Process chains in BW4HANA

See more of process chains in our hbite PROCESS CHAINS

A process chain is a sequence of processes that are scheduled in the background for carrying out specific tasks in BW system like loading of data from datasource till Infoproviders. The set of process chains run in the BW system with certain frequency like daily and complete the batch cycle.

The users are then able to see the reports refreshed the next day.

With the coming of HANA database, many processes are obsolete and chains have become much faster now. So previously if the batch cycle was taking 10-12 hours to refresh the data in reports, the same process chain will just take 1-2 hours in BW on HANA.

Process Type

The process type is the category of the process, for example, a loading process.

The process type is set in the RSPROCESSTYPES view.

Some of the new process types which can be seen in BW on HANA are below.

Note that the highlighted ones are now obsolete

Process Variant

The process variant is the name of the process. Within the process chain, the variant displays the configuration (of a process with a particular process type), which is set at the time of definition. During the loading process, for example, a data transfer process represents a process variant.

The variant information of a process chain can be seen in the table RSPCCHAIN (e.g. if you want to see meta chain of a local pc, give the local pc name in the variant name and meta chain name will be displayed in the table)

Process Instance

The instance is defined by the process itself at runtime, and is normally defined uniquely.

Whenever the process chain run is completed, each step will have its own variant name and instance name.

This information is stored in the table RSPCPROCESSLOG

Here log id defines a unique id of every run of a process chain, this is system generated and can be seen in process chain log view.

You can directly schedule the chain in RSPC or you can use function module RSPC_API_CHAIN_START here.

To see the FM, go to tcode SE37, give the FM name and click on execute option

You can add your pc to rspcm for daily monitoring of the chains

Important T codes for process chains

RSPC – Create/Display process chains
RSPC1 – Display one process chain
RSPCM – Monitor daily process chains

New Features in BW4HANA

You can use BW cockpit to monitor the process chains (it is a web based tool having all the features)

Check sap help for more details on BW cockpit and how to confirgure for your BW syste m

2. You can skip some steps in process chains and then schedule the chain

Go to Planning view -> right click on any step and select “Skip Process”

You can also “unskip process” whenever you want.

3. Streaming process chains – this process chain is for real time data acquisition from underlying sources

check sap help for more details on Streaming process chains

4. In the planning mode, you can select automatic repair or repeat for a process

5. Delta merge process type in process chain

This is new process type added in BW on HANA. Here suppose if aDSO is getting data from multiple DTPs then it is not recommended to use the DTP setting of delta merge as it may cause load balancing problems in HANA database.

In such cases it is recommended to use this process in the process chain once all the loads to aDSO is complete-