BACK TO THE FUTURE

Stephen Hambling, Director. Formulate

Consulting

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Time for a Quiz

Points for correct answers

Referee’s decision is final

I’m the referee

5 different areas with Planning functions?

BPC -10

BW planning -10

General ledger -10

Controlling (Cost Centre, Profit Centre,

Product costing, Projects etc) -10

CO- Profitability Analysis -20

EIS -50

3 places for Consolidation in Finance

BPC -10

BI/BW- SEM etc -10

External (hyperion etc) -10

Excel (!) -20

EC-CS -50

3 Finance reporting tools

BPC -10

BI/BW -10

Report painter & writer -10

Drill-down reporting -10

SAP Query -10

Summarisations and Evaluations -30

GL Wand & Reports Wand -100

Business Intelligence

Designed and developed as a reporting tool

Great toolset

Handles large volumes

Manages external data too

Requires additional hardware and licences

Additional skillset needed

Implementation and support are a factor

Headline solutions

Business Planning and Consolidation

Another great tool

Excel based

Very flexible rules based approach

Combines SAP and non SAP data

Brings more control to forecast process

As with BI, hardware, skills, licences and implementation are a factor

Headline solutions

Time is the biggest constraint Fast turnaround and ROI

Business need is NOW

Resource is a constraint

Business case must be viable Additional licence cost

Hardware

Complexity – sourcing skills to implement

Supporting Maintaining in house skills is challenging

Real benefits

Can’t report or analyse bad data

Rubbish in, Rubbish out!

Use SAP tools to enhance data

Flowing data through from earlier process

Simple stuff – assessments, substitutions,

mandatory data, user exits, BTE’s, BADI’s

It’s the data stupid!!

Specific report writing tool for FICO

Row and Column reports

Formulas and Formatting

Output to Excel

Used by many standard Finance reports

Can add own reports

A good solution for finance reporting

Can add create own libraries

Formatting has limits

Report Painter/Writer

Report Painter

Create your own hierarchy, with custom levels

choose the data to be collected

Run the summarisation routine

Fast reporting against the summarised data

Create your own reports

Available in Projects and Orders (PP, IO etc)

Project Summarisations

Summarisation

AR/AP Evaluations

T.code MC27 to create a new Evaluation structure Can use Data dictionary tables as source

Not restricted to Finance

Evaluation structure can be added to a Library

Can be used in Report Painter/Writer reports

For ad hoc or business specific reports its ideal

Create Evaluation structure

Evaluation structure

EIS – the mini BI system within SAP!

Create a Cube (an “Aspect” ), with Characteristics & Values

Create Master data – with Hierarchies

Extract data from source – internal or external

Standard loads from FI, CO, PS,TR, Consolidation

Or Custom load from SAP Query, or from standard Reports

Summarise data for speed

Manual data entry too

Going Old School!

EIS - Structure

EIS - Setup

Create Reports on the Aspect

Drilldown reporting

Create reporting groups and menu

Aspect creates Evaluation structure

So use MC27 to create a Report Painter Library

Aspect 001 = CO-PA

So CO-PA reports can be available in Report Painter

As can Externally uploaded data

Reporting on EIS

CO-PA Drilldown report

CO-PA Report painter report

Requirement is financial Consolidation system

EC-CS still available – works with New GL

Fully functioning Consolidation system

No additional licences or hardware

User interface in SAP, not Excel

Reporting via EIS/Report Painter

Will accept external upload

!

Going Old School!

Consolidation

Excel planning uploads to GL, Controlling, CO-PA & EIS

Hold any data in a cube in EIS

Consolidate in EC-CS

Report from any via Report painter and/or GL Wand

Upload external data

80% of the functionality of BPC, 20% of the cost…..

Not fashionable – but it works

Old school – Back to the future!

Reporting can’t solve poor data

BI and BPC are great tools

The challenges are time, cost and ROI

Standard SAP has good flexible reporting tools

Digging back in time reveals some gems

GL Wand is a real alternative – stand S10.

In Summary

The future might be behind you!