Pyramid Analytics

SAP BW time-dependent hierarchies - Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid Analytics enhances SAP BW and HANA integration by supporting time-dependent hierarchies through a user-friendly interface that enables live, parameter-driven self-service analytics on slowly changing data—such as customer regions at specific historical dates—without extracting data, addressing the common limitation of third-party tools and exemplified by a business case where a sales manager views historical gross profit by customer region as of a past date.

In previous SAP-focused blogs, Pyramid’s capability for supporting SAP parameters and variables was discussed. Pyramid supports multiple parameter settings for BW and HANA with a user-friendly point-and-click interface, maintaining deep analytical functionality without extracting data from BW or HANA.

An extension of this capability is support for time-dependent hierarchies.

The challenge

A primary function of a data warehouse is the creation and maintenance of slowly changing data. For example, a customer may belong to different addresses over time. If a user wants to review data by customer region at a specific date, time-dependent hierarchies allow them to recreate snapshots of regional data according to the status of customer information stored at that date and time.

SAP BW offers powerful capabilities to handle slowly changing data through time-dependent hierarchies. The challenge is finding an analytics tool that exposes this functionality and allows the user to change the date as needed.

The problem

Most third-party tools have limited or no support for time-dependent hierarchies. Even if they support the mechanism, their weak analytic functionality working directly on SAP BW often encourages users to extract SAP data and ingest it into external engines, losing the live connection to SAP BW and the ability to use the time-dependency mechanism.

The Pyramid approach

Pyramid enables direct querying of SAP data with significant functional and analytic depth, bringing back results directly from either BW or HANA without requiring extraction and reloading into a proprietary database. This allows end-users to get real self-service analytics with parameters and time-dependent hierarchies working directly on live SAP BW.

Business case

Sharon, Sales Manager for ABC International Bank, wants to view gross profit per annum by customer region. The report is run on April 15, 2020, but must reflect the customer region as of December 31, 2019. Several large customers have moved from New Jersey to California after December 31, 2019. The report must include all transactions for customers who belonged to each state at that time, even if they have changed addresses since then.

The SAP BW system at ABC International Bank stores the historical snapshot of the customer segment status. Pyramid, using SAP BW’s time-dependent hierarchies, can display the data Sharon requires according to any snapshot in time by performing a direct query on the SAP BW data warehouse.

Gross profit by customer region as of April 15, 2020

This report displays the gross profit per customer region as of April 15, 2020. The data is displayed according to the customer regions as per their status on that date.

  • California: $13,761,788
  • New Jersey: $12,001,560

Gross profit by customer region as of December 31, 2019

Sharon reruns the report, selecting the predefined parameters to change the date to December 31, 2019. The accurate data as per the snapshot on December 31 is now reflected:

  • California: $16,402,132
  • New Jersey: $9,441,227

Summary

SAP BW offers powerful capabilities to handle slowly changing data through time-dependent hierarchies. Many systems lose the ability to use this function because they extract the data out of SAP BW to deliver self-service functionality. Pyramid, on the other hand, capitalizes on SAP BW’s time-dependent capabilities by using it directly while still offering self-service, full-function analytics—delivering the best of both worlds.

In the next blog, additional features unique to SAP BW that are supported by Pyramid will be discussed, including support for ragged hierarchies, numerical formats, multiple currencies, and captions.

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