In March 2024, SAP announced the latest capabilities in SAP Datasphere, focusing on streamlining the business data fabric, which seamlessly connects various SAP and third-party data sources. These advancements are set to transform how enterprises manage and report data, providing a unified platform for real-time data integration and analysis. For example, Hershey’s is using SAP Datasphere in combination with SAP S/4HANA to build a modern data analytics platform that enables business self-service and trusted data models for decision-making.
These new features include the integration of SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP Datasphere for seamless planning and analytics. Business users can now take advantage of advanced capabilities like Monte Carlo simulation for risk analysis and planning adjustments, all powered through a simple chat interface. This kind of integration enhances operational and financial planning by providing a unified model for data preparation, analytics, and planning.
Moreover, SAP has collaborated with leading partners like Collibra and Confluent to expand its data and AI governance capabilities. Collibra AI Governance ensures trusted and compliant use of data within AI models, while the Confluent integration allows for real-time data streaming to and from SAP Datasphere, making the data management ecosystem more robust and user-friendly. These partnerships emphasize SAP's commitment to creating a comprehensive, open data ecosystem that can effectively meet the diverse needs of enterprises.
With all these updates, SAP Datasphere stands out by providing an advanced and integrated data foundation, allowing enterprises to set up cross-system reporting efficiently without sacrificing context, security, or performance. Let’s now dive deeper into the steps you can take to set up cross-system reporting with SAP Datasphere and leverage its latest innovations for your organization.
SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) propels into Q3 2024, leveraging new features that enhance financial planning and strategic decision-making. This quarter, SAP introduces deeper integrations with Microsoft PowerPoint and advanced forecasting tools, paralleling innovations seen in tech leaders like Google and Amazon.
The highlight is the integration with Microsoft PowerPoint, allowing for live data updates directly in presentations—vital for real-time business decision-making. Deeper integration with Microsoft PowerPoint now allows financial planners to present up-to-the-minute financial data directly in their strategic presentations, ensuring decisions are based on the latest insights.
SAP has introduced a transformative update to its Advanced Financial Closing (AFC) solution with the introduction of Company Code Groups, allowing finance teams to streamline and organize financial closing tasks more efficiently. For those new to this, AFC is a robust SAP solution designed to optimize the complex process of financial closing by automating tasks, enhancing reporting accuracy, and reducing closing times.
This update marks a significant milestone for global enterprises like Siemens and Nestlé, which now have enhanced capabilities to streamline their financial operations efficiently across various business dimensions.
The new Company Code Groups feature revolutionizes financial closing by allowing more dynamic, customizable groupings of company codes. This means finance teams can tailor their processes to fit distinct business units or geographic regions with unprecedented precision. This tool simplifies handling your finances, making sure everything's up to standard with rules like IFRS and SOX, and lets you check your financial status on the fly, all from one spot.
In this blog, you will discover how SAP’s latest innovation in AFC will significantly reduce the complexity and duration of financial closing processes. We’ll delve into the technical nuts and bolts of Company Code Groups, explore their impact on flexibility and efficiency, and look at real-world applications that demonstrate why this tool is essential for today’s multinational corporations.
With the ongoing generative AI boom, businesses are seeing unprecedented scalability and accessibility in AI applications, making advanced AI tools available not just to large corporations but to startups and mid-sized businesses as well. The blend of these advancements with SAP’s innovative approach paves the way for a transformative era in business technology.
This article delves into the concept of real-time reporting, highlighting the fundamental differences between real-time and traditional reporting. We'll then explore five key advantages that real-time reporting in S/4HANA Finance offers, such as enhanced decision-making, improved operational efficiency, etc.
Additionally, we will discuss the key features of S/4HANA Finance that support real-time reporting, and how businesses can leverage embedded analytics within S/4HANA and SAC for practical real-time FI reporting use cases.
The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code® (UNSPSC®), is an open, global, multi-sector standard for efficient, accurate classification of products and services. This code is generally assigned to materials and is used for company-wide visibility of spend analysis, cost-optimization and more.
