Connection to SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) (SAP Library

Connection to SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW)

Use

The SAP Business Information Warehouse allows you to analyze and evaluate data from operative R/3 applications, from any other business applications and from external data sources such as databases, online services and the Internet. You use queries to analyze the data. Queries target specific views on the data according to the individual issues in question. Every authorized person can use these queries to access both historical and current data in any desired summarized or detailed form.

The connection of VMS to SAP Business Information Warehouse allows you to evaluate vehicle data according to different business issues and in any depth you wish.

You can find further information in the standard documentation for the SAP Business Information Warehouse.

Features

Three VMS extractors are available on the side of the DI system. You can use these extractors independently of one another to extract the following data to the appropriate DataSources and this make it available to the BW system for evaluation and analysis purposes:

The most important vehicle attributes (all vehicle numbers, vehicle model, supplier, customer, action control, primary and secondary stati, availability status, gross list price, planned production date, planned delivery date etc.) (extractor VELO26_VLC_BW_GA)
The configuration characteristics of the vehicles, for example, color, engine, special features etc. (extractor VELO26_VLC_BW_GC) and the texts for the appropriate values (extractor VELO26_VLC_BW_GCT)

You can map the special VMS configuration characteristics to BW characteristics. A class with characteristics is assigned to each vehicle model in VMS; each characteristic has a specific number of possible characteristic values (see also: Creating Vehicle Configurations). So that you can compare the characteristics of vehicles, it is helpful to map these specific characteristics dependent on vehicle model to more general vehicle-independent characteristics (example: the vehicle-dependent VMS characteristics Exterior color_SAPCar and Exterior color_SAPRover can be mapped to the BW characteristic Exterior color). This BW characteristic then contains all possible characteristic values.

In this way, queries for BW characteristics are possible across all vehicle models (example: how many red vehicles have I sold in the last two months?) A further advantage of mapping is that you can control which and how many characteristics should be relevant to BW. As a result, BW reporting is more efficient.

Queries can relate to vehicle data and configuration characteristics and can, for example, answer the following question: how many 90 horsepower vehicles of vehicle model SAPCar have I, as importer, sold to dealer Smith within a specific period of time?

Activities

Map VMS configuration characteristics to BW characteristics (transaction VELOBWC Assign Class Characteristics to BW Characteristics).

Create your own queries in BW.

Example

Here are some possible questions you could ask when you create new VMS queries:

How many vehicles with which configuration characteristics have I sold to dealer Smith? Such a question provides valuable data for a new sales forecast.
Which dealers have I sold the most vehicles to?
From which vehicle model have I sold the most vehicles?
How popular is air-conditioning, heating under the seats etc.?