You have probably heard about SAP's new product mySAP ERP. It includes mySAP Financials, mySAP Human Capital Management, mySAP Operations, and mySAP Corporate Services, plus Analytics and Self-Services. It is built using SAP's NetWeaver technology stack, bringing together the latest versions of Enterprise Portal, Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM), Business Information Warehouse (BW), and ERP Core Component into a single package.

mySAP ERP delivers role-based portals for a number of user groups. I will examine the role of the business unit analyst, a role that addresses the CO and BW users responsible for monitoring the financial health of a business unit. Specifically, I will show you how to configure the role by mapping the relevant parts of the ERP Core Component, BW, and SEM into Enterprise Portal. I will also explain how to download the relevant portal content from the iView studio and then focus on two areas within the role — reporting and internal service requests — to show you how the pieces fit together.

The Business Package: Business Unit Analyst

Figure 1 shows the Overview page for Business Unit Analysis comprising four worksets: Key Figure and Budget Monitor, Reports, Planning, and Master Data. Each part of the screen is an iView — a Web application that displays information from an internal or external source — within the portal. These iViews will be available for download from iView Studio (www.iviewstudio.com/sapportal/home.asp) in the second quarter of 2004. The portal content will be available with the business package Business Unit Analyst. This business package groups together all the iViews you need for this role. Downloading the package activates the individual pages and the navigation between pages. Before users can see the package contents in their portal, the administrator must assign their user name to the role Business Unit Analyst.

Figure 1

Overview page for the business unit analys

However, the portal is useful only when each of these iViews is fed with content from the relevant back- end systems, selected according to the user's authorization profile in that system. In the case of the business unit analyst, content from SEM, BW, and the ERP core component (the latest version of the R/3 core) is required. To see how this works, I will show you how to link the reports application with master data from the ERP core component and Web queries in BW.

Reports

Figure 2 on the next page shows two iViews that together form the reporting application for the business unit analyst. On the left, the iView Business Unit shows the master data from the ERP core component. On the right, the iView Report Selection shows a list of reports that can be started for the profit center, cost center, or order selected on the left. These reports can come from BW, the ERP core component, or an external system.

Figure 2

Business unit and launchpad

The Business Unit iView

You can configure the iView Business Unit to read profit centers and profit center groups from EC-PCA, cost centers and cost center groups from CO-OM-CCA, and orders and order groups from CO-OM-OPA at a typical R/3 site, using the standard CO components. A site using the new G/L, available with mySAP ERP, can configure its G/L to produce income statements. The site uses the same set of tables (rather than separate Special Purpose Ledgers and profit center ledgers) to produce the income statements for new entities such as segments and existing entities such as profit centers and profit center groups. In this case, the site can configure the iView to display the segment alongside the profit centers and other entities. To return to the R/3 example, this iView can be configured to show each of the CO hierarchies as separate hierarchies in a way that is familiar to all CO users. You also can configure it to read the assignments between the orders, cost centers, and profit centers from their master data and display the objects together in one hierarchy, as shown in Figure 2.

This configuration step takes place in the ERP Core Component. The implementation guide for the business unit analyst is accessible via Integration with Other mysap.com Components> Business Packages/Functional Packages>Business Unit Analyst (mySAP ERP). The step Hierarchy Navigation allows the administrator to choose among:

• Each object in a separate hierarchy (the way things were in R/3)
  
  
• All objects of the same type in the same hierarchy (Figure 2)
  
  
• All objects in the same hierarchy

These options are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Customizing the hierarchy navigation

At this stage, it is also important to configure which objects the business unit analyst is allowed to see. Depending on the implementation, this includes segments, profit centers, cost centers, orders, cost elements (and all groups thereof), and planning versions. The step Personalization allows the administrator either to enter this information manually or, at a site already running R/3, to derive the personalization from the business unit analyst's current authorizations.

The Report Selection iView

The iView Report Selection can be configured to call reports from both BW and the ERP core component. Table 1 shows the reports designed specifically for the business unit analyst and delivered as Business Content in BW Release 3.5.2. If required, these can also be used directly in BW, without implementing Enterprise Portal.

If the site chooses to use these reports, then the system administrator does not have to do any customizing in the ERP core component, but needs to activate the queries (the BW reports), InfoCubes (the multidimensional data stores), and InfoSources (the structures used to request data from the ERP core component) associated with these Web templates in BW. This process is described in the BW documentation. The administrator should also ensure that the authorizations maintained in the ERP core component are extracted to the relevant ODS objects in BW, such as 0CCA_O01 for the cost centers. You can then use this data to fill exit variables when reports are run in BW. The business unit analyst documentation describes this process in more detail, as does SAP note 547533.