Start: Wednesday, January 25th, 2017 1:00 PM (CT), 2:00 PM (ET), 12:00 PM (MT), 11:00 AM (PT)
End: Wednesday, January 25th, 2017 1:00 PM (CT), 2:00 PM (ET), 12:00 PM (MT), 11:00 AM (PT)
Analyzing Profitability is a key task in any organization. It helps shed light on sales and profit information on various aspects of the market such as customers, geographic regions, product lines, and many more. There are several tools that can be used to analyze profitability in SAP, the most common being CO-PA (Controlling Profitability Analysis). However, many companies still resort to using spreadsheets and other manual methods (despite their plethora of issues) to accomplish this task. Is your company using the system to effectively analyze its profitability data?
Attend this live Q&A with Paul Ovigele, FICO Expert and Founder of ERPfixers, and Janet Salmon, Chief Product Owner for Management Accounting at SAP, where you can ask your most pressing questions, such as:
Ask a Fixer is a live ASUG-hosted Q&A session with one of ERPfixers’ top-rated SAP experts (“Fixers”) in a specific module or topic. In this real-time discussion session, you have the opportunity to pose your specific questions to a Fixer, who will provide an immediate answer during the forum. This is a great way to get quick answers to your pressing issues, as well as learn from questions posted by other users during the forum.
Speakers:
Paul Ovigele, Author: Reconciling SAP CO-PA to the General ledger
Janet Salmon, Author: Controlling with SAP - Practical Guide
If you cannot attend: The webcast will be recorded. The link to the recording will be posted here and emailed to all registrants.
To register, please go to ASUG.
If there is any SAP topic that sends shivers down the spines of end users and experts alike, it is Material Ledger. There seems to be a lot of confusion around what is does, when you should use it and how to interpret its results. What's more, Material Ledger has integration points with several modules such as Financial Accounting, Profitability Analysis, Materials Management, Sales and Distribution and Production Planning, and therefore, it has a pervasive impact on the system.
View the Live Q&A with two Material Ledger experts, Paul Ovigele and Rogerio Faleiros, where you can see some of the most pressing questions such as:
Attend this live Q&A with two Material Ledger experts, Paul Ovigele and Rogerio Faleiros, where you can ask your most pressing questions such as:
Right after a new implementation, everybody is concentrating on getting the invoicing right, and paying suppliers etc. and they tend to assume that the GR/IR is taking care of itself. Generally, if everything matches, it does, the problem is that not everybody understands that the quantity must match exactly to clear the GR/IR account. A typical problem where the invoices are posted manually, could be users struggling to post fractions correctly, for example where using the standard goods receipt process for a service. Another problem, where invoices and credit notes are posted via an interface, is not being able to distinguish between a price and quantity difference and using e.g. a credit memo to post all corrections.
The Business Information (BI) module is one of the most dynamically changing areas, both within the SAP world and externally. This is partially due to the increased need for real-time business metrics on multiple devices, the rise in mergers and acquisitions, and the evolution of SAP HANA-only systems, which opens up an array of possibilities.
Attend this live Q&A with two of ERPfixers' BI and SAP HANA experts, Dmitry Kuznetsov and Mani Chinnaiah, where you can ask your most pressing questions such as:
Is there a future for classic BW?
When is best to use BW and when S/4HANA Modelling?
What is the up-side of S/4HANA Analytics over native HANA Modelling?
How to "build history" in HANA
Does it save time to implement HANA-based Data Warehouse?
Is HANA Live fading away?
What team-training is advised in the BI area?
How is predictive analytics integrated in SAP?
How is the Internet of Things (IoT) handled in HANA Cloud Platform?
The Goods Receipt / Invoice Receipt (GR/IR) account is normally the most challenging account to manage. This is partly because of the number of transactions that are posted to it, and also because of numerous factors that could lead to its discrepancy.
