How to implement complex analysis authorizations in simple way

Question

Hi All,
I need to create some analysis authorizations with long list of single values for a characteristics. For example, we have multiple set up of company codes (APAC, EAME, AMERICAS, etc) and each set contains 150 - 200 company codes in it. Now we have multiple combinations of company code set and geographies. In short, we will have multiple analysis authorizations and each will have one or two set of company codes and some geographies.
I can create the analysis authorizations for the first time, by putting individual values in the respective characteristics. That would be a big task but can be done. But the problem is about ongoing maintenance. In future, if a new company code is added to lets say APAC companies, then we will have to update all analysis authorizations which contains APAC company code and that would be huge number of AAs due to the complexity of business architecture.
Could anyone please suggest if it is possbile (and how) to do below or similar, or have any other better approach (using BW7.4)
- We would create a group (or set) of company codes. Lets say would create a group APAC_Comp_Code and add all APAC related company codes in it. This would be repeated for all set of compant codes.
- While creating analysis authorizatons, I would not assign any individual company code value in characteristic, instead put APA_Comp_Code inside the characteristic 0COMP_CODE.
- If I need to put multiple set of company codes inside 0COMP_CODE, I will just put the corresponding group name, not the invidual values.
The benefit would be that in future if I need to add a new company code to APAC, I would just have to update this group APAC_Comp_Code. I will not have to maintain the analysis authorizations.
Please let me know if this is possible or if there is any other way to implement the requirement with simpler maintenance.
Thanks
Nitesh Gupta

Answer 1

Hi Nitesh,
From what you describe, this would be a good case to use variables in your analysis authorisations. You can specify a variable value for the BUKRS field and have a couple of options to populate the values which are picked up in the query execution.
You will need to ensure that you activate the istep to read customer exit variables and have the query variable set as customer-exit. Once those are complete, you can create a custom table to maintain the mapping of groups to company codes, or to read the company codes directly from your ERP system (if you want to base authorisations on what the users can see in ERP) and populate the table with those values.
However you populate the value to the variable, I think this approach will get you closer to minimal maintenance going forward. Enhancement RSR00001 should be implemented, some help documentation for this below
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/1d/ca10d858c2e949ba4a152c44f8128a/content.htm
Hope this helps,
Tom