How to Understand Realignment in SAP DP and SAP BW

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Executive Summary

Realignment is used in SAP DP and SAP BW and has important features that we will cover in this article.

Introduction

Realignment is the process of adding and deleting characteristic value combinations in DP, BI, and SPP. An example of characteristic value combinations could be:

Unit Sales by Country
A different CVC could be
Unit Sales by Region

We have given two examples of the same level in the hierarchy for sales but different levels in the geographic hierarchy.

Our References for This Article

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Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

When Realignment Applies

If the company begins offering a new region, one must update both the region and country CVCs. Realignment applies to InfoCubes.

Important Features to Realignment

While part of the InfoCube, navigational attributes are not part of the realignment process as they are not real objects but pointers.
The Master Planning Object Structure is realigned along with the CVCs (I cover CVCs in detail in this article). However, this can be changed by selecting the “Only Realign the InfoCube” option on the realignment setup screen.
Realignment is a background process.
The Copy Function is the second step that follows realignment, and this does things like copy notes attached to the CVCs.

Where Used

Two modules in SCM use the Data Warehouse Workbench, where realignment occurs – SPP and DP and BW.

Pivot Forecasting

Interestingly, no realignment is necessary when using an application like Smoothie by Demand Works or ForecastPro. Each attribute is associative and does not affect the other attributes in the database, or rather it works very simply. Any realignment occurs by uploading a new model, which tends to be very fast. Therefore, all that is necessary is to create a new model, adjust the data into its new format, and then perform the upload.