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Increased use of the Internet as well as smartphones is also increasingly changing consumer behavior. With increasing digitization of channels and touchpoints, customers today are informed better than ever and thus harder to acquire. To register, evaluate and understand consumer behavior digitally too, persons in charge of marketing must today form targeted segments and create an accordingly coordinated strategy for potential customer touchpoints, in order to address customers on the right channel at the right time with the right offer, while nonetheless refraining from inundating them with e-mails or push-messages.

Particularly in the environment of HCM and Infotype tables, full loads are often used for supplying SAP BW because clear detection of changes (CRUD - create, read, update and delete) in the source system is not possible. For example, deadlines (Infotype 0019) are not furnished with a full validity, so that a deletion does not lead to creation of a new data record which overwrites this period. In the source system, SLT/RS (SAP landscape transformation/replication server) with its trigger-based detection of changes at the database level could be used to monitor each individual data modification. Due to the relatively small amounts of data, however, use is not absolutely necessary, and change-tracking at this point would be "overkill". It should be noted that SLT/RS is sometimes included in current SAP BW license packages, and can therefore often be used, but requires an installation on the source system.

In the first part of this blog, the aim was to serialize a CSV file as simply as possible to Avro, and store the result in Kafka, the schema being registered in the related registry.

An important building block for a planning system comprises dealing with intercompany (IC) issues. IC comes into play whenever different economic entities of a group of enterprises exchange goods or services with each other. The resulting expenditures and earnings, as well as receivables and payables must be transparent and definable with respect to each other. Because planning is performed by numerous participants, IC coordination and subsequent IC elimination are not trivial.

Even in modern environments, CSV is still a frequently encountered exchange format because many existing systems cannot deal with more modern alternatives. However, other formats are better suited to further processing in a big-data environment. This applies, in particular, to Avro in conjunction with Kafka. Avro offers a space-saving data format with many features, in which the data schema is also transferred. To improve handling, the schema can also be registered in a related repository.

Interactions with customers in the field of energy supply are rare – a single contact a year is not uncommon. Best possible contact management is correspondingly important. This project focuses on the communication channel comprising the inbound call center.

The world of medium-sized companies is being stirred at present by one topic, in particular: Industry 4.0. Pressure here is growing enormously because the digitization bus must not be missed if successful interaction on the market is to remain possible in the long term. What most companies do not know, however: Not all internal procedures must be cast overboard in order to remain abreast of the issues of big data and Industry 4.0. It is much more important make use of one's own employees' curiosity and convey the data culture to all departments. This blog post shows how to master the change to digitization step by step.

The claim that "Python is not a typed language" now raises my pulse rate just like "Python is simply a scripting language" which was common many years ago.

One just needs to open a Python console and input 1+"1". The result is not 2 as in PHP, for example, but a TypeError. Python is by all means strongly typed, and also differentiates between mutable and immutable types. Because code in Python is not compiled until run time, the above-mentioned addition error makes itself noticed not during programming, but only during execution.

When a BW system uses an SAP HANA database, it is possible to use what are called „Mixed Scenarios“. In these scenarios you can use SAP HANA tools to combine data modeled in both the BW system and in SAP HANA.

In Longview, after activating the cell input control function, a reference object can be used to block or allow manual inputs into cells as well as the copy & paste function.

With the migration to SAP BW/4 HANA or activation of the BW/4 HANA mode described here, it is no longer possible to use legacy objects. This includes the popular MultiProvider, used to combine different InfoProviders and to create an abstraction layer for a BW query. It can link InfoProvider objects, even if these are only available as navigation attributes in one of the providers and not directly in the InfoProvider fact table. In this example, the country is allocated once directly and once as a customer navigation attribute.

SAP BW/4 HANA ist nun seit genau einem Jahr für Kunden verfügbar. Grund, einmal zurückzublicken und einen Vergleich mit SAP BW on HANA 7.5 anzustreben. Zudem werde ich von vielen Kunden gefragt, was genau der Unterschied zwischen SAP BW/4 HANA und SAP BW on HANA ist. Deshalb möchte ich dies einmal darstellen.