Data Warehouse and Enterprise application integration (II.)

Data
Three CIF Case-sap BW

The main feature is that ERP vendors provide the entire architecture, which saves a lot of design work, and reduces the cost of design and development, encapsulation of the business in BW, reducing the difficulty of long-term maintenance. ERP data resources are very rich and valuable, should be an important source of data warehousing, SAP is the BW is the Data warehouse into the ERP application.

1. SAP BW Overview

A. History of SAP bw

The following is a brief version history of SAP BW

· BW 1.2b– introduces InfoCubes and Business Content

· BW 2.0b-Introduction of ODS

O mySAP.com Interface

· BW 2.1c– Analysis Component

· BW 3.0– is enhanced from ODS to data warehouse with the establishment of analytical applications.

From the brief development history of SAP BW, the process of data Warehouse establishment is gradual and perfect, and it is getting closer to the CIF architecture.





SAP BW and Business Framework





B. Basic structure

SAP BW Products It provides a unified data platform for data provisioning from R/3,CRM, Business-to-business, APO (Advanced scheduling), together with km (knowledge management) to form the essentials of Business intelligence. From the basic design idea, it is a realization of CIF. SAP BW is also available for users to access from the Web, while BW enables enterprise users to access from portal.







2. SAP BW's Source System

Source Systems is the SAP BW data provider and is a referenced system.



SAP bw's Source System has four kinds:

mySAP.com components, SAP BW fully integrated with the mySAP.com world, as a central data Warehouse tool, predefined extraction structures and programs (also data sources) are transferred by SAP, which enables the data source to be loaded directly into SAP BW by the mySAP.com component.

Non-SAP system, one of the great benefits of SAP BW is that it has an open architecture to deal with external OLTP and other legacy systems.

Data provoider: From different systems, SAP BW provides an interface to an existing external system.

Database: A database of external systems.



3. Application implementation of SAP bw.

A. Info Source, Info object, info Provider Info Object



SAP BW System Cut Map

As shown in the figure, source system will provide data for info source, the data information for info source is expanded in a digital structure, and a financial content is opened in our application. The info Object is the smallest unit of data in SAP BW and gets the data from the info source.





Info provider is the container for info object, all OLAP applications are obtained by info provide. In which data can be organized again, dimension modeling for OLAP queries.

B. The ETL of SAP BW.

Sap will also be ETL as part of BW, the following is the data extraction flowchart, the most original data can be from the file, can also come from my Sap R3 system, in the InfoSource has a transfer structure of replication, and then through some rules (sometimes very complex) to go to communication Structure, the Cube,info object and other target data can be reached by some rules.



Data Extraction Flowchart

We can also define rules to extract data.



Defining Transport Rules

Although SAP BW is not complete enough, such as ETL is not strong enough, support for external systems is still limited, but its architecture is increasingly close to the framework proposed by CIF, I believe that it will continue to progress in the future, so that the potential of DW can be fully played.

But few architecture providers consider CIF as an enterprise IT requirement, which is a serious crisis for companies to maintain their advantage in the e-business era.



Four Data Warehouse and enterprise application integration.

The need to transform and integrate your decision support environment is growing exponentially. This century has been recognized as the "Information age", information will become the most important strategic enterprise resources. Companies must use this strategic resource as a way to change the management model, rethink the way they work, and develop internal business processes and ways of working with suppliers, partners and customers.

All over the world have appeared mis, MRP, Mrpⅱ, SCM, ERP, CRM and other systems, in order to solve the information management problems in different periods played an important role, and how to deal with the 21st century more complex information management problems, such as an enterprise within the different departments of information integration, information sharing System integration in various phases of the enterprise. The seamless integration of these disparate sources of information is obviously more difficult. As a result, a new information management system was needed in 21st century.

1. Information integration and sharing within the enterprise.



The traditional enterprise application

As shown in the picture, the traditional application is independent development, no or very little consideration of its relevance, in a sense they also constitute an "enterprise information factory", but they are independent of each other, do not realize information sharing. This leads to the incompleteness and inconsistency of the data and to the impact of the enterprise's anti-show.



Application of internal contacts and sharing of information

In fact, the business is interrelated, such as a customer visited the Web page first, and then use the order system to order goods, orders through the sales system, while the financial system started, the inventory system needs to confirm the order information, and then arrange delivery and distribution matters. After the transaction is completed, the financial system will conduct the accounting processing. In this process, the Enterprise information entity has the customer, the product, and the transaction, if the enterprise needs the fast corresponding customer and the market need, needs to put them together to consider. If we build interfaces between these applications 22, the cost of development and maintenance will be very high. But if we design the application to consider those cross core entities, on the one hand can achieve information consistency, on the other hand can get design reuse.

2. Information integration and sharing among enterprises.

The second level of information integration is the information integration between enterprises, which is based on the information integration within the enterprise.

Entity information sharing between enterprises and partners is shown in the figure. In order to meet the requirement of reflecting in the shortest time, it is necessary to establish a framework that can support the sharing of core entities among partners, and achieve high accuracy.





3. Integration of Data Warehouse and enterprise application.

CIF is made up of many existing internal interconnected systems of data information, and each of these components must be based on a consistent framework to make the CIF work properly. In the fields of CRM, e-commerce and ERP, the process is based on data collection. Data can be entered into the enterprise system through a variety of contact points. The data collection point in the original operating system becomes the customer data gateway that enters the enterprise. If the defective data enters the contact point, it can be transmitted to all shared operating systems, including decision support systems.



The Enterprise Information Factory (CIF) structure can be used to plan the establishment and maintenance of a successful enterprise data base (Figure 1). As business processes evolve to the need to support new, dynamic Business Intelligence (BI) and customer Relationship Management (CRM), functionality becomes more volatile and difficult to understand and complicate. Fundamentally, this consolidation and expansion will reach deep into the thorough innovation of management systems and business processes.

When developing enterprise application, we should take into account the data integration and the effective use of data in the future to avoid the information island. The trend of modern enterprise information development will be information integration, business intelligence and rules system, enterprises in the changing environment, should make full use of the available resources-data, many successful ERP systems, such as SAP BW and PeopleSoft EPM. Although the technology used in SAP is not the most advanced, the R3 system takes into account the system integrity of the application and integration of information integration, and takes note of the great potential of the data warehouse as its product design, making it an opportunity in the market.



Five Summary.



In the development of enterprise applications, should first from the system and the overall perspective, taking into account information integration and sharing, good long-term and overall plan, there is an old story, can explain the argument of this law. Three blind men met an elephant and everyone screamed loudly. The first man grabbed an elephant's ear and said, "It's a big, rough thing, wide and broad, like a rug." The second man held the elephant's nose and said, "What I feel is the truth, it's a straight and hollow pipe." The third blind man held an elephant's front leg and said, "It's strong and solid, like a pillar." "These three blind men have similarities with the heads of many companies that manufacture, marketing and research." Every supervisor clearly sees the company's problems, but no one sees how their department's policies interact with those of other departments. By the way these people think, they will never know the full picture of an elephant.

Enterprise data is an elephant, and CIF It stores information about producers and consumers in a systematic, reliable, accurate, unified, and timely manner, allowing us to see the overall picture of corporate data.

References:





Master SAP BW.

Introduction to Systematic thinking (Weinberg)

SAP BW case Study.

Building Data Warehouse-inmon

Data warehouse-using the

ERP & CIF (Inmon)

CRM & CIF (Inmon)
The Corporate information Factory and Enterprise infrastructure (Inmon)