BACK TO THE FUTURE - Formulate Consulting
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Transcript BACK TO THE FUTURE - Formulate Consulting
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!