BPC And Code - How Many Lines Of Code Will they Force Upon Us?

I am often reminded of a joke about how many people it takes to do this task or that.  My new joke is how many lines of ABAP code in the New BADI for Custom Logic does it take to do the same thing in the older Microsoft version of the product?


Do not get me wrong.  I have been on the Net Weaver stack for some time now.  I know how it works and what it really does.


What perplexes me is why such significant architectural features being pursued in the BPC space can be so obviously misaligned to the existing Microsoft customer base.


Particularly troublesome is the rising cost of migration from Microsoft to the Net Weaver environment.  If I was in charge of marketing and software sales here I would find someone and have a serious heart to heart about architecture and feature design.


Let's take a look at one real world example where someone somewhere has not been on that many customer engagements but sure knows how to write core software code, particularly classes in the BPC space to unlock cool and improved Net Weaver features.


Dear SAP, most customers use properties in dimensions and use those properties in calculations.   Where there is a clear 1 to 1 relationship between a member and some atomic data regarding that member, it is not an irrational choice to use properties in calculations.  Now I know it could be an account fact that I can reference, but that may not always be a practical reality.   I could give you a few examples but will spare you the details on that for now.


What I am referring to is two key outages in the new Net Weaver stack that continue to be a problem for most.  (not a problem for me but the solution is unrealistic relative to the right way to do things)


In BPC for Net Weaver when we want to RECord a new record, we used to be able to use a FACTOR in our statement and directly reference a dimension property with a simple statement like this - MATERIAL.UOP where UOP in this case refers to minimum production quantity.


Now I know someone somewhere will say a property cannot be assured to be a number.  What?   Think about where we source this from.  It is a number.  We know it is a number and we know it will work and yes we are adults.





Akshay Vellanki
Partner & Director EPM Practice
Techincept Consulting Inc.
www.techincept.com
310-956-1113
AkshayVellanki@gmail.com
www.techincept.com/sapbpctraining.html