SAP Scene

Flexibility of your organisations representation in SAP

This section discusses the idea of SAP "Flexibility" at an overview level. Senior client management are always worried about this.   SAP is supposed to be 'flexible' they say - will it cope with the possible changes coming up for my organisation ?

It is important to understand what areas are very "flexible" and what areas may cause some pain to change. A broad rule of thumb is that if the impending change is going to be painful for the organisation as a whole, then it will probably be a bit painful on any system - just the degrees of pain will be different.

When designing the representation of your organisation in SAP it is worthwhile doing some research into what areas (if any) are likely to change on any regular basis and then considering how that change would have to be implemented.

For example: purely cost centre relationship changes which cause changes in the Cost centre hierarchy or perhaps an alternate hierarchy are relatively easy to implement and could possibly be handled as a master data change directly in production.

However something which causes a change to the SD organisation structure may not be so easy to implement - it may require configuration changes, or additional configuration with the associated risk that not all necessary areas may be created causing operational problems.

For example: if it is a change/addition to Sales Areas - large numbers of customer master records may have to be updated or new segments created.

History - to change or not to change

You should ensure that there is a clear understanding of

• whether there is any requirement to update historical data to allow comparison with the new organisation,
• what areas of history cannot or should not be updated,
• the impacts or limitations of some changes that the system does allow.

For example:

• Profit and Cost Centre comparison to historical data is relatively easy using alternative hierarchies - leaving the old organisation structure/ hierarchy untouched and just creating a new hierarchy valid for historical times too.  There is no need to update historical data.
• The CO-PA Profitability Analysis module has a re-alignment function which allows you to change the historical data to put it in line with the new organisation structure.   However you then loose the historical view, including possibly reconciliations to the GL.
• The General Ledger historical data cannot easily and indeed should not be updated.   This is your statutory record and you should not mess with it.

  23 October, 2002