JUNE 2014 K-I-T-E-S

Know-Innovate-Think-Explore-Share~~Soar high with all that and more!

A bi-monthly journal for BSS by BSS
IN THIS ISSUE…
Authorization (RBP) in
Successfactors

Q u i c k B y t e s....

Muthukumar Kumaravel
Page 4
Page 3

HADOOP - Demystified Industry 4.0-The New

Revolution in the
Horizon

Nisha Chandrasekaran Mathew Nellissery

Page 8 Page 11

Flow:The Lifeline of
Manufacturing/Supply
Chains - Part I

Siva Kumar Muthuru

Page 14

Editorial Team:
Mohammad Abdullah Shamim, Sameer S M, Suresh Vasudeva, Bhargav C,
Raghu Ram Reddy Devagiri, Venkatesh Kanniah, Priya Thomas
……………………....
Design Team:
Naveen Kumar K, Annie Jose, Ramya C Subramanian

KITES JUNE 2014 2

Quick B y t e s....

Accenture, HP and SAP Collaborate to
Accelerate the Deployment of SAP HANA:
Accenture and SAP America, Inc. a subsidiary of SAP
AG, are working with the HP Enterprise Group to help
clients more rapidly and cost-effectively adopt and
deploy the SAP HANA platform through an innovative
subscription based model. The goal is to accelerate the
ability of clients to transform their business by leveraging
real-time business insight provided by SAP HANA. The
companies will provide integrated solution-as-a-service
and additional managed services solutions leveraging
their respective assets, products and services to target
clients worldwide across various industries.
Modernizing the User Experience: SAP Fiori
Now Included With SAP Software:
SAP AG announced that SAP Fiori user experience (UX)
and SAP Screen Personas software will now be included
within underlying licenses of SAP software. For existing
customers, SAP will provide a software credit redeemable
against future software sales. In addition, SAP will offer a
portfolio of UX services, including design, rapid
deployment and custom development, to enhance
customer engagement. SAP users can now take
advantage of a next-generation user experience based on
modern design principles setting a new standard in the
industry.

SAP Fosters Open Ecosystem for Driving
Customer Innovation:
Working closely with an active open ecosystem, SAP AG
empowers customers, partners, startups and developers
worldwide to innovate easily on top of the SAP HANA
platform. By fostering strategic collaborations with
partners, including Red Hat, IBM, HP and VMware, as
well as startups, SAP plans to offer customers broader
choice, ease of deployment and simplified IT
environments, empowering them to transform their
businesses by leveraging the advanced capabilities of
SAP HANA.
SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems Test and
Evaluation Program:
SAP and IBM continue to collaborate closely with the
intent to enable SAP HANA to run on the IBM Power
technology, including POWER7+ and the newly
introduced POWER8 system on Linux. The companies
ultimately aim to benefit customers that run their mission
-critical SAP applications on IBM Power Systems. SAP
and IBM today announced a limited test and evaluation
program for SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems,
allowing selected customers to test SAP HANA on IBM
POWER Systems with Suse Linux, leveraging existing IT
infrastructure investments while driving innovation using

SAP Unveils SAP Simple Finance, a Modern Set of Finance Solutions:

SAP AG introduced SAP Simple Finance, a set of solutions to bring the simplicity of SAP Cloud powered by SAP
HANA to finance departments worldwide. As a leader in finance solutions for the last several decades, SAP worked
closely with customers to identify the most complex tasks in finance and make them simpler to consume and perform.
The result is SAP Simple Finance, based on SAP HANA in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, delivering real time insights
to CFOs and finance departments so they can transform their business. SAP Simple Finance takes full advantage of
the in-memory SAP HANA platform with new finance capabilities, offers a new and beautiful user experience for easy
access, all deployed in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud under a full subscription model, making it easy for finance
departments to adopt these solutions. This modern finance software is designed to help CFOs accelerate their
finance transformation and deliver strategic outcomes to their business.

