BACK TO THE FUTURE
Stephen Hambling, Director. Formulate Consulting
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
Headline solutions
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
Real benefits
 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
It’s the data stupid!!
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
Planning
All of FICO has planning capability
FI, Cost Centres, Profit Centres, COPA, Projects
Copy to new version, Custom formulas, not financial data
Upload from Excel is standard
Report Painter/Writer
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
Create Evaluation structure
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
Evaluation structure
AR/AP Evaluations
Project Summarisations
 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)
Summarisation
Going Old School!
EIS – the mini BI system within SAP!
Create a Cube (an “Aspect”), with Characteristics & Values
Create Master data – with Hierarchies
Full Planning tool
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
EIS - Structure
EIS - Setup
Reporting on EIS
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
CO-PA Drilldown report
CO-PA Report painter report
Going Old School!
 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
!
Consolidation
Old school – Back to the future!
Excel planning uploads to GL, Controlling, CO-PA & EIS
Hold and manipulate 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
In Summary
 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.
The future might be behind you!