Planning Area
Definition
A planning area contains two components: a data basis in which the plan data, including the master data, is provided and the settings in the planning environment that enable plan data to be edited either manually or automatically.
You can form multi-planning areas by combining several planning areas.
Structure
Planning areas are specified by their technical and descriptive names, their BW System, and the InfoCube that is to be used from that system. Once an InfoCube has been assigned to a planning area, it can no longer be assigned to other planning areas.
Integration
When creating a planning area you can branch straight to the Administrator Workbench. Here you can create a new InfoCube or edit an existing InfoCube to assign to the planning area.
The data that you store in the InfoCubes and access using planning areas normally originates from the applications in an operative SAP system. These applications have data extractors that supply the Business Information Warehouse with data.
If you are running BW-BPS in a distributed system landscape and create planning areas that access InfoCubes in different BW Systems, the settings that apply for all quantities and currencies are those basic settings (for example, units, decimal places) that you made in the system where BW-BPS is running. This applies particularly to exchange rates for currency translation. Recourse to the settings stored centrally in one system is necessary to maintain the consistency of the data.
See also: