One of the major tasks for functional SAP professionals is configuration. You configure SAP to perform properly based on business requirements during the realization phase. On your first SAP project, it can be overwhelming to know where to start when configuring a module. Some configuration is cross-functional so there are often multiple ways to navigate to a piece of configuration. With a few hints and tips, you can easily understand how to configure the system for the first time. (more…)

There are many ways to move an existing SAP BW system on a traditional database to SAP BW on HANA, but there are really only two major strategies which most companies consider: New implementation (greenfield) and database migration. (more…)

Espresso Tutorials co-sponsored Fi CO – forum Infotage November 9-10, 2015 in Cologne, Germany. This was the 4^th year for the annual event for Financial and Controlling professionals. The event provided the opportunity for SAP FI/CO consultants, customers, and partners to gather best practices, look at new technologies, and network. (more…)

Traditional manufacturing organizations that operate in an ERP environment include the positions of both materials planners and materials buyers to plan and procure the necessary materials and resources needed for production.  While both functional roles use MRP requirements to make their decisions, it is common for misalignments in scheduled receipts of procured goods to make their way into the production plan.  These misalignments may result from many different unforeseen and legitimate events that cause a supplier to exceed the quoted lead time.  However, the resultant MRP rescheduling that must take place can add significant capacity and resource strain to the host organization, and may eventually lead to poor customer satisfaction. (more…)

If one of your customers calls and wants you to deliver cargo to a location you have not used before, you do not necessarily have to define new master data for this location. (more…)

The software implementation is complete, the go-live date has come and gone, and all of the users are trained. The team has disbanded, and everyone has returned to his or her regular duties. The celebration party is already a distant memory. You are a user responsible for SPL releases and reviews. So far, this experience has consisted of multiple false positives that you have released. You came into work this morning and found a “match” resulting in a blocked document. You review the block. For the first time since you began using the software, you think you may be looking at a real positive match! The customer on our order may actually be the entity on the SPL list—now what? (more…)

Learn more about our recently released book SAP HANA Advanced Modeling in this overview of the chapters. (more…)

An important tasks to perform periodically on the InfoCubes is refreshing the DB statistics. This enables the query to choose the most optimal path to access and retrieve the data from the database tables.  (more…)

The chart of accounts is a list of general ledger accounts. Accounts are broadly classified into assets and liabilities, and then in more granular detail as required by the organization. SAP is an integrated system and all transactions are recorded in the financials with GL accounts enabling data capture. The chart of accounts provides a structure for recording the transactions to enable an accurate depiction of the overall financial and operational health of the organization. (more…)

SAP HANA Advanced Modeling by Dominique Alfermann, Benedikt Engel, and Stefan Hartmann introduces you to advanced modeling techniques based on actual project experience as well as field tests. Our aim is to provide clear modeling recommendations for setting up data models, optimizing performance, using the SAP HANA modeler and development perspective, as well as efficiently solving complex requirements in SAP HANA. (more…)

Cost center hierarchy
Cost center hierarchy consists of groups of cost centers in a tree structure within a controlling area. (more…)

Dear Reader,
Currently all new features, technologies and tool stacks being offered by SAP, evolve around its central platform SAP HANA. SAP HANA is an in-memory database offering a large number of possibilities for modeling reports based on SAP HANA information views and creating analytic environments. Even though SAP HANA runs in-memory, this does not implicitly mean that every implementation in SAP HANA returns query results within milliseconds. (more…)