Best Practices for CO-PA
Submitted by dkaps on 6 July, 2009 - 21:55.- Limit the number of segment level characteristics in the operating concern to only those necessary for reporting and making CO assessments.
- Work closely with the Basis team to make sure there is sufficient disk space for the CO-PA tables. Organize a separate directory on the server for CO-PA data. Since CO-PA often requires special technical attention, it is vital to have a significant level of Basis support.
- Optimize the secondary index in the CE4xxxx table. Since CO-PA looks up a profitability segment number in the CE4 table for each line item that is transferred from a billing document, indexes on the CE4 table play an important role in system performance. By default, the primary index (ID 0) is the key from the segment level table. The secondary index (ID 1) is customizable and includes a subset of the segment level characteristics. The smaller number of characteristics in the index allows the system to access data more quickly. The standard secondary index delivered by SAP may not be suitable for a particular level of reporting, so this index should be reviewed and customized for each project. For further information on indexes, refer to the R/3 Library under AC - Financials CO - Controlling CO Profitability Analysis Technical Aspects of Profitability Analysis Index Support for Determination of Segment Numbers.
- Summarize line items in documents as they are transferred to CO-PA. This functionality reduces the number of line items in the CE1 table if multiple lines exist for the same item on a billing or financial document. You can maintain configuration for this type of summarization under Customization Actual postings Initial Steps Summarize data during update. If line items will not likely repeat on billing documents or financial documents, this recommendation will have the least impact on performance.
- Use summarization levels for reporting. If reports will be generated out of CO-PA, design standard reports that use common characteristics. This way, a limited number of summarization levels can be created to improve report performance. By storing data at a summarized level, CO-PA takes less time to generate reports because the system has fewer lines of data to read. When configured, summarization levels act like segment level characteristics, only at a higher level. CO-PA has built-in functionality that proposes summarization levels for specific reports.
- Use the "Fast Rollup" method to fill summarization levels. A Fast Rollup method has been developed to take a snapshot of CO-PA data and dramatically reduce the time required to fill summarization levels. In our experience at GWF, it took more than six hours to fill summarization levels for one million line items using traditional functionality, whereas the process took only three minutes using the Fast Rollup method. Special system setup is required to use the Fast Rollup method because it uses a parallel query. OSS Note 136216 explains technical details for setting up the system. Instructions from SAP on how to use the Fast Rollup method are attached along with this document. Note that the Fast Rollup method requires a significant amount of Basis support.
SAP Benchmarking Program tracking KPIs of System Performance
Submitted by dkaps on 6 July, 2009 - 18:30.SAP is in the process of bartering an increase in the cost of the Enterprise Support service with the user measuring key KPIs of their systems. The KPIs being measured are CPU utilization and storage performance.
In all 11 KPIs will be tracked via the Solution Manager supervision tool. The KPIs were defined by SAP and the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN).
This will help improve the ability of SAP to help optimize the performance of its systems.
SAP facing pressure from Oracle and Netsuite
Submitted by dkaps on 30 June, 2009 - 16:16.SAP is seeing pressure from all the sides. Oracle, due to the recent acquisitions has been pushing SAP down this past year. The new software sales from SAP plunged 33% last quarter, while Oracle's stock has been performing better than SAP's. It may be even losing market share as the companies start looking for alternatives to SAP because of various reasons.
SAP is "clearly losing market share," said Adam Wood, a Paris-based analyst at Exane BNP Paribas who rates SAP "underperform." "Because of the acquisitions Oracle has made recently, it's left them with a bigger product range for their existing customers."
So, maybe after all, all the acquisitions by Oracle have started showing their results.
Oracle vs SAP - Which way should you go?
Submitted by dkaps on 16 January, 2007 - 15:38.A lot of companies discuss the
differences between Oracle/Peoplesoft and SAP, when they go for any implementation. I feel there are two BIG ones:
1.
Superior Integration in SAP due to Organic build up vs acquisition strategy of Oracle.
2. SAP's vision for next 5-10
years is very tangible and clear - so reduced risk for a CIO vs Oracle with its stable full of various competing and myriad
products like Peoplesoft/Oracle/Siebel and no clear, well defined, strategy for a CIO of the next 5-10 years.
One Global SAP Instance vs Multiple Regional Instances
Submitted by dkaps on 30 June, 2009 - 19:09.As more and more companies are acquiring other companies with different and disparate databases there are complexities that come from merger and integration of the IT applications. Even in the organic growth, when a company grows across geographies, it is seen that multiple SAP systems may need to be merged.
In such situations, one major question that every CIO grapples with is should one have One Single SAP Global Instance or Separate Regional Instances.
TO properly evaluate, there are many things that need to think through. The pros and cons of the two different alternatives are a good startiing point for that evaluation and discussion.
Single Global Instance
Advantages
- Maximum utilisation of SAP Functional Integration
- Forces standardisation or commonality
- Lower cost of on-going maintenance
- Organisation-wide operational reporting is standard
Identifying similar incoming invoices
Submitted by dkaps on 9 July, 2008 - 18:08.This is a useful video on How To identify similar incoming invoices during the process of posting documents. Please share your comments on this.
How Google's Technology could possibly Change SAP BI
Submitted by dkaps on 9 August, 2006 - 08:47.Query Execution and Efficiency is a major
concern in organizations with large amounts of data! SAP has come out with a Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA) tool
that does a good job.. but Google's technique and architecture is still the best!
Here is what Naeem Hashmi says about BIA:
Home