best practices: better reporting with sap -...

Best Practices:

Better Reporting with SAP

KELLEY LYNN KASSA

DATAWATCH CORPORATION

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kelleykassa

http://www.datawatch.com/

BEST PRACTICES:

Better Reporting with SAP

How is your organization coping with having plenty of data but scarcity of real information? How often do your executives ask the IT team – or you – to find and analyze data vital to high-level strategic business decisions? Or how your organization can exploit the information you have without simply throwing money or people at the job? Do you struggle with extracting value out of your data – or data systems?

Information Overload

Industry analysts agree: today’s organizations struggle with information overload, yet, it is valuable information that will separate the winners from the losers. To wit:

David Newman of Gartner recently wrote, “A new era is taking shape – an era in which the economics of data becomes a primary source of competitive advantage, a period in which, as Peter Sondergaard, Gartner senior vice president of research, describes, “information becomes the oil of the 21st century.” 1

Ventana Research calls Information Applications “the next phase in the evolution of information technology, created as a response to businesses’ needs for better availability of contextual information.”

TechTarget’s Wayne Eckerson finds “the most challenging part of any business intelligence project is getting the data right.”

SAP users have an even greater challenge: turning data stuck in “static and hard to use” reports into valuable information. SAP comes with approximately 3,500 “canned reports,” yet few organizations are able to transform the data in these reports into usable, valuable information. Few organizations can leverage their significant SAP investment for the new data-driven economy.

1 How to Plan, Participate and Prosper in the Data Economy, Gartner, March 29, 2011 G00211545

Some organizations think – wrongly – that popular business intelligence tools solve the problem. Unfortunately, business intelligence tools only solve part of the problem; they access data stored in the business intelligence system or relational database. They don’t do anything with the output from SAP reports.

Getting the Data Right

How can an SAP-based business go from drowning in unusable reports to leveraging the untapped resource that corporate data can be? How can a business running on SAP “get the data right,” while doing so in a cost-effective, smart manner? How much effort is needed to extract data from the underlying database, stage the data, and then build a business intelligence reporting infrastructure to get at the data? Is it even possible?

Historically, there has been one solution to leveraging SAP-generated data: involve costly IT resources to program custom reports. While this approach works, it completely ignores one of the biggest benefits from your SAP application: the 3,500+ reports that come with SAP. What may appear a simple line item – IT resources doing custom programming for SAP reports – actually accumulates to an extremely large annual capital expenditure. And, unfortunately, as some organizations learn, neither approach – custom programming or using business intelligence tools – works all that well.

Relying on IT to create customized SAP reports doesn’t make business sense because:

Money: programming and IT resources are costly; Impact: IT resources should be used for more strategic, meaningful projects.

Deploying those resources to simply create customized reports, or modifying existing reports, is a waste of time, money and talent;

Bandwith: custom report requests become a non-stop activity; there are always requests for new reports, requests to modify existing reports and urgent requests. IT can never keep pace with the volume of reporting requests.

Context: IT resources are experts in systems and data, but not in how that data relates to the business challenges. IT can find you the data the business user asked for, but can’t necessarily determine if it’s the data business really needs.

Add to this challenge another wrinkle: SAP reports are extremely valuable because they are trusted. The data is generated automatically. Your business has already validated the data – ensuring proper data governance. SAP has more than 30,000

BEST PRACTICES: BETTER REPORTING WITH SAP © KELLEY LYNN KASSA / DATAWATCH

FORWARD

http://www.gartner.com/AnalystBiography?authorId=25733

http://www.ventanaresearch.com/researchCategory/InformationApplications.html

http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/eckerson/archives/2010/11/why_i_joined_te.php

See the Power of Monarch Analytics in Action!

tables and highly complex business rules that govern interaction and calculations with the underlying data. Once you begin integrating other systems with SAP, you risk introducing errors to the tables and business rules. You risk the integrity of the SAP data.

If only that data could be analyzed, used, and acted upon at all levels of the organization…

Despite the challenging environment created by relying on SAP, some organizations have discovered how to leverage the comprehensive suite of canned reports that are delivered with SAP – the static, inflexible, unworkable system reports – and turn them into dynamic, strategic corporate information assets. Read on to learn best practices in better reporting with SAP.

