Data Model

SAP Financial Services Data Management helps you to reduce redundancies by managing your enterprise data with a Single Source of Truth approach through a unified data model, which comprises a conceptual and a physical data model.

  • Data for different objects of the same class is stored in the same format even though it might come from different source systems. You need to understand only one unified data model, not the data model of every single source system.

  • Data for the same object is stored only once. This reduces redundancy, avoids possible sources of errors, and is much more cost-efficient.

  • Data can be used to implement various reports aligned with regulatory requirements on top of the data. This makes it easier to reconcile results from different reports because different reports use the same source data and the same data model for the business semantic.

The Data Model Seen From a Business Perspective

The data model represents financial services topics such as business partner, bank accounts, or reinsurance. Each financial services topic is represented by diagrams and entities, which are semantically related. The following are examples of which financial services topics can be represented in the data model for SAP Financial Services Data Management:

  • Business Partner
  • Bank Accounts
  • Lending Business
  • Syndicated Lending
  • Credit Risk
  • Securities Trading
  • Derivatives
  • Commodities
  • Subledger Accounting
  • Reinsurance
  • Primary Insurance
  • Support for European Regulatory Reporting
  • Trade Finance

An entity can be part of one financial services topic only. The characteristics of the entity are represented by attributes and their different values. For example, all the data relevant for the operational processing of accounts and deposits is part of the Bank Accounts topic. The following figure shows how this looks in the data model:

The Data Model Seen From a Technological Perspective

The unified data model is a standardized and business-driven data model for financial services data with full integration in the SAP HANA database technology, a modern, in-memory database and platform that is deployable on premise or in the cloud. Based on the SAP HANA platform, the data model uses a flexible data source-agnostic, in-memory data platform that allows you to analyze large volumes of data in real time. Using the database services of the SAP HANA platform, the data model stores and accesses data in-memory and column-based. The flexibility of the unified data model enables an open environment for individual extension.

Conceptual Data Model (CDM)

The conceptual data model (CDM) helps you to analyze the conceptual structure of an information system, to identify the principal entities to be represented, their attributes, and the relationships between them. A CDM is a more abstract data model. This means it provides the business semantics of the data model in the form of a graphical view of the conceptual structure. This helps you to validate the data design since you can easily identify the principal entities (such as Business Partner, Financial Instruments, Financial Contracts, or Business Events), their attributes, and the relationships between them. You can also view entity definitions here.

Physical Data Model (PDM)

The physical data model (PDM) helps you to analyze the tables, views, and other objects in a database. The PDM for SAP Financial Services Data Management is derived from the CDM and represents the data model in the database. It defines the table structure that is used in SAP HANA to store the data. The CDM model is based on relationships and the PDM is purely technical.

How to View the Unified Data Model

To view the data model, you can use the SAP PowerDesigner, a graphical enterprise architecture and design solution that supports standard methodologies and notations and provides automated code reverse engineering and generation through customizable templates. It has powerful reporting capabilities, is highly extensible, and offers a scalable enterprise repository solution with strong security and versioning capabilities to aid multi-user development. SAP Financial Services Data Management provides two model types, a conceptual data model and a derived physical data model.

There is no 1:1 mapping between CDM and PDM entities since the CDM uses inheritances that are not translated into a physical representation in the PDM, where inheritances and header item structures are denormalized. You can display the mapping between CDM and PDM tables in SAP PowerDesigner by choosing Start of the navigation pathTools Next navigation step Mapping EditorEnd of the navigation path in the PDM.

SAP PowerDesigner contains the unified data model for SAP Financial Services Data Management, which comprises all the entities that make up each of the financial services topics such as business partner, bank accounts, or reinsurance. For each artifact in the model, you can display the related financial services topic in the extended attributes in SAP PowerDesigner. Although you can use the graphical representation of the model in SAP Financial Services Data Management, the unified data model is complex because it must meet complex business demands.

Extensibility

You can extend the SAP Financial Services Data Management data model in SAP PowerDesigner to meet your business needs.

You can add:

  • Data fields to existing entities.
  • Entities and link them to existing entities in the delivered SAP Financial Services Data Management data model.
  • Relationships between entities.
  • Values to the code lists for tables shipped with the data model of SAP Financial Services Data Management.

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