Index Page KITES JUNE 2014 3

 Authorization (RBP)
In Successfactors

Muthukumar Kumaravel
RBEI/BSH3
Muthukumar.K@in.bosch.com

In HCM space, data security and privacy plays a critical role. Successfactor protects the customer’s data through
their role based permissions (RBP) framework. The RBP framework is the authorizations concept used in
SuccessFactors which controls access to the applications and what the users can see and edit.

T he RBP framework is the authorizations concept used

in SuccessFactors which controls access to the
Role based security provides the flexibility to manage the

users in two ways

applications and what the users can see and edit. Field-
level permissions are possible across most of the
SuccessFactors HCM suite; for example, view, edit,
correct, delete, etc. can be controlled in each role. Access
to transactions and administrative functionality are also
controlled at a fairly granular level. Say, for instance,
almost all fields, menu items, and actions in the Employee
Files in Employee Central can be permitted. However
there some exceptions like Module-page permissions for
Performance Management, Goal Management,
Compensation, and CDP which are controlled at the form
level.
 You control the features accessible to every user
 You can easily update to users’ permissions by
updating a role, rather than individual users.
Concepts of the RBP framework
The concepts of the RBP framework evolve around having
Granted Users (who should have the permissions
assigned) that have a Permission Role assigned (the
permissions) for a Target population (those individuals
that the permissions are applied upon). To summarize:
 Permission Role = group of permissions
 Granted Users = users that have the role
assigned

KITES JUNE 2014 4

 Authorization (RBP) in Successfactors

 Target = population of users that are accessed This concept can be demonstrated in the diagram below:
using the permissions

A Permission Role can be re-used with different Granted Managers

Users and Target populations. A user can be assigned  HR Managers
multiple Permission Roles. When a user has two different  Matrix Managers
permissions, the user will get the most powerful of these  Custom Managers
permissions. For example, if a user is assigned Edit  Second Managers
permission and View permission then, they will get the  Host or Home Managers (when on Global
Edit permission. Assignment)
 Host or Home HR Managers (when on Global
Permission Groups are simply groups of users that can be Assignment)
used as either Granted Users or Target populations. In
 Everyone
each Permission Group various criteria can be used to
select users, including but not limited to:
Granted Users – with the exception of Permission Groups
City Location and Everyone – can be further filtered by Permission
Country State Group. The options for the Target populations can vary
Department Team View depending on which types of Granted Users are selected
Division Time Zone for the Permission Role.
Geography Title
Hire Date User Target populations
Job Code Username Target populations are those users that Granted Users
can access with the applied permissions in the Permission
Multiple criteria can be used. Individuals can also be Role. If the Granted Users is a Permission Group or
excluded from a Permission Group using the same criteria. Everyone then the Target populations can be:
Other fields and customer-specific fields can also be  Everyone
added to the list of criteria available in the system.  Granted User’s Department
 Granted User’s Division
Granted Users  Granted User’s Location
Granted Users are those users that are assigned a  Granted User
Permission Role for a specific Target population. Granted
Users can be one of the following options:

KITES JUNE 2014 5

 Authorization (RBP) in Successfactors

Data Model of RBP

Granularity of permissions and Role Design
The RBP framework provides a great deal of granularity in
assigning permissions and this can be a daunting task to
design, create, and maintain. That is why it is very
important to ensure that Permission Roles and the overall
permission design is well thought out and catered for by a
minimal number of Permission Roles.

KITES JUNE 2014 6

 Authorization (RBP) in Successfactors
To give an idea of the granularity of permissions, for
Employee Central there are over 400 permissions that can
be used in the various Permission Roles that would be
required for end users and administrators. The
authorizations model in Success Factors Learning differs
from the rest of the HCM suite in that it doesn’t leverage
How does RBP differ from SAP Authorization? Below are
the main differences between SAP authorization and RBP
The concept of HR authorization objects like
PLOG, P_ORGIN etc are not available
Concepts like BAdI is not used
No references roles, RBP always deals with target
population
Time logics are not used in RBP
Summary
Definitely RBP framework is different from SAP
authorization. However the access level permissions are
quite similar. RBP is easy to maintain, straight forward
Index Page
RBPs.
The following graphic provides an overview of where RBP
is used and where other mechanisms are in place. In the
table below, you will find details on RBP coverage for each
module.
than SAP. RBP is a powerful concept but needs careful
plan and design before implenting. For Global companies,
the RBP framework makes the solution scalable and
accessible to all levels. On the whole this type of
framework is good for customers and has enough
flexibility to satisfy most of their needs.
References
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/hcm/
blog/2014/02/27/successfactors-all-you-need-to-know-
about-authorizations-and-security
Please send your feedback to Bss-.CoE@in.bosch.com
KITES JUNE 2014 7
 HADOOP - Demystified

Nisha Chandrasekaran
RBEI/BSH2
Nisha.Chandrasekaran@in.bosch.com

In the SAP World, most of us are all too familiar with the buzz words “Big Data” and “HANA”. While the former is a
popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data and deriving valuable insight, the
latter combines database, data processing, and application platform capabilities “in-memory”. Yet another closely
related buzz word in the area of big data analytics is “HADOOP”. So what exactly is HADOOP?

Introduction HADOOP Core Components/Keywords

T he Apache Hadoop platform is an open source

platform designed to solve problems where there is a lot of
data — typically, a mixture of complex and structured data
that doesn’t fit nicely into tables.
HADOOP is useful for situations where businesses want
to run analytics that are deep and computationally
extensive. Architecturally, the reason that this platform is
able to deal with lots of data is because data is spread out
across different servers in the landscape- Hadoop is
designed to run on a large number of machines that don’t
share any memory or disks, but it keeps track of where the
data resides.
MapReduce: MapReduce is a software framework that
serves as the compute layer of Hadoop. The framework
divides every job into parts for easy and quick “Query”
processing.
Hive: Hive is a Hadoop-based data warehousing-like
framework originally developed by Facebook. It allows
users to write queries in a SQL-like language called
HiveQL; this allows SQL programmers with no MapReduce
experience to use the warehouse.
Hadoop Distributed File System: HDFS, the storage
layer of Hadoop, is a distributed, scalable, Java-based file
system adept at storing large volumes of unstructured data.

In a centralized database system, there is usually one big
disk connected to four or eight or 16 big processors. But in
a Hadoop cluster, every one of these servers has two or
four or eight CPUs and each server operates on its own
little piece of data.
Pig: Pig Latin is a Hadoop-based language developed by
Yahoo. It is relatively easy to learn and is adept at very
deep, very long data pipelines (a limitation of SQL.)
HBase: HBase is a non-relational database that allows
users to conduct Database related operations such as

KITES JUNE 2014 8


updates, inserts and deletes. EBay and Facebook use
HBase heavily.
HCatalog: HCatalog is a centralized metadata
management and sharing service for Apache Hadoop. It
allows for a unified view of all data in Hadoop clusters and
allows diverse tools to process data elements without
needing to know physically where in the cluster the data is
stored.
HADOOP Integration in Enterprise Scenarios
By using SAP HANA platform and Hadoop together, it is
possible combine instant results with infinite storage for real
-time insights of Big Data. SAP supports integration with
Hadoop in several ways. A few of such ways are explained
below:
 SAP HANA Smart Data Access feature can perform
queries across a variety of data sources so that only a
minimal amount of data is retrieved at a single point in
The “3-pillar” Analytics Model states that by unleashing the
individual and integration capabilities of SAP BI, HANA and
HADOOP, enterprises can truly achieve “Real-time
HADOOP - Demystified
time to complete the query on SAP HANA.
 SAP IQ provides a native application programming
interface (API) that helps to analyze very large data
sets covering structured, semi-structured and
unstructured data formats.
 SAP Data Services delivers a Hadoop connector that
enables pre-processing of large volumes of data in
Hadoop to identify relevant text, which can be rapidly
loaded in to SAP HANA or SAP IQ for real-time
analysis with structured data.
 SAP Business Objects BI platform offers an analytic
modelling environment to build data models (called
universes) that can be used by the BI tools to answer
queries. These universes can be deployed against data
in SAP HANA or non-SAP data sources including Hive
and HDFS. End users can interact with universes using
BI tools such as SAP Predictive Analysis, SAP Lumira,
and SAP BuinessObjects Explorer.
business insight” and dramatically reduce hardware and
maintenance costs through a flexible, cost-effective, real-
time approach for managing large data volumes.
KITES JUNE 2014 9
 HADOOP - Demystified

