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Nowadays all IT professionals are working in a very dynamic environment where professional development and learning the whole life is a must if you want to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. The same principles are applicable for SAP professionals – SAP is constantly striving to provide both – more powerful and user-friendly solutions, upgrading existing or releasing new products.

At the same time SAP community tries to keep up with new products. Currently SAP is doing some step forward to make SAP system less complex, though SAP implementations are still heavily dependent on the consultants and integrators.

As most other software vendors SAP provides an opportunity to prove the knowledge of their products via certification program. Though it doesn’t have the reputation as the only way to show your SAP proficiency for wider audience, SAP is trying to boost the popularity and recognition of its certification program.

SAP offers 2 levels of certification – associate and professional.

Associate level requires only technical knowledge that can be gained during SAP organized training academies or through self-studies of SAP provided training material. Certification questions are built in a way that it can be passed mostly if you are learning from SAP books and have some walk-through in the test system at the same time.  Initially it was created to bring additional value for the participants enrolled to the SAP training academies. Currently there is no requirement to be enrolled on the official SAP training course in order to pass an exam. The exam can be booked after self-studies of SAP material.

Professional level exam is much more complex as you cannot directly learn all the answers from the reference materials (as it is with associate exam). The goal of professional exam is to check your abilities to apply your technical knowledge in the practical situations. In other word, it cannot be directly learned from training books or via test system as you need to answer questions on the problems you are facing during different phases of SAP implementations. Because of that exam is much more difficult to pass. Thereby it can prove your excellence more accurately.

SAP recently launched a website that allows to manage your certifications hoping to gather SAP certified professional in one single place. Company is emphasizing that certification would ensures expected value added to the client if service is provided by certified SAP partners. However I would like to dispel some myths on SAP certification value:

* Certification no longer guarantees that you will get SAP job if another candidate possesses the right skill set and hands on experience acquired in the SAP implementation projects. Though, it can give you additional advantage applying for the SAP entry level positions if you already have any associate level certificate (as employer can skip initial investment dedicated for new joiners). Small exception can be made if you already have the certificate of the new SAP product where demand and supply of SAP consultants in the market is still not in balance. In this way such certificate can open more doors and does it quicker.
* Certification no longer ensure you the promotion, additional pay rise or a daily rate increase. The main key driver for your success is your ability to apply the knowledge in the project environment. Similar parallel can be made with the highest education – regardless of the prestige of your university after 10 years your university mates will never be at the same place as your career acceleration heavily depends on your motivation and personal goals.
* SAP certification cannot secure you long-lasting career. SAP technical knowledge together with your consulting skills must be combined with your creativity and the ability to think out of the box challenging clients’ requirements. In addition, other factors such as your mobility or foreign language skills are also very important.

All in all, SAP certification is an additional way to prove your knowledge and competency together with references from your past projects. It is always worthy to invest some time going through reference books as it could help you not only to pass the exam but also to get additional ideas how to solve client’s requirements using SAP standard. Sometimes it can be much more valuable saving hours of work.

These observations were written after passing 6 SAP certification exams and working in SAP industry over the last decade. They are based on the personal opinion and cannot be associated with any company that I am working on or representing. http://bit.ly/2jFZL0p #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

ICYMI: 1.0 Overview 

The DataWeave Language is a powerful template engine that allows you to transform data to and from any kind of format (XML, CSV, JSON, Pojos, Maps, etc).

2.0 Introducing To DataWeave Transformation With Mule ESB-Part I https://goo.gl/FCivVD #DataIntegration #ML

This is the third and final blog in a series of three about enriching SAP BW with SAP Predictive Analytics:

* Introduction
* Technical Integration
* Steps of a Project (this page)

Steps of a Project

In the earlier articles of this series we have looked at the value that SAP Predictive Analytics is adding to SAP BW and how the two components can be technically integrated. In this article we look at the typical steps of a project.

Methodology

Especially in a predictive project it is extremely helpful to follow a methodology to ensure that a clear business need is discovered and appropriately supported through predictions. The Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) is very popular and we use it extensively at SAP. In this article we will not cover the details of this methodology, but you could read up more about it on this Wikipedia article for instance.

