Representing your Organisation Structure in SAP
At the start of any project one of the first and most important things to be done is
that your current best guess of your businesses organisation structure must be configured
in the SAP System. The sooner you do this and the more accurately you do this, the
quicker and better the project team can get on with prototyping or configuring the rest of
the system. Some functionality is quite dependent on which SAP organisation elements you
chose to represent various aspects of your organisation. So to avoid wasting too much
time, it is very important to get appropriate skills working on this design ASAP in order
to ensure that the initial configuration is reasonably appropriate.
Each module of SAP tends to have its own organisation elements, although some are
shared across modules (plant, division etc). If an element is very specific to that module
with localised usage, then I have not explained it here. Adequate explanation should
be in the R/3 Library.
The organisation structure decisions and issues are presented in the following
chapters:
Key SAP Organisation Elements /
Structures:
Following is a summary of the key elements for organisation structure and
functionality decisions. Follow the link on each for more detail and guidelines
on how to configure. The 'integration' section on this site will provide
some further tips.
| Element |
Owning Module |
Brief Description |
| Company Code |
FI |
mandatory, used for lowest legal entity |
| Business Area |
FI |
optional, used for sub or cross company
Balance Sheet reporting |
| Profit Centres |
CO-PCA |
optional, used for profit and return on
investment reporting. See also module decision on CO-PCA vs
CO-PA. |
| Cost Centres |
CO |
mandatory for responsibility level overhead
expense reporting |
| Sales Areas |
SD |
mandatory, actually a combination of the SD
elements : Sales Organisation, Distribution Channel and Division |
| Purchasing Organisation |
MM |
mandatory - could be just one. See R/3
library. |
Relatively "Uninteresting" SAP Organisation Elements:
Several SAP organisation elements are required purely as the top node of the
module providing an 'environment' under which a single set of data exists. Data
can usually not be shared across these 'top node' elements. These elements are
usually invisible to the users and can often be excluded from training or
explanatory diagrams. For that reason I do not see much point in
discussing them here - adequate information on their definition and relationship
to other elements is in the R/3 library. These elements are:
| Controlling Area |
CO - Controlling |
| Operating Concern |
CO-PA - Profitability Analysis |
| Financial Management Area |
TR - Treasury |
| Credit Control Area |
FI-AR & SD (Credit Management) |
SAP Master data which represents the Organisation
Structure:
In controlling, the Cost Centre and Profit Centre Hierarchies are also used
to represent the organisation or enterprise structure. SAP considers these
as 'master data' though not as organisation elements. Therefore
maintenance of these is not found in the Enterprise Structure
area of the IMG. However they are worth discussing here. Organisation
Structure issues relating to these are presented in two sections :
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