The below illustration gives a brief of how HADOOP can be integrated in typical Enterprise Scenarios

 Hadoop as a simple database and flexible data store - Conclusion

Storage and Retrieval of data as “Blobs” typically using
Through effective usage of HADOOP in an integrated Real-
interfaces provided by HIVE or direct HDFS access, to
time Data Management Platform, businesses can capitalize
carry out retrievals or analytics later.
on the Big Data opportunity as well as address Big Data
 Hadoop as a processing Engine – Leverage the Map-
technical challenges in order to optimize data management
Reduce computation framework for data enrichment
and enable insightful decision making in each phase of the
and data pattern analysis
information lifecycle process.
 Hadoop for data analytics – through stand-alone
analytics as well integration with the existing analytical References:
framework of SAP BI
 www.sapbigdata.com
 www.scn.sap.com
Well-known Hadoop Use Cases  www.saphana.com
 Facebook uses Hadoop to generate reports for third-  www.sas.com/big-data
party developers and advertisers who need to track the  http://www.takesolutions.com/es-big-data-analytics-
success of their applications or campaigns. with-sap-hana
 Yahoo was Hadoop's first large scale user as it started
using Hadoop to speed up indexing of Web crawl
results for its search engine and continues to also use
Hadoop to block spam trying to get into its email
servers.
Please send your feedback to Bss-.CoE@in.bosch.com

Index Page KITES JUNE 2014 10

 Industry 4.0 -
The New Revolution In The Horizon
Software, sensors and embedded systems are becoming increasingly part of our everyday life – right from
electric toothbrushes to cars. With about 100 million lines of programming code, today‘s luxury car has double
the software that a typical space shuttle has. Each of these objects generate data and could be connected to
make intelligent and efficient use of the themselves.
C ustomers are increasingly interested in specialized
products, which are specific to their requirements. Industry
is moving from mass production to mass customization.
Catering to such individual preferences require intelligent
production systems which could adjust themselves to
various external factors dynamically. Shrinking product
lifecycles, visualization, sensing, high usage of electronics,
connectivity and the customer preferences for
individualized services are leading to the fourth industrial
revolution - Industry 4.0. Here people, machines and other
resources would interact as in a social network.
The smart factories of Industry 4.0 would use a network of
elements which would interact and control each other
autonomously, within an intelligently networked production
process. Product itself will have the capability to
communicate to a machine and inform what to do next in
the next production process. Components will be produced
in small quantities and at real time thereby reducing
wastage and inventory pile up. By interacting with each
other, the machines in smart factories could predict failures
and trigger maintenance processes without manual
Mathew Nellissery
RBEI/BSL2
Mathew.NG@in.bosch.com
intervention. By connecting machines, work pieces and
systems, intelligent networks are created along the entire
value chain that controls each other autonomously. The
machines also would be able to react to unexpected
changes in production and self organize the logistics. The
characteristics of such smart factories would be resource
efficiency, flexibility and integration with business partners.
By connecting multiple such factories and geographies, a
revolutionary change in the entire business ecosystem
would take place.
The high degree of specialization, which helped industries
reach high productivity and quality, would be the detractor
for next wave. These specializations created Silos of
design specialists, manufacturing specialists and logistics
and planning specialists. In the new world of Industry 4.0
the demarcation between these functions would be blurred.
3D printing would democratize production to such an extent
that the designer himself would be able to produce his work.
Similarly visualization would help non designers to
contribute to product design.
KITES JUNE 2014 11
 Industry 4.0

