BPC link with any other SAP products?

[Former Member]

Hi, Prakash

I am wondering how BPC communicate with any other SAP products? using RFC? Can we load the data from ECC into BPC?

Thanks

C.S.

[Former Member]

Hi Chimei,

Remember that BPC is based off of the microsoft platform. Within this platform there is a very cool transformation tool called SSIS, or SQL Server Integration Services. It allows a great deal of flexibility during the loading of our BPC Cubes and Tables.

As Prakash said you can dump your information out to a flat file from ERP or from BI via OpenHub however this is only the beginning of the integration touchpoints. Within SSIS there is a Web Service task, what you could do is take your RFC's generate a web service and use that web service in an SSIS package to load master or transactional data.

Using a web service to load large quantities of data is of course not the most performant solution and therefore this is something you should be careful with.

However there are many options out there. I am working on a guide to summarize these integration options. Look for it on SDN shortly.

Cheers,

Scott

[Former Member]

Hi Chimei,

We are currently going to kickstart our BPC project.

We went through the process of evaluating products which can help easy extraction of data from SAP products into Outlooksoft.

There is a company called ERPLink which has a product suite called iNet.BI which helps enable this. It is very inexpensive (17K for software with 17% annual maintenance charges). This product is SAP certified and has ability to read metadata from SAP modules. It can extract data from BW environments (Cubes, queries of ODS objects) and from R/3 environments (via ABAP report programs with their embedded macros & direct table views). From the product demo, the user interface seemed simplistic. The product is installed on the Outlooksoft environment and uses SQL*Server Information Services (DTS packages) to do the load from SAP source system to Outlooksoft.

You might want to consider this product as an alternative to Flat File loads.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Abhay Shanbhag

[Former Member]

Yes, you can load data from ECC into BPC (via flat file). Today BPC 5.x uses flat files to move data in and out. Within BPC 7.x, we'll offer tighter integration.

[Former Member]

.... via RFC? or others Netweaver instruments?

Tnx

[Former Member]

Flat files can be loaded within BPC 5.x via the Data Manager capabilities... In addition to just flat files, we are looking at creating data manager packages within BPC 5.x to pull some data directly without flat files. A how-to guide should be available on this within the upcoming weeks so stay tuned.

[Former Member]

Thank you,

Claudio