Running totals made easy for SAP HANA and BW - Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid is an official member of the SAP® PartnerEdge® open ecosystem and is fully certified by SAP on SAP BW/4HANA, SAP HANA, and SAP Netweaver. The Pyramid Platform is also available on the SAP Store.

In previous blogs, a common goal for many SAP users was highlighted: finding a self-service BI tool that works directly on SAP. Pyramid is a tool that seamlessly connects with and runs direct queries on SAP BW and HANA. This blog demonstrates how Pyramid extends those capabilities by building and running calculations directly on these two data sources.

Code-free calculations

Modern self-service BI tools differentiate themselves from legacy counterparts through “point and click” and “drag and drop” functionality, shielding users from needing deeper technical expertise, such as writing code.

Third-party tools that claim to offer mature self-service capabilities often cannot fully work directly on SAP BW and HANA. They require users to extract, reload, and duplicate the data, introducing data governance and security challenges.

The challenge is to find a real self-service analytics platform with sufficient functional depth that works directly on SAP BW and HANA. Finding a platform that can build calculation logic beyond basic mathematics is even more difficult.

Business case

Consider this business problem: a user is analyzing monthly sales data and wants to track when important milestones have been reached. To do this, she wants to see running totals of sales in her SAP HANA view, indicating when a $1M milestone was achieved. She might also want to track this at different levels of granularity, such as by quarter, month, or week.

With Pyramid, a user can use a direct query on SAP HANA to retrieve results in a simple matrix grid in three clicks, without extracting the data into another database.

While this information provides sales data by month and year in an easy-to-follow grid, the user cannot see when the $1M (or $2M and $3M) milestone was achieved. She needs the table to display running or cumulative totals to achieve that outcome.

Running totals in a single click

Creating running totals in many BI applications is often part of an ad-hoc reporting exercise that requires complex coding and depends on developers and the software development lifecycle.

In Pyramid, with a single right click on any sales metric, a user can display dynamic “Cumulative Totals”—no code or data extractions required—on top of any query processed on SAP BW or HANA. The task doesn’t require redesigning the InfoCube or writing technical BEx queries.

When you swap out months or any other hierarchy—or add additional hierarchies—the running total is automatically recalculated. No extra code or steps are required. Now the user can easily see the key month targets.

How do other tools compare?

On less sophisticated platforms, each calculation requires the user to write code specific to the combination of dimensions and measures they want to view. This is usually beyond the capabilities of most consumers, and even some proficient end-users will need help from a developer. This doesn’t even address the challenge of connecting to SAP BW or HANA to get the data in the first place. For many BI tools, this inefficiency (across specifications, documentation, development, testing, etc.) is common.

In the example, the developer would need to create three different variables for company, salesman, and branch, each with three different time options for quarter, month, and week. That’s nine separate variables, each requiring separate code.

A sample of DAX code required to calculate running totals in Power BI would need to be copied and adjusted nine times.

At this point, business users may spend a large amount of time creating all the variables and code required for this solution or decide it is not worth the effort. The most common alternative is Excel. When users resort to Excel, it defeats the purpose of having a centralized enterprise analytics and reporting strategy, leading to data silos.

Conclusion: With Pyramid, calculate without code

With Pyramid, users can create advanced calculations and logic that work directly on SAP BW and HANA. The logic, driven by a self-service paradigm, covers anything from basic calculations to sophisticated logical expressions.

To view Pyramid’s code-free solutions for other common business problems on any data source, including SAP BW and SAP HANA, see previous blogs:

• ​Pyramid’s powerful, simple, and code-free tool to uncover 80/20 insights
• ​Code-free calculations for commonly used metrics

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SAP and Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid solves this problem with a complete solution that offers real self-service working directly on SAP BW and HANA. By delivering best-in-class functionality and performance on SAP BW without extracting or duplicating data, Pyramid preserves the full analytic power of the SAP engines, as well as the inherent security and governance.

Explore the Pyramid + SAP Blog Series to learn how Pyramid supports customers on SAP. Each post contains specific examples to illustrate key functionality:

1. 1.Real self-service BI for SAP
2. 2.Self-service BI directly on SAP BW
3. 3.Collaborative analytics for SAP BW and HANA
4. 4.Time intelligence for SAP BW and HANA
5. 5.Running Totals Made Easy for SAP HANA and BW
6. 6.Dashboards and report bursting directly off SAP BW and HANA
7. 7.Realizing the power of parameters in SAP BW and HANA
8. 8.SAP BW Time-Dependent Hierarchies
9. 9.Ragged Hierarchies and Data Formats in SAP BW
10. 10.Building Calculations directly on SAP BW and HANA
11. 11.Building data models into SAP HANA