Review the Q&A by Oona Flanagan, FICO Consultant and author of the SAP Press E-Bite “Invoice Verification with SAP: Payment Blocks in GR/IR Accounts”, where you can ask your most pressing questions such as:
- In transaction MIRO (post invoice) should I use a credit memo or a subsequent credit to post a credit note from the vendor?
- What is “Goods Receipt Based Invoice Verification” and when should I use it?
- What is the best way to post a “receipt” for a service?
- Why does my GR/IR account have a balance on it for a particular purchase order when the amount of the related invoices seems to be correct?
- When should I use Transactions MRBR to release an invoice and MR11 to write off a balance?
Attend this live Q&A with Oona Flanagan, FICO Consultant and author of the SAP Press E-Bite “Invoice Verification with SAP: Payment Blocks in GR/IR Accounts”, where you can ask your most pressing questions such as:
It is hard to find an easy explanation about ABAP coding in standard queries . In some casesyou can’t easily attach additional information to a field in a Query or you need to call and ABAP function module to do an specific calculation, then adding coding to a local field may be a suitable solution. To demonstrate this we are going to make a standard query with one table using ABAP Coding on it, instead of creating an infoset with three tables inner join) as usual.
We’ve all heard the buzz around SAP S/4HANA Finance. But what are the practical benefits that you can achieve from its new functionalities? Attend this live Q&A with SAP Mentor and Trainer, Ajay Maheshwari, where you can ask your most pressing questions such as:
- What is the Universal Journal?
- What are the new Tables available with S/4 HANA Finance?
- What is the impact of S/4 HANA Finance functionality on period closing?
- What is New Asset Accounting, and how is it different from the traditional Fixed Assets module?
- Is New GL migration necessary for SFIN, for the customers still on Classic GL?
- How different is Simple Finance from S/4 HANA Finance?
- What is Central Finance?
Sometimes, users needs to enter some text directly (decisions, explanations, comments), for example, during the running of a module pool program. There is an easy way where the user can perform this action. Via MF TERM_CONTROL_EDIT. This MF shows a POP-UP with a text editor screen that is very simple and where the user can enter texts or perform the action of importing/exporting files.
When we encounter errors/issues in an SRM document (like POs, shopping cart and SRM/EP related SAP objects), then we usually login to the SRM or EP portal to access these corresponding document. In order to analyze further - we also have to check the SRM system to crosscheck if the issue is with any custom code put into the BADI’s (Business AddIns).
To debug this scenario we would have to perform certain set of activity that is causing the error like ordering the PO etc. in the portal login which then calls the SRM system where the actual processing is done. To achieve this we will be using the external debugging option that SAP has provided. (In other words, we can say that to find the RCA we have to debug the SRM/EP objects in their corresponding landscape and that require few settings as explained below).
XBP - stands for External Interface for Background Processing. It is used to enable external entity/system to schedule, start and monitor jobs inside SAP. In XBP, we have many RFC enabled function modules (provided by SAP) which can help external systems to control various background activities in job (like create, modify, delete, start, terminate, monitor etc. inside SAP).
In this article, we will explaining how to implement a web service call from Microsoft Excel. The prerequisite to for this? We must have web service toolkit installed.
The user requires the ability to calculate percentage of completion without planned costs, using total revenue minus planned margin as the cost basis.
Ask a Fixer is a live ASUG-hosted Q&A session with one of ERPfixers’ top-rated SAP experts (“Fixers”) in a specific module or topic. In this real-time discussion session, you have the opportunity to pose your specific questions to a Fixer, who will provide an immediate answer during the forum. This is a great way to get quick answers to your pressing issues, as well as learn from questions posted by other users during the forum. And it is exclusive to ASUG members only!
The most successful Fixers are the ones who consistently provide high quality service. Everything from your profile to the communications you provide can contribute to a high quality presence on ERPfixers. Read on for our top tips on how to provide a high quality experience on ERPfixers.