A look at the past increased output and reduced production costs. The
division of labor between skilled and unskilled workers
Each of the previous three industry revolutions have had its
further increased productivity. The new factories lead to
share of great socio-economic changes.
rapid growth of population in industrial centers and cities.
The second industrial revolution lead to the creation of a
During the first industrial revolution, steam engines made
larger, increasingly professional, middle class.
new products and new ways of production possible. Steam
engines were introduced into boats, railways and farms.
Third industrial revolution was made possible through the
Industrial revolution increased material wealth, restructured
introduction of electronics and IT for automation. The CNC
societies and created newer kind of jobs. For example,
machines and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM)
unlike in agriculture, the seasons of the year were irrelevant
allowed to make products in better quality with much lower
to an average industrial worker. Workers were expected to
input of labor. The cost of labor as a proportion of the total
work for 12 hours a day for 5 to 6 days a week for entire
product cost reduced dramatically. New kinds of jobs in the
year, many times indoors. This was a big transition and
services emerged and a new industry developed around
many laborers, who were considered highly productive as
information technology and Internet. The internet and the
agricultural workers, were unable to adjust to the new
commercial network surrounding it allowed start ups and
requirements.
smaller companies to compete with traditional businesses.
People from the smaller towns and villages were able to
Second industrial revolution was characterized by large
access knowledge and get similar opportunities as city
scale production of steel, widespread use of manufacturing
dwellers due to democratization of information.
machinery and electricity. Unlike crafting by hand, the
usage of machines and mass production techniques

Image source: uberb2b.com

KITES JUNE 2014 12


What has the 4th Industrial revolution in store ?
In future, the product and its smart raw materials will have
integrated digital storage, sensing and wireless digital
capabilities. The product would act as an information
Source: Business meets Research 2012
Smarter production would result in very high precision,
superior quality of production of high-mix, low volume smart
products. Due to its intelligence, the networks would help to
achieve clean, resource efficient and sustainable
production.
The smart machines, intelligent supply chain management
systems and product life cycle systems of the Industry 4.0
generates huge amount of data. These big data will be
harvested and analyzed to further improvise resource
efficient production.
Migration of employees towards industrial areas and cities
for jobs was a typical characteristic of industrialization. The
smart factories of the future would produce smaller
quantities on need basis locally. Such factories would be
closer to the employee homes and nearer to the places
where its products will be consumed. With the
decentralization of production, the fourth generation would
have completed a full cycle from where it started.
As in the previous revolutions, many of the skills considered
to be highly desirable earlier would become irrelevant with
the new technologies. Other skills would take its place. For
example, the augmented reality like Google glass would
help employees to learn new production processes faster
Index Page
Industry 4.0
container and as an agent which not only monitors itself,
but also its environment. For example, sensors and
embedded applications in the work piece would inform the
machine about the operations it needs to perform.
and do them without errors. Adaptability would continue to
be the success factor.
Many challenges still remain to be solved. Connecting
factories from different organizations would mean a
common communication platform, interoperability of
sensors and software. Security would be a topic of high
focus as production would be in the hands of the products
and machines. Also new algorithms might need to be
developed to understand and securely share relevant data.
Conclusion
German government has a project under ministry of
research and ministry of economics to study on Industry 4.0,
which it believes is the future of manufacturing. Bosch,
being one of the market leaders in embedded systems and
related technology, is positioning itself as a leader in the
new industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 could lead to new
internet based services and “not yet seen” business models.
However, due to the influence of so many external
parameters, nobody can predict how precisely all these
would unfold. But one thing is sure; the effects of fourth
version would be equally dramatic as its predecessors.
Please send your feedback to Bss-.CoE@in.bosch.com
KITES JUNE 2014 13
 Flow: The Lifeline Of Manufacturing / Supply Chains
- Part I

Siva Kumar Mutnuru

RBEI/BSR1
SivaKumar.M@in.bosch.com

George Plossl, a founding father of MRP along with Joe Orlicky and Oliver Wight, once wrote, “Manufacturing is a
bewildering and distracting variety of products, materials, technologies, machines, and people skills obscuring
the underlying elegance and simplicity of it as a process”. The essence of manufacturing (and supply chain in
general) is the flow of materials from suppliers, through plants, through distribution channels and customers, and
of information to all parties about what is planned and required, what is happening, what has happened, and what
should happen next.

