAP BW expert. It is important that the steering committee members meet regularly to discuss the project status to be aware of any unforeseen business problem, the project scope, or technical issues. The steering committee is responsible for resolving, prioritizing, and recommending alternatives to keep the project on track. The steering committee must establish a problem escalation process to the SAP BW support center and SAP BW engineering team, and designate one contact person between SAP and the SAP BW implementation team. Figure 5-4 describes SAP BW team roles and their interactions.

Figure 5-4: SAP BW Project Team Members.

The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit by Ralph Kimball is a good reference book that describes data warehouse team structures, roles, and responsibilities for traditional data warehouses. The ASAP methodology for SAP BW provides several templates to build the SAP BW implementation team and their roles and responsibilities. I won't repeat the same information here, but I will describe the relationships among the team members, keeping the SAP BW project in mind.

Figure 5-4 shows the SAP BW team structure at a higher level. The actual number of team members depends on the scope of the SAP BW project. For example, if SAP BW business content does not meet data analysis needs, you may need one or more ABAP developers to code extract programs or enhance existing extractors in SAP R/3.

Because SAP BW is an SAP product, it is assumed that, like SAP R/3, it will require a large team to implement. In reality, the SAP BW implementation team is relatively small, and members come from the following five areas:

• Business Partners

• Corporate Data Warehouse Program Office

• SAP R/3 Program Office

• SAP BW Experts

• Corporate Information Architects and Technologists

Business Partners

The business partners and analysts play a major role in defining business and end-user requirements and quality of information needed for the reporting and analysis processes. Business partners are responsible for defining business architecture and how reporting and data analysis will be performed in the business model. For example, does the data warehouse need to support an enterprise-wide workforce or is support limited to their business unit? This information is critical in defining the SAP BW deployment architecture: data marts or central data warehouses or a combination of both that satisfy business analysis needs.

Corporate Data Warehouse Program Office

It is critical to involve the existing corporate data warehouse team in the SAP BW project. Though its members may not be familiar with SAP BW, they will provide a wealth of information on the present state of the information supply chain in the company. For example, they can quickly provide data models, present KPI definitions, data sources, data volumes, and data extraction/transformation techniques. The corporate data warehouse, business, and technical analysts must work together for a successful SAP BW implementation.

SAP R/3 Program Office

Involvement of the SAP R/3 program office is very important as well. Two major areas should be focused on with the SAP R/3 operation team:

• How do SAP R/3 path-to-production and SAP BW path-to-production need to be coordinated? It is expected that SAP R/3 will have a different life cycle than SAP BW. However, you need to implement SAP BW extractors in SAP R/3, and you might not have anticipated this in an earlier SAP R/3 project life cycle. SAP expects to have minimal BW-related interruptions in SAP R/3, but you will have to apply special hot packs related to SAP BW business content in SAP R/3. These hot packs do not enhance SAP R/3 OLTP functions but will enhance SAP BW extractors or business content functionality. Scheduling non-OLTP maintenance work in SAP R/3 may impact SAP R/3 OLTP operations, and the SAP R/3 OLTP production team must understand this.

  In addition to data extractors, you need to configure ALE and other SAP BW-related parameters in SAP R/3. Some ALE parameters, such as packet size, may be suitable for SAP BW but not for SAP R/3 OLTP-related ALE messages. Balancing these two environments requires frequent parameter adjustments for DBMS, R/3, and ALE to handle the increase or decrease in transaction volume. Though adjusting such parameters on SAP R/3 boosts performance for SAP BW operations, it may result in poor OLTP performance. For these reasons, involvement of the SAP R/3 OLTP operations staff is very important from the beginning stage of SAP BW configuration and project definition.

• How do you manage SAP R/3 and SAP BW production operations? When do you schedule data extracts from SAP R/3 to SAP BW? How does it impact R/3 performance? SAP R/3 and SAP BW project teams need to work very closely to assess the overall impact of data extractors on SAP R/3 performance.

Modules in SAP R/3 can use LIS, but SAP BW uses special LIS structures to capture delta changes. Include one person on the SAP BW team who is familiar with LIS setup and configuration. Depending on what subject area you plan to implement, include one person on the team who has an in-depth understanding of business process flows and associated data objects in SAP R/3. For example, if you are planning to implement the Sales and Distribution area, your SAP R/3 subject expert must know how the SD system works. Your subject expert must also know how order documents are invoiced, how deliveries are generated, and how order documents flow in the SD system.

SAP BW Experts

In any SAP BW project, you need SAP BW experts, who actually implement the reporting and data analysis environment. This team consists of an SAP BW business content specialist-an SAP consultant who works with business and data warehouse teams to understand business requirements. The SAP BW consultant facilitates mapping end-user requirements against SAP BW business content. This exercise helps the team in assessing the development work: how much predefined business content is usable, what needs to be enhanced, or what new data objects need to be designed from scratch to satisfy business requirements. When it comes to modeling SAP BW schema, one must have a good understanding of the star-schema model to model InfoCubes. However, to model Operational Data Store, you need to understand overall data warehouse modeling and normalization techniques beyond multidimensional star-schema modeling.

Caution 

Often, when SAP R/3 developers trained in LIS technology are asked to model an InfoCube in SAP BW, they will model the InfoCube model that resembles the LIS structures in SAP R/3 rather than the SAP BW InfoCube. Make sure that this does not happen. First, take the TABW20 training course on SAP BW modeling before embarking on modeling and defining custom InfoCubes or Operational Data Store. SAP BW specific training courses are listed in Appendix A.

Initially, one ABAP developer is sufficient. You also need at least one developer on the team who is fluent in Microsoft Excel VBA and ODBO programming. An existing SAP R/3 Basis administrator must be trained in SAP BW database and ALE administration. If you need to import non-SAP R/3 data in SAP BW, get support from a corporate data warehouse group, which might already have someone trained in products (from Acta, Ardent, Hummingbird, Informatica, and other vendors) that use Staging BAPI to load data in SAP BW.

The purpose of a data warehouse is to provide accurate information to the end user. Simply presenting fancy charts and graphs is not the purpose of a data warehouse. The quality assurance engineer establishes all project-deliverable quality and audit standards that are in accordance with corporate standards and also meet end-user requirements.

Corporate Information Architects and Technologists

A corporate information architect should be on the SAP BW team because he or she has a much broader view of the corporate information supply chain that includes the data warehouse, transaction systems, and other information delivery systems. He or she can help teams build data objects and definitions based on corporate data standards. In SAP R/3, you are very limited on how you can name an object. Object names must start with Y or Z. In SAP BW, you do not have such restrictions. You can name your objects using any combination of characters other than a zero prefix. Objects prefixed by 0 (zero) are reserved only for SAP BW. I recommend not using the SAP R/3 naming scheme. Instead, develop a new naming scheme that is more suitable to end users and that conforms to corporate naming standards.

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Team-Fly