Cubis in Walldorf – BW4HANA Partner Testing

Yesterday, we headed off for a 5 hour drive from Antwerp to Walldorf (Germany) to participate in a BW4HANA Partner testing workshop. Walldorf probably doesn’t say much for the average person, but what Rome is for a Christian or Tomorrowland for a dance-fan, Walldorf is for the SAP community. Just to say that we started the trip with high hopes both on the location as on the content of the workshop. So after a good Weissbier, we called it a night.

The first day of the BW4HANA Partner testing started very interesting. After stressing the fact that we all had signed a non-disclosure agreement (yes, I’ll try to be very diplomatic in this post and not disclose any detailed functionalities), we got the task to stand in a line starting with the person who lives the closest to Walldorf and ending with the person who lives the furthest, before doing a quick personal introduction. I must say, it’s an original way of doing the introduction round because the consequence of this little exercise was of course that all Belgians were standing next to each other, it’s a small world.

During the first presentations, it became even more clear that SAP BI is indeed a very small world. The introduction was held by Oliver Schilling, the person in charge of distributing the SAP extensions. Since we released our own extension with Cubis, we have been in contact with him. The second presentation of the BW4HANA roadmap was held by Ulrich Christ. For those of you following some BW on HANA courses on openSAP, that’s him!

After lunch, we finally got to do your first testing in the system. Preceded by the usual system connection and system version issues, even at SAP they are not always a 100% prepared, we tested the first dataflows in the modern UI. Although there is always room for improvement, the dataflows have improved a lot with the new modeling objects in Eclipse.

The last topic for the day is one that is of interest to many companies. If your company is thinking about moving to BW4HANA in the (near) future, there is only one way; convert all object to the new (simplified) HANA objects. These objects (aDSO, composite providers, etc.) have already been introduced in previous versions of BW, but always in addition to the old ones. With BW4HANA, this will not be the case anymore and SAP is forcing to simplify. As a consequence, a conversion tool is inevitable. The current tool in place is powerful, don’t get me wrong, but there will always be manual work to do and decisions to be made so don’t expect magic.

First day started well, tomorrow is another day. If you are also interested in BW4HANA, we have a hands-on session in September for which there are only a few more places left!