Your IT Investment

Every company handles their SAP IT requirements differently. But in general, if you wanted to fully leverage your investment in SAP reports, you’d need to have some combination of highly skilled (and expensive):

• ABAP programmers • ETL specialists • Database/BW (Netweaver Business Warehouse)/data warehouse experts • BI consultants

Oh, and most companies opt for building or buying a traditional business intelligence solution to attempt to address the reporting challenges of SAP.


FORWARD

Sign up for two complimentary SAP report models from Datawatch. See how quickly and easily you can capture and work with data trapped in any number of “canned” SAP reports. Get on the fast track to better SAP reports today!

http://go.datawatch.com/SAPebookoffer.html

Chapter 1: Eliminate Report Requests to IT

Best Practice Example: European Government Office

Best Practice Example: Food Production and Packaging Company

Best Practice Example: Healthcare Provider

Chapter 2: Managing Massive Amounts of Data

Best Practice Example: Global Manufacturer

Chapter 3: Adding Business Intelligence to Standard ERP Reports

Best Practice Example: A High-Volume Distributor

Chapter 4: Empowering Business Users

Best Practice Example: A Large University

Chapter 5: Turning Unusable Data into Valuable Information

Best Practice Example: Worldwide Agribusiness

Best Practice Example: Financial Services

Conclusion: How You Can Unlock the Data Trapped in your SAP Reports

CHAPTER 1:

Eliminate Report Requests to IT

Best Practice Example: European Government Office

“The Monarch Report Analytics Platform has solved our SAP reporting needs, with no new programming and no need for live connections to the SAP system or other database. Plus, Monarch has dramatically cut our ongoing SAP costs.”

This European-based government organization has more than 6,000 employees throughout Europe. The organization relies on most of the standard SAP modules, including the Financial Accounting (FI), Controlling (CO), Material Management (MM) and Project Systems (PS) modules.

Like many organizations using SAP, this group faced several serious SAP reporting challenges:

It had too many expensive (named) SAP licenses for occasional users who just needed certain reports;

The existing SAP reports did not match the end users’ requirements; Designing and developing ad-hoc applications to replace the lack of

functional report capabilities was too expensive, requiring specialized expertise and resources;

Even minor changes to the SAP reports required costly IT resources; Users could not easily get reports that met their layout and logic

requirements; and Higher level reports needed data from the “canned” SAP reports and data

from outside SAP.

In sum: the SAP report functionality didn’t work for the organization’s end users or its IT department. All the information needed to run the business was in their SAP

reports. The reports were just not usable because they were static, isolated (no integration) and inflexible. The environment and its lack of functionality resulted in numerous reporting delays, and a corresponding loss of budget control.

The organization found its solution in introducing the Monarch Report Analytics Platform into its SAP environment. This simple and easy solution, that required no programming, resulted in the organization:

Organizing, integrating and activating for analysis the existing canned SAP reports critical to running the business;

Replacing manual running of SAP reports with web-enabled, secure archiving of SAP reports;

Easily mining needed data from the archived SAP reports; Transforming data mined from archived SAP reports into an online table for

easy sorting, filtering, aggregation and export to Excel or PDF; Consolidating data not just from several canned SAP reports, but from

external data and report sources, to deliver an automated report analytic environment for the enterprise.

“Now our existing SAP reports are easily produced and distributed and can be made accessible online with complete security. Our managers

and directors can view the data mined from those reports in any manner they wish with the click of a mouse. We are very pleased with the new SAP reporting and data

access and flexibility we now have.”


Page 1 of 9 DATAWATCH CORPORATION

CHAPTER 1:


Best Practice Example: Food Production and Packaging Company

“We’ve reduced our requirements on supporting IT resources and daily business runs more smoothly.”

A large food production and packaging company relies on SAP for its transactional and operational data.

