Maps 

Purpose

Many BI characteristics, such as customer, sales region, and country, contain important geographical characteristics. The geographical information can be evaluated in a map together with business-relevant key figures.

Use maps to display business relationships and distributions. You can clearly display specific key figures as color shadings, pie charts, or bar charts for a country, region, or city.

You have the option of changing the view of a map by zooming in to display a detailed view or zooming out for an overall view. This allows you to easily prepare a sales analysis for a specific product that refers to a specific region or a country, for example. You can recognize the potential or dangers of a market all at a glance.

Integration

Maps help you with reporting geo-relevant data. By using the Map Web item, you determine a geographical display in the BEx Web Application Designer for your business-oriented data for the Web application.

Geo-relevant InfoObjects are stored and maintained in the Metadata Repository. The master data for geo InfoObjects has geo attributes. The assignment of geographical data to business data (mapping/geocoding) is carried out using an external tool: ArcView from ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute).

Features

You use maps to prepare and evaluate data of a geographical nature (characteristics such as customer, sales region, and country, for example). The geo-relevant data is displayed graphically on a map. Using enhanced navigation options (“geographical drilldown”), regional information can be evaluated more easily at different levels of detail. A map shows the spatial proximity of places and regions, allowing geographical connections to be more clearly represented.

Process Flow

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       1.      In the InfoObject maintenance, flag the geo-relevant characteristics (country, for example) that you want to use as geo characteristics.

       2.      Load the corresponding shapefiles into the BI system. Maintain the assignment of shapefile and master data (mapping between geo characteristic and shapefile). See SAPBWKEY Maintenance for Static Geo Characteristics.

If you want to use the maps to report on geo characteristics that show information in point form (customer, plant, sales office, for example) you have to geocode these characteristics. See Geocoding.

       3.      In the BEx Web Application Designer, include a Map Web item in your Web template, and assign a data provider to this Web item. Use parameters to determine the display of the map and business-oriented data.

Finally, execute the Web template in the Web. You can navigate in the map to further analyze the geo-relevant data.

See also:

Additional Cartographical Information

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