Suppose you work for a company that sells products to customers. This company wants to report sales data by product and customer. The products should be listed with descriptions in different languages and grouped by product category. Moreover, address information (street, zip code, city and country) for the customers is needed. All this information is available in sources, such as SAP S/4HANA. For each of these topics, there is a dedicated source table. In your source systems, the data objects and structures are not aligned across different branches.
As the sources are SAP systems, data is provided via the operational data provisioning (ODP) framework. You want to implement a reference check for products and customer when loading the transactional data. Therefore, you have decided to integrate master data and sales data already in SAP BW bridge.
In this unit, you will learn how to create SAP BW bridge objects with standardized data formats and related metadata, facilitating smoother data exchange.
The first step is to create InfoObjects, Remember that an InfoObject is a centrally defined object that represents a specific business entity. To store master data, hierarchies and texts for a specific business entity in SAP BW bridge, you need to create an InfoObject of type Characteristic. For values, you create an InfoObject of type key figure. Different InfoObjects will later be integrated in objects for transactional data - especially DataStore objects (advanced) called in short ADSO and CompositeProviders.
Here, we focus on the product master data first. Suppose you want to include an attribute for the product category in the product definition, then you need two InfoObjects: Product category and Product. You have basically the following two options to define an InfoObject:
- Install Business Content: Activate objects that are already defined and delivered (mainly by SAP)
- Manually create an InfoObject (as a reference, as a copy, or from scratch).
Both options are presented in videos. First, launch a video to see how the Product category is installed as Business Content.
Now, launch a video to see how an InfoObject for Product is defined manually from scratch.
Sometimes, it is easier because you can copy existing InfoObjects. Launch another video to see how you create an InfoObject using an existing one as a template object.
Now, you learned how to create InfoObjects.