The company knew it had valuable data trapped in its SAP reports. All the information it needed to run its business was scattered among several different SAP reports from multiple SAP modules. The company wanted to be able to do more with that data, such as:

Mining and extracting information from SAP reports into more dynamic formats;

Accessing and working with data existing in printed reports; Enabling managers and executives to work with SAP data on their own,

without any advanced IT skills or requests into the IT department; Migrating data from legacy systems to newer systems with less hassle, cost

and resources; Easier account reconciliation, which affects several business-critical and legal

tax reports;

Today, relying on the Monarch Report Analytics Platform, the company gets:

Proven business logic that is already present within the existing reports that are delivered with the SAP system;

The ability to create new, custom and ad-hoc reports without knowing ABAP programming, database schemas, table relationships and other specialized, technical knowledge;

A way for managers to put their hands on the right data, allowing them to spend less time moving data from one system to another, thereby facilitating faster decision making.

Clarity and insight into trusted data with integrity, enabling managers and executives to identify important details that could otherwise lead to incorrect assumptions, bad decisions and poor business results;

A seamless and time-saving way to reconcile monthly SAP reports, such as the Inventory Book, a 5,000 page report containing all monthly stock transactions, with the General Ledger;

An astonishingly fast way to cross-check and finalize legal reports within three days of the end of the month.

“Monarch Report Analytics Platform is one of those applications I cannot imagine now working

without. It is a must-have in my toolbox.”



CHAPTER 1:


Best Practice Example: Healthcare Provider

“We were a traditional data center where report requests came in and somebody sat down, wrote code, tested it, deployed it, put it on a schedule and produced a paper copy on a regular basis.”

A healthcare provider operating in five U.S. states treats more than 300,000 patients and generates $140 million in revenue each year. This level of volume brings a significant challenge to tracking the organization’s financial, accounting and payroll records. Dealing with such a high volume of reports brings many challenges, including:

Excessive time, labor and money spent printing and distributing reports; A small group of Financial IT people being inundated with requests for new

reports; The need to manually rekey – while potentially introducing errors – vital data

from multiple hardcopy reports into multiple systems;

Now, the organization, its business users and its financial IT staff are much better off. The organization implemented the Monarch Report Analytics Platform to leverage their existing SAP report environment and reporting processes. Today, the organization has the ability to:

Have business users sort, filter, aggregate, graph and otherwise manipulate data themselves, without making requests of the financial IT team;

Access, analyze and understand data formerly locked away in bulky reports; Solve business problems previously considered unsolvable: for example, the

organization was able to streamline salary recalculations. Due to the complex nature of its business, the organization’s salary figures can consist

of 200 separate components, each with 30 decimal places. The organization was able to mine the relevant data from various reports, consolidate it and solve “a 20 year old payroll problem.”

“Monarch lets our business users analyze data themselves. We put reports out to the population and they can do whatever they want with it. These people are happy. They didn’t want the paper; they wanted the information. And in terms of labor and supply expenses, we estimate Monarch

saves us $40,000 per year.”



CHAPTER 2:

Managing Massive Amounts of Data

Best Practice Example: Global Manufacturer

“With Monarch Report Analytics Platform, we can easily summarize and analyze the mass of data from SAP reports and we can add other data, such as Excel files, for obtaining new evaluations and findings.”

This large manufacturer wanted better insight over and management of its financials. Like many businesses, key financial data was contained in the large volume of reports generated from SAP. The key to getting better insight was to compare budgets to actual report data from SAP; the data from SAP that was trusted, verifiable and secure.

The manufacturer knew its SAP reports held a treasure trove of data, but in their current form, they were simply unusable. The manufacturer wanted to:

Analyze accounting summary records, expense center summary records, detailed production information and sales summary records – all from SAP – with planning data stored, managed and analyzed in Excel;

Have the ability to analyze this data to a level of granularity that allowed for examining information by departments and sort on other fields;

Generate division-oriented accounting summaries, combining data in Excel with data in various SAP accounting links and other master data – such as material group, account name, expense center classification.

The manufacturer turned to the Monarch Report Analytics Platform, which transformed the firm’s static, unusable SAP reports into valuable, workable information. This approach leveraged the existing, well-developed SAP reports, which in turn, became a terrific foundation for better, more sophisticated reporting that

not only delivers the right data, but also creates a great end user reporting environment. Now, the manufacturer is able to:

See, analyze and make decisions on marketing and factory outcome, both monthly and cumulative;

Process untold numbers of single data records from SAP annually; Put difficult-to-process SAP reports into Excel easily, and without the labor

and risk of manual errors; and Have a comprehensive, single, workable source for all the company’s

financial information.

