SAP BW/4HANA offers a powerful and streamlined data warehousing environment, fully optimized for SAP HANA’s in-memory capabilities. Central to effective data modeling and reporting in BW/4HANA are Attributes and Key Figures. These elements define the characteristics and measurable data points critical for analytical insights.
This article explains how to create and manage attributes and key figures in SAP BW/4HANA, highlighting best practices to maximize their potential in your data models.
Attributes: Attributes describe the descriptive or master data properties related to business entities, such as customer name, product category, region, or sales organization. They are usually textual or categorical information that provides context to key figures.
Key Figures: Key figures represent quantitative data that can be measured and aggregated, such as sales revenue, quantity sold, costs, or profit margins. These are typically numerical values used for calculations and reporting.
Together, attributes and key figures form the backbone of data models in SAP BW/4HANA, enabling detailed analysis and drill-down capabilities.
Attributes are primarily created within InfoObjects (characteristic InfoObjects).
Create or Identify Characteristic InfoObject:
Define Attributes in InfoObject:
Maintain Master Data for Attributes:
Activate InfoObjects:
Key figures are created as Key Figure InfoObjects, which define the properties of measurable data.
Create Key Figure InfoObject:
Configure Aggregation and Currency Conversion:
Load Transaction Data:
Activate InfoObjects:
CompositeProviders: These are advanced InfoProviders in BW/4HANA that allow combining data from multiple sources. Attributes and key figures can be modeled, projected, and restricted here to build flexible reporting models.
Queries: Using SAP BW Query Designer or Analysis tools, you can leverage attributes as drill-down filters and key figures as measurable indicators in reports and dashboards.
Attributes and key figures form the core components of SAP BW/4HANA data models, enabling detailed, multidimensional analysis. By carefully creating and managing these InfoObjects with best practices in mind, organizations can unlock powerful insights and build scalable, high-performance analytic solutions.
With SAP BW/4HANA’s modern tooling and HANA-optimized capabilities, modeling attributes and key figures has become more intuitive and efficient, empowering users to meet complex reporting requirements with agility.