Common questions posted during handover

1) How do we manage the number of records in error stacks?
2) Identify owner of mapping and filter tables
3) Test on unit and currency conversion done?
4) Data release mechanism tested?
5) Yearly process chain or mechanism (such as balance brought forward) tested?
6) Any master data issue and escalation process?
7) Cleaning up of obsolete objects?

Intercompany Elimination - how BI helps to reduce manual workload

When preparing or combining consolidated balance sheet,routine manual finance task is required to deduct the intercompany items between a parent and its subsidiary. This can be done either through manual adjustment (by manual entries) or through dummy account posting.

However, there is a feature in BI that allows this deduction to be done automatically. It uses the elimination feature in the key figure infoobject (SAP reference). The elimination is by each characteristic pairs or done via start routine in the transformation for a more complex approach such as elimination at parent-child level (Intercompany elimination). The elimination figures is calculated in a separate flow and consolidated in the financial multiprovider for reporting.In a global environment, the different regions must have the standard and consistent master data that is referred to during the elimination such product (SKU) , selling business unit and buying business unit.

The business rules behind intercompany elimination:
1) IC sales -done as soon as data available in BI(dynamic) for the following account:

• Internal Net Turnover
• Bought in Goods
• Primary Supply Chain Cost

2) IC margin -done monthly
3) Profit in stock (involve IC margin and sales volume) - done monthly.Eg:

• 6 month rolling IC margin in June will be based on Jan-June IC Margin / Jan-June IC Sales volume
• 6 month rolling IC margin in July will be based on Feb-July IC Margin / Feb-July IC Sales volume

4) There are 2 types of elimination:

• Intracompany Elimination

BI will eliminate when the BU/Entity has an identical corresponding Partner BU/ Partner Entity

• Intercompany Elimination

BI will eliminate when the BU/Entity and the corresponding Partner BU/ Partner Entity
belong to the same level of the market hierarchy (eg. same End Market, Cluster, Zone, Area or Region)

The Framework of a BI BAU Organization

Change Management Framework - To be able to access the BI related changes and impacts from current development and changes in feed system, identify escalation party
Business Release Framework - To ensure the changes land successfully in the BR timeline, ensure the readiness of infrastructure and no impacts resulted from the transports
Quality Assurance Framework - To ensure no or minimal risks or defects landing into the system

Future of SAP BI?

Ok, we all know BO is gonna replace SAP BEx (not in near future) but HANA to wipe off the datawarehouse? This is like hardware evolution vs the datawarehousing technology. HANA 1.0 is more like the BWA but going forward, SAP's roadmap was to replace BW database with HANA, main memory cache is used to store data copy of database. But the BI application server is still to be used on top of HANA in addition to separate application server for ECC.

In-memory is going further to eliminate the need for a separate OLTP system . BI analytical capabilities are directly incorporated into the ECC system and allow all analytics to be run on operational data (ECC data). But hey, it's still a long way to go.