Sites that have already implemented BW may prefer to replace the delivered income statement report with their own income statement. In this case, they need to go to Compile Report List in the implementation guide and enter their own reports for each object type. Figure 4 shows the current settings for the income statement on the profit center. As you can see, the current report is a BW report with a template and is started with the selection screen (rather than springing directly into the report using personalization). The administrator would change the Application Category to BW Report. The remaining fields on the screen would then change, prompting the administrator to enter the logical system, query name, InfoCube name, and text for the new report.

Figure 4

Report list settings

Sites using the new G/L, on the other hand, can change the settings to include the BW reports delivered for use with the new G/L. These are displayed in Table 2.

The same applies to sites currently using R/3 reports. They can change the settings, for example, to include the income statement on the profit center:

• As a list report, transaction S_ALR_87009712 (report 8A22)
  
  
• As a drill-down report, transaction S_ALR_87013340 (report 8A26)
  
  
• A custom-built R/3 report

Sites using an external reporting system can replace the BW income statement with a URL.

Internal Service Requests

So far, I have focused on how to display information from the ERP core component and BW in the portal. I would now like to show how users can use internal service requests to initiate action in the back office from the portal. I'll use the example of a service request for a reposting.

One of the applications shown in Figure 1 is Critical Postings. This allows the business unit analyst to create rules to display line items above a certain threshold or forunplanned cost elements. If the business unit analyst finds a problem, he can select the line, analyze the document, and create an internal service request to initiate a correction. This automatically transfers the document number, year, and so on, into an Adobe Interactive Form together with details about the applicant. Text fields allow the business unit analyst to describe why the correction is needed.

When he submits the form, a workflow is triggered that finds the cost accountant responsible for the reposting and creates a work item in the cost accountant's inbox. If the cost accountant is also a portal user, then the item appears in the universal worklist in the portal. If not, then it appears in the R/3 inbox. When the cost accountant opens the work item, the system automatically calls up the appropriate transaction (in this case, KB61) with the document number preselected. The cost accountant can then make the change without having to rekey data. The following requests are available for the business unit analyst:

• Request adjustment posting
  
  
• Request additional budget
  
  
• Request new profit center
  
  
• Change profit center
  
  
• Request new cost center
  
  
• Change cost center
  
  
• Request new order
  
  
• Change order

You can configure the service request via IMG menu path Cross-Application Components>Internet/Intranet Services>Internal Service Request. The form itself is built using Adobe Acrobat in mySAP ERP. It can be configured to read fields from the application. If you use the existing scenarios, then the main task is to set up the workflow configuration to find the appropriate processor for the form. Internal service requests have been available since R/3 Release 4.6C. Sites that implemented internal service requests in previous releases can either keep the existing scenario customizing and workflows but build new forms using Adobe software, or adjust the pages of the portal to call up the old iViews. A cookbook describing how to create your own internal service request scenarios is available on SAP's external Web site via the alias /isr.

Availability

The business package for the business unit analyst will be available with mySAP ERP 2004 support package 02. It ships to Ramp-Up customers in August 2004. The first customers will be those that have already implemented at least Cost Center Accounting in R/3 and Enterprise Portal, but ultimately any site wanting to make Controlling functions available in Enterprise Portal will be able to use the business package. Implementation time depends on how much functionality is already available in R/3 and BW. Most sites have CO active, but implementing the business package may cause sites to revisit some of their reporting assumptions and "spring clean" their report lists.

In the case of the internal service requests, the complexity of the workflows can be significant. Some sites use the delivered scenarios out of the box and others make significant changes to the approval logic. Finally, implementation of the portal can range from out of the box to questioning the case for every iView on the page. The business package Business Unit Analyst is a suggestion — use it as is and bolt your existing implementations behind it and you have six customizing steps (personalization, hierarchy navigation, key figure and budget monitor, reporting, planning, internal service requests) to work through.

Janet Salmon

Janet Salmon joined SAP in 1992. After six months of training on R/2, she began work as a translator, becoming a technical writer for the Product Costing area in 1993. As English speakers with a grasp of German costing methodologies were rare in the early 1990s, she began to hold classes and became a product manager for the Product Costing area in 1996, helping numerous international organizations set up Product Costing. More recently, she has worked on CO content for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, Financial Analytics, and role-based portals. She is currently chief product owner for management accounting. She lives in Speyer, Germany, with her husband and two children.

You may contact the author at janet.dorothy.salmon@sap.com.

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