Do you want to reduce your SAP BW development time by 50%?
You can, by focusing on SAP BW Naming Conventions.
Our Custom Development Project Methodology
Using custom development, we have developed a custom tool here at SAP BW Consulting called SAP BW Object Naming Tool.
SAP BW Naming Conventions Best Practices
It is an end-to-end SAP BW Naming Conventions Best Practice design and management solution that ties your entire business solution together. This allows developers to work twice as fast and to troubleshoot within minutes versus weeks.
How can we reduce development time by 50%?
Building a data flow (the backend) in SAP BW takes approximately 2 days to set up.
The first day's task is spent figuring out the names of all objects and items to be created. This is a pencil and paper design task.
The second day's task is spent sitting at the computer on the RSA1 screen actually creating those Objects, Data Sources, Update Rules, Transfer Rules, Tables, Cubes, InfoSets, Multiproviders, BEx queries and Process Chains.
From 2 Days to 2 Minutes
There are a lot of items to build and they all have both a long, short and technical name to be determined by the developer.
So building any data flow is a 2 day task.
Rather than spending a day figuring out names by hand, our tool accomplishes this task in 2 minutes based on a few key inputs the developer needs to provide.
So now the developer can spend 2 days out of 2 developing, rather than 1 day out of 2.
So guess what, your development time has just been reduced by 50%. Your 6 month project just became a 3 month project. So a 50% reduction is easily possible and we have done this on actual projects and built some pretty rock solid systems in the process.
Are SAP BW naming conventions new?
Not really, but SAP has always recommended that you develop SAP BW naming conventions for your project.
Our experience is that naming strategies have not been done well in the past nor in an automated, methodical fashion.
Our methodology, which we developed our tool from, accomplishes both objectives while delivering additional benefits like traceability, scalability and more efficiency.
Key Points:
- Our system, designed by one of our chief software engineers, is scalable.
This means you can start out on a small system and it will scale up without creating spaghetti code.
On a recent greenfield implementation, our system had no trouble scaling up from zero objects at the beginning of the project to over 15,000 objects (Characteristics and Key Figures), 1500 BEx Queries, 1500 ODS's, 305 APD (Analysis Process Designer) models, 305 Cubes and 108 Process Chains - 11 months later covering 11 different ERP modules. - Vertical Scalability
Our system allows you to scale up and down as you add and remove or reorganize organizational units, such as new sales offices.
On a recent greenfield implementation project, our system had no trouble scaling up from a single SAP functional area at the beginning of the project to 11 different SAP functional areas. Each of these SAP Functional Areas had complex Performance Metrics and related Key Performance Indicators the business needed to track via the SAP Business Intelligence System. - Horizontal Scalability-
Our system allows you to scale out to different business domains and locations, i.e., from manufacturing to finance.
On a recent greenfield project, our system had no trouble scaling out from a single office to include 5 offices 11 months later.
There was talk to include a total of 30 office locations.
Our system would have had no problem scaling up to handle this. Bring it on. - Easy System Maintenance:
It becomes extremely easy to maintain a production system because our naming tool gives you a well organized, easy to understand system that you can navigate around from one end of your system to any other point in 30 seconds or less.
Our Methodology is designed to be self-correcting and traceable, meaning that it will also pass ISO-9000 audits.
For example, if a new consultant coming on to your project comes aboard and develops something new that violates your SAP BW naming convention, our system will immediately show the error.
Because our system also allows you to trace from one end of your system to the other in about 30 seconds or less, troubleshooting is easier.
Trace from BEx Queries, Cubes, Tables, Data Sources, Process Chains and any other item in your data flow with ease. - High Order and Structure:
Our SAP BW Naming System brings high order and structure to what has traditionally been a highly disorganized project environment. - Easy Collection of SAP Transports:
We all are familiar with the disappointment of failed transports due to something being overlooked in the Transport Collection Process (T-Code SE09).
When development starts and you get that pesky little transport popup that no one is sure what to do with until well after development has started, it's best to have a transport naming strategy figured out before that first transport pop-up appears.
$TMP or Local may not be the best choice.
A SAP BW naming strategy extending not only to the objects and dataflows, but also Transports is an important (I can't over stress this point enough) consideration for Transports.
How many times have you had the work completed in the Development SandBox only to have half the work lost come time for transports requiring an extra month of re-work to get all the transports finally collected up and transported.
Avoid this unnecessary hit to your schedule and budget by setting up your SAP naming strategy for transports early on in the process.
Transport naming is built into our naming tool. - SAP Security Considerations (T-Code PFCG):
A SAP BW naming convention is also an important consideration for SAP Security Administrators.
It's easy to set up SAP Security on systems developed with a common SAP BW naming strategy.
Systems developed Ad-hoc without a SAP naming strategy in place are a maintenance headache for the security person.
When you want to restrict view access to sensitive financial data objects that all have no common naming strategy, the overhead for security grows exponentially, requires custom security solutions, and slows down everyone on development as each new object name has to first be "OKed" with the security team.
Our SAP BW naming strategy lends itself well to easy SAP Security setup and administration. - What the Naming Convention Tool Does Not Do:
The Naming Convention tool can not go through your system and change object names after you have already built them.
The tool simply runs on your desktop and not on your sap system nor is it connected to your SAP system.
It is simply a guiding tool that does the intellectual work for your developers based on sound engineering principles to help them do their work better realizing the benefits as stated above.
If you would like to have us take a look at your SAP BW system, we now offer a FREE Remotely Delivered 2 hour SAP BW Naming Convention review service. Just click the button below to get yours now.
We would like to hear from you on this subject so feel free to comment on my blog.
