Insights

Performing with SAP Spend Performance Management

12 Dec 2011 Business Intelligence (BI), Supply Chain, Consumer Business

Having recently finished work on a SAP Spend Performance Management implementation I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on how to get the best performance from the tool. Trust me, it isn't always straightforward...

The Vicious Circle

So we all know how important it is to lower the cost of our Supply Chain, but how can we kick-start the process?

Monitoring and analysing Supply Chain costs is an iterative process and requires high visibility of current processes and spend in order to identify issues and commence corrective action.

Without visibility your Supply Chain is an unknown entity - and that's where SAP SPM comes in.

So Tell Me Something New

Ok, I'll get to the point.

SAP SPM has been criticised by users, clients and Consultants alike for its often slow performance. Popular grievances include:

• Slow loading of large reports in the portal and frequent timeouts
• When drilling down to the detail level reports certain filtered criterion can be lost, adding confusion and more timeouts to the mix

These performance issues can be particularly frustrating as the SAP SPM tool shows so much potential. SAP SPM is portal-based and looks fantastic; there are no grey boxes here. It is really user-friendly and intuitive to use so you can start making useful analysis' from the word 'go'. SAP SPM also allows the user to customise their preferences with dashboards, home-pages and briefing books, not to mention the capability to create their own reports or customise existing ones.

In essence, users wants to like SAP SPM but when reality hits home there can sometimes be holes between their expectations and the slightly restrictive functionality SAP SPM delivers. 

Method to the Madness

 Now let me refer back to my earlier diagram of. Why are companies rolling out SAP SPM?

To increase visibility in order to reduce costs and take their Supply Chain out of the dark. 

Warning!

SAP SPM is NOT a financial reporting tool!

Educate the User

So SAP SPM does deliver after all. SPM is designed to show where savings can be made, the pre-configured reports work at a high level to show trends, not transactions. So the features that really allow the user to dissect the data in a useful way need conveying to the user. Particular emphasis should be placed on the following:

• Slice and Dice functionality means the user can dissect spend by category, type, region and supplier etc to understand where and why they accrue their costs.
• Target your reports by using date restrictions to view meaningful data that won't be hit by the curse of the timeout!
• Drill down to view transaction-level data only where relevant. You do not need to see thousands of lines of data to see a trend. SPM uses an aggregated view to do the hard work for you.

The Techy Bit

Of course there are still some things you can do to improve performance so here are some hints and tips to get you started.

Remove unnecessary navigational attributes: Navigational attributes hit the performance of SPM hard, so if the business does not need an attribute, remove it.

Compress the cubes: This speeds up OLAP processing and reduces query run-time.

Cache...your reports. When a user first runs a report the data is cached to prevent time-consuming calls to the BW database. So when you log-in be patient and do not despair! The first time a report is run will be the slowest; calculations are calculated at the point of execution of the first report and persist in the database for later use.

Flash: The current version of SPM runs on Flash. Make sure you're running all the latest and greatest versions to optimise performance.

This is by no-means an exhaustive list and I'd love to hear your experiences with performance and SAP Spend Performance Management.

The Aim of the Game

SAP Spend Performance Management does exactly what it says on the tin. It is clever and works primarily at an aggregated level to help the user gain real insight into trends and areas of concern. Transactional level data is available to give confidence in figures and explain anomalies but if you're looking for mass downloads of data then SPM is not for you! You can run those kinds of reports directly from your ERP system, alternatively a less sophisticated BEx query or WEBI report should do the trick.

Correct adoption of SAP SPM is the key to ensuring your users get the full performance and not just a dress-rehearsal.