SAP BPC Embedded: Some tips

03 Oct

SAP BPC Embedded: Some tips

After being part of several projects with SAP BPC Embedded, there are some things that are good to take in consideration. In the following lines, I will share some advices to take in advance when we are dealing with this version of the SAP product.

Master Data

Many times, the teams working on SAP BPC Embedded projects are more experienced in BW than in BPC, but even if we know that the Master Data should be created and maintained in the BW way, there are some BPC specific details to consider.

The following dimensions are mandatory to setup Legal Consolidation Models (but can be named as you wish):

ACCOUNT: It is one of the four required in all projects (ENTITY, CATEGORY, TIME, and ACCOUNT). The account dimension defines the chart of accounts for your model and how those accounts are calculated and aggregated.
CATEGORY: As I mentioned in the previous point, it is also one of the four required. The category dimension defines the groupings in which you store information in your model. It is the Versions dimension.
ENTITY: Also one of the four required. The entity dimension defines the organizational structure of the business units for your model and how the units aggregate.
TIME: It is the last of the four required. The time dimension defines the units of time for your model and how those units aggregate. The mandatory standard Info Object for this dimensions is 0FISCPER.
CURRENCY: Together with the Group dimension it is required for the consolidation and/or currency business rules. The Currency dimension is required if your company reports on local currency and translated values. These dimensions store the reporting and input currencies for your organization.
GROUP: As I mentioned in the previous point, it is required for the consolidation and/or currency business rules.
INTERCOMPANY: It is used for matching intercompany activity. The Intercompany dimension defines the base members associated with the level at which Intercompany balances are tracked for Intercompany eliminations.
AUDIT: It is required for elimination and/or consolidation business rules. The audit dimension is the Data Source dimension and tracks the source of input data.
FLOW: It is optional and tracks the source of input data. We can define here the movements, the Opening and Closing flows, etc.

In BW we can leave some of the dimensions empty in a query and the id taken will be “#”, but in most of the cases in BPC we will need a dummy member to select it when “we don’t want to select anyone”.

There is also other topic to consider here, and it is the id of the dimension members. SAP recommends to use a letter at the beginning or at the end of the id and the reason is very simple, if you use all numbers, the system will add leading zeros to complete 32 digits, even if you only want to have 4 or 5 digits for this specific id.

We can see the consequence of this issue in the following screenshot:

I have entered as ids “1”, “2”, “3”, “4” and “7”, but you can see that the result is not the expected one. The issue could be more annoying, as we can see in the following screenshot:

With so much leading zeros, we are not able to see which Audit is selected. But if we use a letter, for example the id “A03”, we will see the result:

Prerequisites of the System

When we start a project, and in this case, specifically with SAP BPC Embedded there are some prerequisites that we have to take in mind. Two of them are the following InfoObjects and Function Types for Planning.

InfoObjects:

/CPMB/RULE
/CPMB/RENT

Function Type Planning:

/CPMB/LAUNCH_LOGIC
/CPMB/WRITE_BACK

If you don’t have all of them installed and activated you can get the following error when you try to save the Ownership Manager data:

One Time dimension per BPC Cube

There is a rule that we should follow here, we can only have one Time dimension in each BPC Cube (Consolidation, Ownership and Rates Cubes) and that Time dimension must be 0FISCPER. If you have more than one you can get errors like the following when you try to run the Currency Conversion: