Computerized Accounting in ERP

This article provides an introduction to computerized accounting in ERP, specifically focusing on SAP S/4 HANA. It discusses the history of SAP S/4 HANA, the difference between SAP S/4 HANA and current SAP ERP FICO, and the benefits of using SAP S/4 HANA for businesses. The article also includes two case studies of companies migrating to SAP S/4 HANA. Study material and solved assignments on computerized accounting in ERP are available on Desklib.

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COMPUTERIZED ACCOUNTING IN ERP
Statistics
6/10/2019

Contents
INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................................3
HISTORY.................................................................................................................................................3
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAP S/4 HANA AND CURRENT SAP ERP FICO....................................................3
BENEFITS FOR BUSINESS........................................................................................................................4
CASE STUDY 1........................................................................................................................................5
Migration Specifics............................................................................................................................5
Project Plan.......................................................................................................................................5
Migration Tools..................................................................................................................................6
SUM (Software Update Manager).....................................................................................................6
BW Transformation Finder................................................................................................................7
Key Challenges...................................................................................................................................7
Establishing DMO Migration Runbook...............................................................................................7
Best Practices Followed.....................................................................................................................7
CASE STUDY 2........................................................................................................................................8
FGC....................................................................................................................................................8
MIGRATION NEED TO SAP S/4 HANA.................................................................................................8
Solution.............................................................................................................................................8
Challenges and Issues During Migration............................................................................................9
Impact Analysis..................................................................................................................................9
Impacted Objects...............................................................................................................................9
Test Acceleration...............................................................................................................................9
Results.............................................................................................................................................10
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Every business has multiple departments and all the departments must be well integrated to
give a clear picture of health and wealth of the business that is being run. Enterprise Resource
Planning is a software technology to integrate main business processes by mediating and
managing all the processes in real time (Grant et al, 2006). ERP package has been developed
many decades before and it has been scaled up with scaling up and challenging business
processes of companies. SAP S/4 HANA is advanced ERP SAP software for larger
enterprises. S/4 HANA is an optimized version of in-memory database SAP HANA of SAP
and is SAP ERP and SAP R/3’s successor. Eventually, SAP S/4 HANA is considered and
seen as consistent SAP HANA enhancement (Panaya, 2017).
HISTORY
SAP HANA is developed and made available in the market in 2010 and S/4 HANA has been
in existence from 3rd February 2015. SAP introduced it as a real time and comprehensive
next-generation ERP Suite. So far it is considered and noted as biggest ERP platform and
strategy update of SAP, in over 20 years (N.A, 2015). Though it was identified as
‘transformational shift’, later there were certain issues raised regarding pricing, availability,
migration and functionality around S/4 HANA.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAP S/4 HANA AND CURRENT SAP
ERP FICO
Basically, SAP ERP FICO stands as an older SAP finance modules version. It is used for the
purpose of internal reporting and external reporting and today it is referred as a basic module.
Several integration of many modules and several parallel operations can take place. And as a
much upgrade is found with the S/4 HANA and enables the system’s reduction in
complexity, real time analysis and in memory database, etc. It is built on SAP’s in-memory
platform’s top. This advanced version includes capabilities of ERP, over various diversified
business areas, like Finance, sales, supply chain, procurement, HR and many other
departments.
Unlike FICO, it primarily deals with financial management solutions especially and enables,
 A universal journal related to controlling of data and financial data
 Consolidate multiple data sources at back end by central finance
 A common financial data view that stays consistent all over the company and
minimizing efforts for reconciliation
SAP FICO, being a core component of functionality in the central component of SAP ERP,
which allows to manage all the financial data of the company, by the organization. It only
helps financial statements generation and management to analyse and report towards better
decision making and effective business planning (Oehler et al., 2017). On the other hand, S/4
HANA stands as an in-memory database that performs data storage and processing.

SAP FICO is basically a database model, based completely, on on-premise. It consists of
database layer, presentation layer and application layer. As it cannot dethrone its competitor
from its database layer even though SAP technical modules and functional modules are used
in the application layer and presentation layers. This problem is overcome and attained good
monopoly in the landscape of the ERP, HANA has been created by SAP to increase the need
and demand for the cloud by the industries and also to face the competition from the
competitor’s database from the customers of SAP. Hence, S/4 HANA stands as a complete
cloud model, on-premise model or even blend of these two model, which are preferred by the
needs of the clients.
SAP S/4 HANA has additional features than SAP FICO, such as SAP Cash management,
central finance, SAP BPC optimized (Naveh & Moshe, 2017). Some of these features need
licensing, but are available. So, it has wider applications, like in SAP Extended Warehouse
management and SAP Transportation Management.
BENEFITS FOR BUSINESS
Economy and industry have been undergoing rapid changes with the society and demand
desperate digital transformation. Eventually, digital transformation changes the business
processes very rapidly with better outcome and changes entire business models. It demands
requirements to be changed for the IT architecture’s organization that creates bad need to
develop quick and flexible solutions, along with the changing conditions (Sankar & Rau,
2006).
The basic objective of the SAP 2/4 HANA Enterprise Resource Planning software is able to
cover the processes of day to day enterprise business, such as plan-to-product, order-to-cash,
request-to-service, procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, along with its capabilities at core level
(Vance & Ashlee, 2003). The package ingrates all the functions, like industry solutions, lines
of businesses and it can re-integrates various SAP Business Suite product portions, like SAP
SCM, SAP CRM, SAP CRM.
SAP S/4 HANA can address most of these issues and challenges and pave new ways of
successful value creation in the digital economy. The business processes are simplified with
rapid database technologies, data and processes consolidation over single platform and depict
the same across systems. It enables companies to decorate with new look at their processes
and data (Thomas & Christian, 2009).
SAP S/4 HANA has been designed and developed with an objective to get operated through
Cloud or on the basis of premise. The flexibility access applications and user interface of this
suite can be personalized, through various devices, like tablets and smartphones.
Businesses experience great advantages of SAP S/4 HANA, as a platform for process
spanning, which consolidate, channel and simplify all of the company’s business processes.
SAP S/4 HANA makes use of a system, called centralized storage system, solving the
problems associated with the traditional ERP systems, like redundant data and documents. It
eventually provides clear overview of the entire process by preventing the breaks and

enabling to continue AS process-oriented tasks, instead of transaction-oriented tasks, just like
the conventional solutions of the ERP (Stagge & Christiane, 2010).
CASE STUDY 1
SAP S/4 HANA FIANCE software has been preferred by Global CPG company and the
existing SAP had been migrated to this software. Global CPG company stands as a leader in
the fashion, sports, luxury and performance eyewear design, manufacture and distribution.
The company owns and runs with huge and retail data, with over $10 billion in revenue,
through 7000 retail stores, run by more than 75,000 employees, worldwide.
The company maintains all the transactions in retail using SAP ISR (ECC) system and it
holds over 12 TB of BW reporting system and 8 TB of the data (Narayan & Martin, 2017).
The company has initiated to migrate to SAP HANA and this migration has been
implemented by CenturyLink.
Migration Specifics
 Initially, migration is planned from both ECC and BW, simultaneously.
 There are two different teams employed for application.
 The company has used resources commonly for both the migrations and the resources
are used on an overlapping basis.
 There is a team, named MaxAttention and it involved in the process, as and when
roadblock occurs. They involve in two conditions, specifically, like
o Issues related with the memory
o Issues related to parameter tweaks
o DMO run stand still, because of the issues of performance
 To manage ongoing transports and developments, dual landscape has been
established.
 There has been a dedicated testing management tool set and established called HPQC.
 An attempt to SolMan update has been made with ChaRm, Retrofit Set in SolMan,
which stands as one part within the plan.
Project Plan
The SAP S/4 HANA migration project has been phased with the following key milestones.
 Preparation
 Estimating pre-requisites and collecting the same
 Migration
 Testing and Quality Analysis
 Mock run and optimization
 Movement of product
 Operation with hypercare or support
This entire project has been scheduled for over 30 weeks.
The entire project has taken the actions for migration, as a series of the following tasks.

 Initially, ECC Suite On HANA is evaluated, followed by options for S/4 HANA. It
evaluated On Premise VS Cloud and the respective managed services.
 An assessment has been performed, while identifying and validating the benefits of
the business and the scope is finalized.
 Various options like SAP HEC, hardware partner and Cloud partner choice are learnt.
 Then the relevant activities, tools and other resources required are identified.
 The following task was to prepare project plan.
 Then clean u p activity, such as AQL, PRD, Dev, SBX, preceded by archiving
analysis.
 Dual landscape is build and managed for production and development ongoing.
The above task has the tasks, like,
Figure: SAP S/4 HANA Migration Project Tasks (Narayan & Martin, 2017)
Migration Tools
SAP migration process is started with the following migration tools, to…
 Reduce the system size
 Clean up the system of SAP BW
 Conducting readiness or pre-checks
 Finding the transformations code, which is sub-optimal
 Looking at the loads and distributions of the table
SUM (Software Update Manager)
SUM related activities contain DMO (Database Migration Option) option. Usage of SUM can
solve many issues and challenges in the process of migration to S/4 HANA, with the
following benefits.
 Tasks and steps related to migration gets simplified.
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Preapare
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 One tool combines the operations of system update, database migration and Unicode
conversion.
 The total downtime for business gets reduced.
 A fast fallback is made possible, since the source database continues to be consistent.
BW Transformation Finder
 Certain SAP BW custom data transformations are written sub0optimaly and some fo
them have certain negative impacts over the performance of HANA.
 A tool to identify the BW migration cockpit, which is provided by BW Migration
Cockpit.
Key Challenges
BW – Option for Direct Migration, Challenge and Solution
When the company attempted to update from BW 3.x to 7.0, it has decided not to attempt to
complete conversions of Unicode, other recommended steps, like security conversion.
Initially, there was an attempt to perform upgrade and then perform the migration project, as
it is needed for the BW 7.4 and migration to HANA, subsequently. It is a mistake as the
migration at this level leaves many problems (Narayan & Martin, 2017). This issue and
challenge is faced by certain tools. The problem has been solved with the solution of new
Direct Migration Option tool. The tool helped to accomplish both the migration of HANA
upgrade to 7.4. Both these problems are solved in just one step.
Establishing DMO Migration Runbook
The migration tasks and processes have to be very clear and should be well recorded for the
purpose of reference in the future. Hence, Runbook is necessary to create and update
accordingly. This approach can best be followed by starting a system of sandbox and creating
a runbook, having a list step by step, recording how each of the issue or problem has been
identified and how each of the task of software is created.
Runbook is a success key for migration. It helps to build on this, when the migration is made
and how the development and quality analysis are performed, along with the production
system. Here, speed of sandbox migration is not an important aspect, but repeatable process
creation is more important (Narayan & Martin, 2017).
 Multiple priorities are also issues with this project, since there are many other ongoing
projects that have been running along with the migration projects.
 Other technical issues involve performance issues, during the process of database
migration and this problem has been overcome by fixing the resources, like scaling up
4 CPUs to 15 CPUs.
 Issues related to domain are resolved, by changing RSCHALV to SSTRING data typ.
One more change is domain change to SSTRING from CHAR.
 Code fixes related to custom ABAP, such as regeneration of BW transformation
 There are certain issues related to importing transports of catch-up to HANA system
or retrofit from Non-HANA system.
 The issues related to splitting of the POSDM tables and optimization and this problem
is resolved through node level changes.

Best Practices Followed
Apart from the above small key challenges and solution, there are certain best practices
followed by the company, to prevent many of the problems associated in the process of
migration.
 Enough lead time set for procurement of hardware can enable the migration to go
softer and clearer
 Run-books have to be having to be updated and maintained regularly.
 Though housekeeping activity is not relevant, it is critical in terms of migration and
investing time is worth. These aspects have big impact over sizing of hardware.
 Establishing sequence of execution and test scripts execution is needed, especially,
when integration of multiple application is done with the environment of SAP.
 Centralized testing tools are needed to use, for managing test scripts and test cases.
 MaxAttention team has to be engaged to overcome the unique and unexpected issues,
such as parameter tweaks and performance tweaks.
Apart from the achievement of objective of migration to SAP S/4 HANA, some other and
immediate benefits are the following (Narayan & Martin, 2017).
 8 million rows can be accessed and retrived in just lesser than one second.
 Data loading has become faster to four times.
 Compression of BW database is made possible to 1.2 TB from 10 TB.
CASE STUDY 2
FGC
FGC company was founded in 1979 and it is based in Ferrocarrils, Spain, Barcelona Catalan
Government Railways. The company provides tourism and railway transport services and
activites related to mountain. FGC stands as a vital transportation artery for the travellers
travelling between Barcelona and Valles region, more than 80 million per a year and it has
coverage over 80% of Catalunya and it enables 32 trains running at peak time hours. The
company also offers its services to other fields, such as postal services, transport, power and
water, on contact basis (Panaya, N.D). FGC also aspires the efficiency excellence for
environment in 2019, with its 100% of energy supplied from using renewable sources and
also aims to achieve 50% of origin of solar, by the year, 2020.
MIGRATION NEED TO SAP S/4 HANA
The railaway company has initiated digital transformation towards improvement of its
services’ performance. Hence, the company embarked over the project of migration to SAP
S/4 HANA, from its legacy ERP system, with EH98 for HCM over-premise.
Based on the condition and situation of the company, the migration had expected to be,
 High quality
 As swift as possible