“Without Monarch Report Analytics Platform, it would be impossible to carry out important parts of

our busy company’s SAP reporting”



CHAPTER 3:

Adding Business Intelligence to Standard

ERP Reports

Best Practice Example: A High-Volume Distributor

“We found the business intelligence tools that came with SAP to be far too complex for everyday use.”

A family-owned distributor sells to thousands of independent retailers throughout the United States. The company’s overall number of sales transactions and shipments are three times greater than a typical distributor with similar sales revenue. The volume of transactions and number of customers makes managing the business extremely complex.

The organization needed a way to analyze the core financial and operational data and make better and faster decisions based on that information. Not only was the business intelligence tool too complex, but the company found the output from the tool yielded data that was hard to reconcile, and sometimes simply incorrect. And, using a business intelligence tool is not a simple proposition: the company had to stage data in interim data warehouse or data mart; this alone requires recreating business logic, hiring or contracting with database experts, deploying specific ETL tools and more.

In order to get the right information to the right people, the distributor needed to:

Mine data from existing SAP reports and from data views sourced from related databases; and

Be assured the sourced data had integrity, so they could have “complete confidence” in the data.

Now, with Monarch Report Analytics Platform, the distributor can:

Access, filter, summarize and export all the required data from existing SAP reports;

Prioritize shipments based on several criteria; Mine data from multiple data sources and reports, including backorder

reports, customer credit status reports, tables containing shipment limitations, and more;

Analyze the combined information and identify and prioritize shipments with the highest dollar value, with good credit, no shipment limitations, etc.;

Assess which high dollar shipments should be held due to past due invoices; Actively analyze sales data showing current year sales versus last year sales,

and filter this data by sales person, region and more.

“Monarch is our frontline solution for the

business intelligence we need on a daily basis throughout our organization.”



CHAPTER 4:

Empowering Business Users

Best Practice Example: A Large University

“We’ve made everyone self-sufficient in getting at the data they need, with no database programming and no need to re-key report information into Excel.”

A large university with a student population of more than 5,000 has vital data locked in its SAP system. The university struggled with:

Having the database programming resources needed to get the correct data reliably from SAP;

A way to transform existing SAP reports quickly and easily; Turning a 4-inch thick paper report – the university’s Master Schedule of

class descriptions, students per class, class capacities, instructors, numbers of credits and more – into usable and immediately available information;

Access vital data buried in SAP reports necessary for budget forecasting two years ahead;

Turning its 700-page financial report into workable data in Excel; Aggregating and integrating data from different SAP modules that contain

financial, HR and student data;

Starting from existing SAP reports – the ones developed by SAP itself – the university was able to transform the trusted data into actionable intelligence. With consolidated data from multiple SAP reports across multiple SAP modules, the university has unlocked its vital information and can:

Perform any type of ad hoc query on the Master Schedule, to make rapid business decisions such as for snow delays and cancellations;

Analyze and identify critical trending information by comparing course registrations, attrition rates, seasonality, and more;

Use insights gleaned from the information to make staffing decisions that support the university’s goal of providing a high quality education;

More accurately forecast budgets two years into the future; Easily analyze financial data for various analytical projects such as actual

versus budget analysis, spending by vendor, expense analysis and more; Assess the university’s finances to identify possible efficiencies to avoid

unnecessary costs; Combine data from the existing SAP reports from multiple SAP modules for a

single view and analysis, such as mining compensation reports, turning it into live data and ensuring the university properly manages overall compensation.

“Monarch is more valuable than ever for

institutions looking to easily work with data from their ERP system and easily bring needed data into Excel.”



CHAPTER 5:

Turning Unusable Data into Valuable Information

Best Practice Example: Worldwide Agribusiness

“It was essential that we kept our list of incoming and outgoing orders up to date, as well as our accountancy hierarchy, but we had a lot of files outgoing from SAP which were unworkable for the generation of these reports.”