Technical Steps

As it is usually the case, the technical steps break down into two phases:

* Initial setup and configuration
* Project (or use case) specific work

 

Step 1: Initial Installation

The following components have to be installed. Please check with your SAP Account Executive if you are not sure, whether these components are available to you:

SAP BW / SAP HANA:

* SAP BW has to be running on SAP HANA. This is a requirement, since the content will be accessed through SAP HANA Calculation Views. See the Product Availability Matrix of SAP Predictive Analytics for details on the supported environments. You can find the link to the current version on the Predictive Analytics Community.
* You should install the Automated Predictive Library (APL) on SAP HANA. The APL provides the framework that creates the predictive models automatically inside SAP HANA. Having this installed, allows models to be trained in-memory without having to extract data out of SAP HANA. Strictly speaking this is not a technical must, but I cannot think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to.

Windows Laptop of the person creating new predictive models:

* Install SAP Predictive Analytics (Desktop), which provides the graphical interface to structure your data and to create predictive models. You will spend most of the time in this environment.
* Set up an ODBC Source to SAP HANA, which is the interface used by SAP Predictive Analytics. You can obtain the ODBC drivers by installing the SAP HANA Client.

Server, to maintain models automatically:

* SAP Predictive Analytics Server and SAP Predictive Factory, which can maintain models independently. Predictive models can be retrained when needed and new forecasts can be produced on a specified schedule. For ongoing use of predictive models these components are crucial as they provide the full automation, independent of any manual steps. Should you just want to experiment with creating a model now and then, these components are not necessarily required.
* If you are using the SAP Predictive Analytics Server / SAP Predictive Factory you also need to set up an ODBC source to SAP HANA.

Step 2: Initial Configuration

It is technically possible to write the predictions into the existing data schema of SAP BW. Should you want to keep the predictions in a separate area, you can create a dedicated database schema. Please verify whether this is allowed under your licenses.

You will probably have some content in SAP BW of which you are certain that it will be used in a predictive project. Expose these objects as SAP HANA Calculation Views.

If you have installed the SAP Predictive Analytics Server / SAP Predictive Factory, you need to configure these. The ODBC source needs to be imported to the Factory for example. You can also set up users and access rights within the Factory.

After this step, you have an infrastructure in place to start creating your models!

Step 3: Create Predictive Model

Every time you want to create a new predictive model, you will come back to this step.

* If needed, expose any further required SAP BW content as SAP HANA Calculation View.
* If needed, create a semantic layer on top of the Calculation Views in the Data Manager of SAP Predictive Analytics.
* Once the data is structured as required, create a predictive model in SAP Predictive Analytics. If you have the APL installed, the model will be trained directly in SAP HANA, even if the data was semantically restructured in the Data Manager.
* From SAP Predictive Analytics you can also apply the model and write forecasts to a SAP HANA table. The target table can be created automatically from SAP Predictive Analytics. Again, creating these forecasts and writing them into a table happens without having to extract the data.

If you just want to experiment with predictive models, you might be done at this point!

Step 4: Deploy Predictive Model

If you want to put the model into productive use, you have to ensure that it is regularly retrained and that predictions are created when needed. This is taken care of by the SAP Predictive Analytics Server and SAP Predictive Analytics Factory.

* Import the metadata from the Windows Desktop into the Factory. Make sure to move both the metadata of the data structure from Data Manager, as well as the metadata of the predictive model.
* Set up a schedule in the Factory to retrain the model and to write predictions into the SAP HANA table.
* Now any application with access to this table can benefit from the predictive insight. SAP BW for instance can access that data and join the predictions with existing SAP BW content. SAP BW has been enriched with predictive insight!

You have closed the loop! SAP BW is not only showing the historic past, but also provide predictions about the future. A wide range of business process can be improved with that insight, whether through an automated decision process or by delivering additional insight to the end user.

Well, I hope you enjoyed these blogs. Thank you for reading! You can find more material in the SAP Predictive Analytics Community. http://bit.ly/2hLndsE #SAP #SAPCloud #AI