Using SAS Data Surveyor to connect SAP ERP ECC 6.0 system with SAS Visual Analytics

[chunkyneo]

After going through a lot of content (both offline and online) and doing deliberations we decided to go with SAS Data Surveyor to connect SAS Visual Analytics with an existing SAP ERP ECC 6.0 system to do reporting and analytics.

We have ordered for the following SAS products-

1. SAS Metadata Server
2. SAS Visual Analytics LASR Server Non-Distributed

3. SAS Visual Analytics

along with SAS Data Surveyor for SAP and this is for SAS 9.4

This was done with the understanding that the Metadata server would register the SAP Server using the SAP server details and then the Data Surveyor would expose the metadata of SAP Modules and then the ETL can happen.

Only recently i chanced upon the below link -

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bidsag/61236/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a003112411.htm

which although refers to SAS 9.2 but talks about SAS Management Console to register the SAP server and then move forward.

This is frustrating !

Can someones please guide whether the Metadata Server approach would work or getting a SAS Management Console is a must?

Please help !

Thanks

Chunky

[foobarbaz]

HI,

I have implemented SAS engine for R/3 in the past and it doesn't actually give you a 'Metadata" view out of the box in the sense of what you see via SE11, 16 etc. without some work on the SAS side.  Data Surveyor does in the sense that it will extract texts and sid info into a local SAS library and then use that info to create tables in SAS which shows the texts of columns etc.  Looking at the library datasets through the SAS workspace server will give you very raw view of your SAP system and in my experience confuses users as SAP hides this info under the covers.  I found I needed to do a few tricks to make the view more user friendly.

As far as I understand the R/3 access engine doesn't connect directly to Visual Analytics however HANA was given support from v 7.1. for direct import.  You can connect to SQL databases in Data Preparation however this will give you the "raw" view of the tables.  Using Data Surveyor via Management Console will allow you to extract the metadata and tables but they will be extracted from SAP and into SAS.  These can then be imported into VA as well.  On the plus side, SAS Management Console comes with SAS Foundation so you should have the application already.  You will just need to have your SAS Admin give you access to the plugin.  The below link has some additional info that I wrote on this site on an old work account.

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Data-Management/Connecting-to-SAP-BW/td-p/173337

Hope that helps.

[chunkyneo]

Thanks @foobarbaz.. So, in a nutshell we would need SAS Management Console to complete the integration of SAP ERP with SAS VA ? 

[foobarbaz · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You can load VA via SAS/ACCESS to R/3 however it will the raw database view of the data.  So for example Business Partner will show as something like '/BIC/0BPARTNER' and texts won't show in the table.  You will get the lookup values from the master data text tables.  E.G:  BP Type will show as 01 for Customer etc.  Extracting the data using Data Surveyor will give you more friendly table names and dimensions to show master data texts

Cameron

[chunkyneo]

Thanks Cameron!