07 Feb KISS Super Bowl Spot
(Disclaimer – This is a fictional depiction as our rates are far too reasonable to support mass media purchases)
Imagine a Super Bowl ad spot for SAP financials implementation experts. The brief scene features an experienced, confident professional gazing wistfully into the distance. The only line is simply “It Was Always You” followed by the camera panning to reveal an SAP general ledger report with profitability details.
SAP Financials solutions have gone through many iterations, but they’ve always centered around general ledger integrity. As clients deploy or migrate to S/4, strategic guidance can be gleaned from this history. A sound strategy can ease development effort and avoid future risk.
ERP on relational databases was the focus in the 90s. Database performance was a challenge that led to separate purpose-driven ledgers – such as COPA for profitability, CCA for departments, PCA for divisions, and Special Ledger. These financial silos were in addition to detailed sales and logistics analytics. Each report was focused on its data island, but procedures were built to ensure everything could bridge back to the “truth” – the general ledger.
In the early 2000s, the Business Warehouse was a separate system that provided a faster way to structure data in a relational database. We used this architecture to build enriched general ledger reporting solutions, ensuring accurate financial results while producing more robust results from a single solution. This combined logistical information with detailed ledger activity but still faced logical limitations. There were also time lags between data entry and reporting.
The New General Ledger provided functional advantages, including tighter controlling integration and an improved ability to use custom fields. However, the HANA database (even prior to S/4) was perhaps the most significant game changer. Suddenly, the GL line item bseg table was no longer of type cluster, so it could be used in SQL joins. Dramatic database performance improvements supported real-time, cross-functional reporting.
S/4 with the Universal Ledger and custom reporting capability closes upon the ideal of a single real-time source for all financially relevant reporting. Getting the data correct and enriched in the ledger avoids data inconsistencies and wasted reconciliation time. Keep It Simple SAP (KISS) and ensure your reporting strategy revolves around the general ledger. It has always been the one!
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