Introducing a Data Flow Scenario for Transactional Data

Transactional data in SAP S/4HANA is distributed across many tables. For example, to collect the most important data relating to a sales order, you would need to access more than 20 database tables and then combine the records.

But instead of extracting data from the individual tables, we define views to collect and combine the data from the various tables so that during loading, SAP BW/4HANA can simply consume the view. The view is created in the SAP S/4HANA source system as an ABAP CDS View.

In our example scenario, the sales transactional data provided by the ABAP CDS View ZPEPMCDSVSO1 in SAP S/4HANA generates sales data from the columns of multiple tables:

Even though there are plenty of useful columns in this view, we are still missing some additional information that would improve the final report that the business user would generate. For example:

• description (name) of the product
• product category and gross weight of products shown
• tax rate percentage
• number of business partners that products are sold to

Perhaps, the business user would like to see the products displayed hierarchically within product groups to facilitate drill-down.

Here is an example of a report that includes the basic information from the view that has been complemented with additional information to produce an effective result:

This report contains key figures such as Gross Amount and Net Amount that relate to each characteristic InfoObject Product ID. However, the report not only displays Product IDs but also organizes the Product IDs using a hierarchy. Here we also see the product description, and additional attributes such as Product ABC Category and Gross Weight.

In our scenario, the master data (texts, attributes, hierarchies) that relate to the Product ID has already been loaded to SAP BW/4HANA.

However, the sales transactional data has not yet been loaded. To achieve this, a data flow has to be created, starting with an ABAP CDS View in SAP S/4HANA and ending with the BW Query. On top of the BW Query we will create a business report. The finished data flow is shown in the diagram below:

We will follow step-by-step the creation of this data flow in the next lessons.