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The initial step is to ensure that the various BI InfoSources are in place along with the queries that you ultimately select for use with the general BI interface. These are either current or new InfoSources required to support the predesigned incentive plans you implement in ICM.

Caution Caution

You can use as many queries as necessary to support your incentive scenarios. You must follow the guidelines listed here for each query that you plan to use to drive your ICM application.

End of the caution.

When you select queries, be aware of the following restrictions:

  • Performance (SAP BI, SAP CRM, and ERP ICM)

  • Restrictions of the API used to execute the queries

  • The ODBO interface

  • The technical difficulty in implementing the solution in this version of the interface

When developing your design to support the BI interface to CRM ICM, the interface has the following features:

  • Support for characteristics in the header and/or rows of the query, but support for KPIs only in the columns of the query.

  • No support for hierarchies.

  • No support for compound objects (country and region).

  • Volume limit of 50,000 records with 10 KPI

  • No support for queries that use the operators CT, RT, and GT, as well as %CT, %RT, and %GT in calculated key figures.

  • No support for queries that use replacement path variables while the reference query uses variables that are open for input.

  • Support for user exit variables.

  • Characteristics in queries to be defined as upper case only.

The ODBO interface does not support the following:

  • Filter and variable values that contain special characters, accents, or characters in lower case.

  • More than 19 characteristics in a query.

Additionally:

  • Default values of variables cannot be changed when the query is executed. If a default value is defined for a variable, the ODBO interface always applies this value, even if it had been explicitly deleted manually in the variable dialog box. We recommend that you do not use default values.

  • When the query results are written to tables, the characteristics of a query are used as key fields in the generated table. Due to the restrictions imposed by the Data Dictionary, the combined width of all key fields must not exceed 255 bytes.

  • A query cannot be changed and reused. To change a query, you must copy it under a new name and then change it, because BI does not support multiple versions of the same query.