 With minimal risk
Solution
FGC has migrated to SAP S/4 HANA and it enabled itself to update its SAP system with the
upgrades of EHP.
The process of migration is performed with the following project plan.
1. Initially, next-generation impact analysis is applied, for running simulations of change
impact. The analysis includes satellite applications analysis and interfaces, which
communicate.
2. Based on the analysis, a report has been made with details added about all the objects
impacted, along with the primary tasks and tasks needed for the correction.
3. The report is used to develop project scoping, which represents over testing and code
corrections savings.
4. The tasks are implemented and test management related to most of the critical tests of
business.
SAP S/4 HANA Finance has been employed and migrated to and it took total six months of
duration. Visibility has been enabled for financial accounts, processes and public contracts,
through mobile devices (Panaya, N.D). In this case, update has been made possible in a single
step and no many issues have been faced on the usage, day-to-day.
Challenges and Issues During Migration
Impact Analysis
Code correction tasks is an issue raised during the process of migration, since the system of
FGC is giant system and it includes multiple services, both regular and contracted. Hence,
while integrating all the services offered by it, eventually, leaves various issues in coding.
Every time, the code written needs to be updated for multiple times. It is a give challenge and
it demanded correction of code multiple times. However, the problem has a solution. The
solution is to run an automated code and review of pre-migration code. These two solutions
saved about 50% of tasks related to correction of the code.
Impacted Objects
Once the core ERP system is attempted to migrate, eventually, the entire system that includes
various services, which are part of the entire system, including every small element of the
system gets affected and changed. During the process of migration to S/4 HANA, there were
total 1868 objects that got affected and the impact is identified. All these objects impacted
must be set back to the right way with normal functionality. This is not a small issue, as each
of the objects is related with many other objects (Editor, 2016). A small change made with
one object affects the same and associated objects too. This problem has been solved with the
help of the test plans. These plans are usually generated with automated tools, usually
employed by the migrating services companies. These automated tools can save the time
from 30% to 50%.
Test Acceleration
A small made in one small organization needs to be informed and made familiar by each and
every employee in a company. Similarly, FGC, being a very large company offering multiple

services from multiple industries, eventually goes through massive changes and each and
every change must be well updated to each and every stakeholder of the company. The
challenge is even difficult to estimate, with such a large scale company and so the solution.
However, solution is made possible, with the real-time dashboards (Monk & Wagner, 2009).
Each and every stakeholder has got updated with the updated SAP business processes, in
detail, after migration. Real time dashboards enabled the test managers and allowed them to
find out the occurrences of bottlenecks with actionable insights, throughout the process of
testing.
Testing acceleration metrics during the migration are identified, as the following.
 Total 1411 unit tests were enabled to run and captured reusable test evidences
automatically.
 Total 310 defects were identified, automatically with the tool and also handled using
the same tool.
 There were total 605 tests were conducted over business processes and most of them
were recorded with evidences.
There can be various defects that are hard to find in many cases, since migration to S/4
HANA is performed on the entire ERP system. However, these defects have been discovered
with the help of a dash board called defects management dashboards. These defects are
identified and highlighted as ‘show stopper’ (Panaya, N.D). Once these defects are identified,
business leadership and IT department of the respective migrating services company resolved
the defects by taking real-time decisions.
Results
After migration to SAP S/4 HANA, from traditional ERP system, FGC has received a Gold
Award, in the category of fast delivery, at the SAP Quality Awards, for the processes of
conversion and migration of the SAP S/4 HANA system of it.
CONCLUSION
ERP package has been progressing to meet the day to day challenges of business processes of
companies starting from small scale to large scale businesses. So far, the ERP business
progress has been reached to SAP FICO and then moved to the next level integration
software, SAP S/4 HANA. Businesses always wish to scale up their businesses and as part of
it, they attempt migrate their business ERP system from the existing SAP FICO to SAP S/4
HANA system. There are various challenges associated with this migration and these
challenges are addressed in this report with case study examples.
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