BI Business Content x IS-U/CCS Implementation

For those who believe that Business Content is the solution for all reporting requirements, I’m sorry for breaking the news to them, but unfortunately their reporting solution into BI will become nothing but useless. Most of the time, when implementing IS-U/CCS, some people believe the reporting solutions became easy by just activating the Business Content. From my point of view, I personally consider BC only as the standard extractors, which are responsible for retrieving data from the source system (IS-U/CCS for example) into the BI system. All the BC objects from the BI side, according to SAP best practices, should be used only as references for your own objects for a certain implementation.

Master Data for Utilities issue: Most of the time, a SAP BI system implementation for Utilities has more than just one system, in this case, your SAP BI system must provide consolidated information from many source system, or IS-U/CCS systems if you like.
In Utilities, there are two major types of MD: Technical (Installation, Connection Object, Device, et) and Business (Business Partner, Contract, Contract Account, etc) master data. You SHOULD NOT (or MUST NOT!!) use the same infoobject to store information from different source system! For instance: you might have the installation with number ‘1’ for more than just one IS-U/CCS system, so you will face problem when consolidating information from all the utilities systems.

An easy way of modeling your MD would be making a copy of 0UCINSTALL to your own infoobject and then insert the 0SOURSYSTEM (source system) as compounding infobject, so it will be part of the key for the infoobject.

I though it would take a while until I start working in other BI implementation for IS-U/CCS again, but I cannot complain at all! I’m pretty happy working again on BW for Utilities, but once again I am implementing only the BC content! Why?! Budget my friend!