A large, worldwide agribusiness with more than 24,000 employees in 90 countries relies on SAP to run its business. Unfortunately, the organization had a problem accessing key data contained in reports produced from SAP. The organization wanted to:

Get more use out of the “canned” SAP reports; Mine data from many types of documents, including PDF files, HTML files

and more; Combine data from multiple sources and file types into new, custom reports;

The organization’s finance controller quickly realized the value of better, workable data, but knew IT-intense, customized reporting was not the best solution. Instead, the organization turned to the Monarch Report Analytics Platform, which delivered not only a programming-free solution, but was also a very quick implementation, delivering benefits almost immediately.

Now, this agribusiness can:

Consolidate data from separate canned SAP reports into a single business view in Monarch;

Extract static data from SAP reports and sort, filter and summarize the information for better business decisions;

Use staff more strategically – the company has gained a “considerable” amount of time as a result of the staff no longer having to rekey data from one report to the next.

“Through using Monarch, staff are now able to exploit the data

they need from their reports. As well as noticing a massive increase in productivity, it is saving us a huge

amount of time.”



CHAPTER 5:

Turning Unusable Data into Valuable Information

Best Practice Example: Financial Services

“SAP provides a large selection of existing reports, but we need many different views of our data, as well as combinations of data from different modules. It is possible, of course, to design custom reports, but that would result in an unmanageable number of reports.”

A financial services and banking firm with more than 200 operating locations and 8,000 employees, had massive reporting and data challenges. The firm uses SAP for its operations and financial management; the ERP system contributes to many of the firm’s reporting challenges. For example:

There is no way to combine data from different modules; Creating and running numerous custom reports would negatively impact the

performance of SAP; It was impossible to consolidate information and analyze data regarding

revenue, direct labor costs and more, by branch and other factors; Multiple static reports meant the organization was not able to do an in-depth

analysis on payroll data;

Today, the firm has met those reporting and data challenges with the Monarch Report Analytics platform. This approach allowed them to achieve better reporting without building a data warehouse. By leveraging their investments in SAP and SAP reports, they’ve taken the fastest path to transforming unusable data into accessible, valuable information. Now, the organization has the ability to:

Mine and combine data from SAP reports it “knows, trusts and has already paid for;”

Get the customized data it needs, quickly and easily;

Glean insight from and make business decisions on information previously trapped in numerous SAP reports. For example, the firm can now mine data from multiple revenue and expense reports to create and analyze profitability reports.

“Thanks to Monarch, we have the customized data we need

for the most critical aspects of our business in the simplest manner possible. Monarch’s combination of data power and unrivaled ease of use has helped our company achieve improved

profitability and new business efficiencies we would not otherwise have.”



CONCLUSION:

How You Can Unlock the Data Trapped in your

SAP Reports

More than 109,000 organizations worldwide rely on SAP to help run their businesses. The global investment in SAP is significant, but very few companies are fully maximizing that investment. The vast majority struggle with finding and creating value out of the numerous “canned” reports that SAP delivers with its applications. Many find it impossible to unlock the immense business value contained within the SAP canned reports and therefore start from scratch with a large scale project to attempt to re-create a reporting environment with more end user flexibility and self-service. Some more strategic-thinking organizations have recognized the value of building on the solid reporting foundation that SAP delivers with its applications, by using the 3,500 canned SAP reports as the source for dynamic report analytics.

Those companies that have changed how they manage and work with SAP reports – like those discussed in this eBook – are well-positioned to be more competitive by making more informed business decisions, more quickly. Those companies are the ones who have solved the data problem and have made the right data available to the right people.

It’s time for your company to get more out of SAP. To really harness, understand and react to the information trapped in SAP reports floating through your enterprise.

Sign up for two complimentary SAP report models from Datawatch, at no charge, to demonstrate the value and benefits of the Monarch Report Analytics Platform. Get on the fast track to better SAP reports.

About Datawatch

Datawatch empowers organizations to transform the valuable information that is trapped in static reports, PDF files, text files and other content-rich, but difficult-to-use

sources, into a dynamic information analytics system that accelerates and improves decision-making throughout their operations. Datawatch's technology allows its 40,000 customers worldwide to leverage the investments they have made in reports from ERP, CRM and other applications into high performance analytic information at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional approaches. Datawatch is headquartered in Chelmsford, MA with offices in London, Sydney and Manila, and partners and customers in more than 100 countries worldwide.



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