Orange County Convention Center
Orlando, Florida | June 3-5, 2014
Owens Corning Financial Consolidation Migrating from
7.0 to 10.0
Terri Himmel & David Hutton
Abstract
 Hear why Owens Corning decided to migrate the
consolidation from BPC 7.0 – 10.0
 Review the business case for changing the business
model to a Group Based Financial consolidation
 Learn about some of the “Key Design Decisions”
that were made during the project
 Hear about the decision to remove some custom
development and justification to add some more
 Hear how OC leveraged the cloud to accelerate
their technical migration
 Understand the performance metrics of an E2E
consolidation from four source systems (7.0 v 10.0)
Who is Owens Corning?
 Owens Corning Corporation is the world's largest
manufacturer of fiberglass and related products. It
was formed in 1935 and spun off independently in
1938.
 Fortune 500 Company for 59 consecutive years




Sales of $5.3 billion in 2013
Approximately 15,000 employees
27 countries
Five continents
Credit: Owens Corning
Who is Owens Corning?
 OC invented glass fiber and glass fiber insulation in
1938; split into two major business segments:
 Composites
 OC glass fiber materials can be found in over 40,000 end-use
applications
 Building Materials




Roofing
Insulation
Sound insulation / Acoustic Solutions
Basement finishing solutions
Credit: Owens Corning
OC Has Been to the Moon
 Apollo 7 astronauts dressed
in and slept on Beta cloth
material
 First Moon vehicle equipped
with Fire Safe Fiberglass Beta
material
Personal photos taken at OC Museum, WHQ in Toledo
Speaker Introductions
 Terri Himmel (Owens Corning)
 Finance Center of Excellence Leader
 Led OC through both installations of BPC
(7.0 and 10.0)
 9 years of Owens Corning experience
 Dave Hutton (TruQua)
 BPC Consolidations Consultant
 17 years of SAP Consolidations experience
Agenda
5. Benefits
4. Project Realization
3. Key Design Decisions
2. Consolidations Wish List
1. Existing Pain Points
SAP Legacy
 Evolution of OC consolidation solutions follows
SAP’s history of products:
 FI-LC (circa 1900)
 EC-CS (1996 - 1997)
 BPC 7.0 (2008)
 The bleeding edge of technology
 Generally available in Q2/2009
 Plus numerous source
systems (4 currently)
This is a file from the flickr Commons, credit:flickr.comphotosmecklenburg/
Operational Challenges
 Consolidate results from +-3800 entities
 4 hierarchies
1.
2.
3.
4.
Management
Legal
Geographic
Tax
 Fast close (3 days)
 Numerous consolidations
during close
 4 SAP source systems
 Small team (centralized)
This is a file from the flickr Commons, credit:flickr.com/photos/tantrum_dan/
Hierarchy Complexities
 Emerged from bankruptcy with sophisticated legal
structure
 Constantly evolving management structure
Building Materials
Insulation
Markets / Channel
Customers
Regions
Vertical Integration
Capital
Products
Plant Operations
Distribution
Warehouses
Res EIS
Drive Org
Structure
R&A
Foam
Rebates
North America
High
Continuou
s
Drive Org Structure
Discontinuous
Many
Composites
Reinf
ES
NonWoven
s
Fabrics
Americas, Asia, Europe
High
Drive Org Structure
Continuou
s
Discontinuous
BPC 7.0 Pain Points
 Entity Hierarchies
1.
2.
3.
4.
Management
Legal
Geographic
Tax
 Creating new hierarchies is labor
intensive
 Security impact
 Entities
 Profit centers
 3800 dimension
members
 14 hierarchy levels
 Nine Hierarchies
 Management reporting
requires new hierarchy
each year
BPC 7.0 Pain Points
 Dimension members
 Obsolete members
 Leading zero’s
 Data Visibility
 IBM DataStage (custom development)
 “US Eliminations”
 Reconciliation
 Functionality
 “US Eliminations”
 Intercompany reconciliation
This is a file from Getty Images
BPC 7.0 Pain Points
 Undocumented functionality
 Customization (ABAP)
 IBM DataStage – source data mapping / logic
 Consolidation time is longer than desired
 80 minutes for the first execution
 60 minutes subsequently
?
BPC 7.0 Pain Points
 Reporting
 Slow execution on large reports with multiple tabs
 Formatting of reports is labor intensive
 No ability to report on lower levels of data
 Lack of ability to copy current application into quality
assurance system
Agenda
5. Benefits
4. Project Realization
3. Key Design Decisions
2. Consolidations Wish List
1. Existing Pain Points
Dreaming Big