A n appreciation of this elegance and simplicity brings

us to what is known as the first law of manufacturing:
The best, sustainable way to achieve that goal is to protect
and promote flow.

Variability – Enemy Number one of Flow

“All the benefits will be directly related to the speed of flow
What is the primary killer of flow in systems? Simply stated,
of information and materials”.
the answer is variability. The law of variability states, “The
more that variability exists in a process, the less predictive
For example, when flow is poor, additional expenses are
the process will be”.
incurred to close the gaps in flow. Examples would be
expedited freight, overtime, and rework, cross-shipping
Problems associated with variability being passed
and unplanned partial ships. When the flow is maximized,
between discrete areas, steps or processes are nothing
the materials will be converted to cash at a relatively quick
new and this is known as “bullwhip effect”. The bullwhip is
and consistent rate. This makes cash flow much easier to
infamous effect in industries with large extended supply
manage and predict. Additionally the related expenses are
chains. Examples include automotive, aerospace,
minimized.
customer electronics etc.
When flow is maximized, then revenue will be maximized
A further illustration of variability occurs in planning
and protected, inventories will be minimized and Return on
systems. It is called “nervousness”.
investment (ROI) will be high. And isn’t it really the
objective? Every for-profit company has a universal
Nervousness is directly related to the number of
primary goal: maximize some form of return on share
dependent connections contained in a company’s product
holder equity.
structure and how they impact each other. As changes

KITES JUNE 2014 14

 Flow-Part I

occur in quantity and timing requirements at the higher
levels in the product structure, those changes
automatically impact lower-level quantities and schedules.
Nervousness is directly related to MRP’s biggest power
and biggest fault; making everything dependent.
A significant contributing factor to the bullwhip effect in
many supply chains is the interaction of the nervousness
of the various manufacturing companies that make up the
supply chain.
Variability – What we are focusing?
System variability kills flow. Variability can be
systematically minimized and managed but not eliminated.
Can Our Organizations Think Systematically?
Intuitively everyone in an organization knows that
organization is a system, collection of interdependencies
with some sort of common purpose or reason for
existence. When it comes to measuring, operating, and
problem solving, we tend to divide the organization in to
subsystems. Those subsystems typically have staffs,
budgets, and authority, as well as expertise to manage
within the subsystems. Often instead of really managing a
system, we manage a collection of subsystems. The
overriding assumption is that if the subsystems are
under control then the system will be under control.
Let’s take an example with illustrations in the next edition
of Kites……

From an enterprise perspective, variation has four distinct References:

sources (two internal and two external). The sources come
 Demand Driven Performance – Debra Smith and
together to create total system variation. Of the four
Chad Smith
sources of variation, which is in our direct control?
 APICS Dictionary, 12th Edition(Blackstone, 2008, Page
78)
 Customer and market behavior (demand variability)?
Hardly.  Resolving Measurement/Performance Dilemmas –
Debra Smith and Jeff Herman
 Supplier performance (supply variability)? Only
indirectly.  Chapter 14, Theory of Constraints Handbook, New
York, McGraw-Hill, 2010
 Random events (operational variability)? This is the
normal and random variation exhibited by the system
in steady state. All the lean and six-sigma initiatives
will focus only on the discrete process level.
 How we decide to run the business (management
variability)? Bingo!! On target..

Most devastating form of the variability is self-imposed or

management variability, this must be tackled first. Please send your feedback to Bss-.CoE@in.bosch.com

Index Page KITES JUNE 2014 15