Good Day!
We've just implemented HANA Live to support a set a corporate KPI's. The project has gone well, and we're on track for the production go live in May.
As awareness of HANA starts to increase in the organization, discussions are now underway about additional projects. One idea which has been suggested is a consolidated view of what are called "Strategic Commodities". These are high value commodities with long lead times. We run 4 separate SAP ECC systems, which came into the corporation through acquisition. There was no global template, each SAP system was configured independently.
To track the strategic commodities (they number about 20 identifiable materials) at month end, a corporate financial analyst must log into each of the separate SAP systems, determine the on-hand quantities and utilization for the month, merging all the data into a spreadsheet.
One suggestion for utilizing HANA Live, would be to link to all 4 SAP systems, and using SLT pull the relevant inventory tables into HANA and then to possibly use out of the box VDM's to consume the consolidated data.
The commodities are all numbered differently in each source system. During the ETL process we'd most likely assign a master inventory number to the inbound data.
We're trying to figure out a very high level project plan. Looking for any insights to problems we may encounter, and have to resolve along the way. Obviously as discussed, we need to true up the master data to a level of consistency.
Our experience with SLT has generally been a good one. We had some initial teething pains, where we followed the implementation guide religiously, had far to many jobs running, and almost brought the ECC source system to its knees. It's running very well right now. We're replicating close to 500 tables, with no issues.
One of the bigger disappointments, has been the VDMs. There are 5 MM-IM (Inventory Management) queries, and they don't appear to be particularly useful for reporting out:
- ending inventory
- material delivered
- material consumed
We're trying to figure out if we toss the VDMs and start from scratch, or think about enhancing the existing VDMs.
Any intel would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.