Intuitive
Fast
Transparent
Maintainable
This is a file from Flickr commons
Credit: flickr.comphotoshavro
This is a file from Getty Images
BPC 10.0 Wish List
 Make hierarchy maintenance easy
 Make intercompany eliminations better
 Provide insight into the data
 Adjustments, translations and eliminations
 Data loads from sources




Improve consolidation execution times
Utilize standard functionality
Improve report performance
Remove obsolete master data
Agenda
5. Benefits
4. Project Realization
3. Key Design Decisions
2. Consolidations Wish List
1. Existing Pain Points
“Elim Entities” versus “Groups”
 Eliminations on “groups” more intuitive
 Still maintained entities but made them time-dependent
Entity
Dimension
Group
Dimension
Entity
Dimension
The Side Effect of Using “Groups”
Financial Model
“Elim Entities”
TruQua migration and maintenance tool
Ownership Model
“Groups”
Business Rules
configuration change
from “US Eliminations”
to more advanced
“Eliminations and
Adjustments”
Consolidation Model
“Groups”
SAP BW InfoProvider
“Time-dependent groups”
Time-dependent master
data and transaction data
history to overcome
“PARENT_GROUP”
limitations
Eliminations: Weighing The Value of ‘To Be’
“Elim
Entities”
“Group”
Key Design Decisions
 Consolidation Model
 Time-dependent entity hierarchies
 Eliminated security maintenance
 Streamlined master data maintenance
 Minimized change management impacts
 More details for auditability
 Replace customization with standard
functionality
 Almost all Data Manager packages were
custom in 7.0
 Replaced IBM DataStage with standard SAP
BW pre-delivered content
This is a file from the flickr Commons
credit: flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/
Agenda
5. Benefits
4. Project Realization
3. Key Design Decisions
2. Consolidations Wish List
1. Existing Pain Points
Using the Cloud for Project Acceleration
TruQua Cloud
Environment
Security:
• SAP SNC
• Encrypted DB
• Dual Factor
Authentication
BPC 7.0 / BW 7.01
BPC 10.0 / BW 7.31
Client SAP
Environment
Building a Better Solution
 End-to-end “lights-out” automation
 SAP ERP and SAP BW data loads
 Consolidations (e.g. currency translation and eliminations)
 Generation of the group hierarchy and ownership data from
time-dependent entity hierarchies
 Capturing records with bad or obsolete master data
 Automated data validations (i.e. debits equal credits)
 Automatic e-mail notifications
 Enhanced reporting and analysis
 Document line item drill-through
Credit: Owens Corning
Optimizing Performance
 Sizing hardware
 Making operating
system changes
 Applying Oracle
database patches
 Configuring SAP
NetWeaver
 Re-designing and reconfiguring BPC
 Use of the “Parallel
Execution
Framework”
P
P
P
Agenda
5. Benefits
4. Project Realization
3. Key Design Decisions
2. Consolidations Wish List
1. Existing Pain Points
Performance Metrics
Task
BPC 7.0 (mins)
BPC 10.0 (mins)
Load from Source - 4 ERP systems //
30
10
Translate and eliminate
30
Currency Translation
10
Net Income (script)
1
Eliminations
10
Total Time
60
31
Data Volumes (monthly)
BPC 7.0 (recs)
BPC 10.0 (recs)
Group None
220K
Legal
1.9M
Management / tax / Geographic
3.5M
Total
800K
5M
Reporting Impacts
 Performance
 2x to 20x faster
 Usability
 Very similar but
formatting is
much easier
 Maintenance
 Had to learn a
new Excel add-in
tool and re-write
all reports
Performance
and Usability
Maintenance
Business Benefits






Transparency to data from source systems
Ability to reconcile between SAP and BPC
Automated processes
Reporting performance
Drill through capability
Automated data validations
This is a photo from Flickr commons Credit: flickr.comphotosphotorisma
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SESSION CODE: 1609
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