How to change the characteristics of an SAP InfoCube

How to change the characteristics of an SAP InfoCube

I have a requirement to change the values of a characteristic in an SAP InfoCube (i.e., source/product/customer/valid week).

The above data is the format we feed to the InfoCube, but our client wants to change the values in the source column. If anyone calls and says we cannot source the product from this for this valid week, the client needs the ability in the InfoCube to change the source value.

I know this is not standard with SAP InfoCubes, but do you know of any roundabouts to achieve this? Can we use virtual InfoCubes to manipulate the data in the cube and save back to the cube?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    When you register, you will start receiving targeted emails from my award-winning team of editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics and biggest challenges faced by SAP professionals today.

    Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchSAP.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchSAP.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

This requirement looks more like an online transaction processing (OLTP) application requirement which cannot be done easily in SAP BW. Since SAP BW is a data warehousing system, changes to transaction data need to be generated from the source system. This is the best way of designing and using SAP BW applications. You may try to see if the source can be made a time dependent master data of product to get this accomplished. If not, providing an application in the source system and loading data from this source is the best solution.

This was first published in March 2010