Celonis Product Documentation

Operational Data Provisioning (ODP) is a built-in framework in ABAP based systems, including S/4 HANA and up to date versions of SAP ECC, that provides interfaces for replicating business data in near real time. ODP is accessible for third party applications via RFC and OData APIs. Celonis offers an extractor for the ODP to replicate data from the source SAP ERP systems into Celonis Cloud. It is an alternative to the existing Celonis SAP Extractor, and unlike the latter relies exclusively on the system’s built-in capabilities. All change tracking, data organization, exposure and cleaning is done internally by SAP, with no third party code required. Celonis subscribes to the queues created by the system and passively consumes the data.

The Celonis ODP Extractor supports replicating data from CDS Views. These can be either native CDS views that support data replication (with a notation of @Analytics.dataExtraction.enabled), or custom ones created by the customer. No Celonis code is required in SAP as all the replication is done via ODP functions.

To establish the data pipeline, you need to install the Celonis On-Premise Client in your network. This middleware will be responsible for connecting the Celonis Cloud and the SAP system. In essence, it will receive the extraction requests from the Celonis Cloud and route them to SAP. Once the data is received, it will then upload it back to Celonis. 

ODP can be accessed via 2 interfaces - calling the RFC modules directly or calling the OData APIs on top of those modules. The former is not permitted by SAP via its note 3255746 (not legally binding), though it offers the best performance and flexibility. The latter is the officially recommended pattern and is open for third-party tools.

Under the hood, ODP tracks the changes via installing triggers on the database tables. The changes are collected in staging tables and exposed for consumption to the consumption in delta queues. The extracted data is regularly cleaned. All this functionality is built in, and part of the SAP system. Celonis passively extracts the data with no interference into the change tracking, data exposure and maintenance. The following SAP blog gives a good overview of the inner workings of the ODP and delta enabled CDS views.

The diagram below shows the high level architecture of the Celonis ODP extractor.

ODP is available out of the box, and requires no additional licensing or setup. In a nutshell, all S/4 HANA versions are supported. SAP ECC is also supported assuming that all the latest SPs have been imported. For the detailed version requirements, see this SAP note. 

You will also need to set up a communication user in SAP which will be utilized for the connection. Instead of compiling a user role from scratch, you can assign the existing profiles S_BI-WX_RFC. If you are looking for a minimal set of authorizations required for ODP data replication, see this SAP note.

To leverage the ODP capabilities, you need to set up CDS views in the SAP ERP. While you can use the native CDS Views, Celonis currently does not have connector templates based on the native views. Therefore, we cannot provide recommendations which native views to extract to get the data that you need. Instead, we recommend creating mirror CDS views for each of the database tables that are referenced in our standard marketplace connectors.