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Is this the Tool to Manage your Period End Close? |
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Written by Mark Chalfen
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Wednesday, 06 August 2008 |
Background:
Throughout my time as a SAP Finance Consultant I have worked with a number of clients which vary in sector and size. One common pain-point the majority of them share is Period End Closing. Issue:
Some have issues around visibility. Others have issues around performance and speed of close. Period End reporting packs need to be created in an efficient manner. I have worked in organisations where the close requires the Finance team to work late into the night to meet the tight timeframes that they have been set. A common occurrence was for work to be done offline, and the close would be reliant on a user’s offline spreadsheet which was not available to the rest of the Finance team. History of Solution:SAP have recognised these issues and identified Visibility and Speed as being the key ingredients that clients require. SAP introduced a process called the “Schedule Manager” as part of the new functionality in 4.6. This provided Organisation the ability to schedule jobs that related to the Period End Close and schedule jobs in sequence. This provided some benefits to clients and a platform to move this business process forward.
One of SAP’s recent acquisitions has been a company called “Redwood”. They were specialist in terms of job scheduling but not specifically linked to the Period End Close. For clients who were on 4.6 to 4.7 there was the option to use Redwood tools at an extra licence cost.
In ECC5, SAP introduced the Closing Cockpit as standard functionality. It utilised some of the Redwood technology and provided significant benefits compared to the “Schedule Manager”. It recognised that clients had a month end task list (a list of common tasks in and out of SAP that had to be completed in a certain sequence to perform Month End Close), and so a template could be configured and used at month end. Further to this, documents could be added to the items in the task list enabling users to comment on reasons for job failure or delay.
What is in a Tasklist?
• The Tasklist describes the tasks and responsibilities for a Period End Close
• Assigns tasks to Specific days and times in the Period End Close
• Can use client specific factory calendars to define tasks
• Handles dependencies between the various tasks
• Tasks can be system perform tasks or manual tasks
• Documents can be assigned to tasks as well as notes if there are errors
• Status’s can be applied to each task
• A Business Owner can be linked to a task
How to fit the Closing Cockpit into your LandscapeThe Closing Cockpit can be used for both Local and Global Closes. Tasklists can be common over groups of Company Codes, or you could have different Tasklists per Company Code/ Country. Further to this in ECC6 Enhancement Package 3, the Closing Cockpit can be run to manage tasks performed in non-SAP solutions. This flexibility will allow Clients with varying numbers of Company Codes to use the Closing Cockpit. The Closing Cockpit can be accessed via standard ERP or a User Interface. Copyright: SAP 2007
ConclusionThe Closing Cockpit has been designed to ease the pressure for the Finance team during Period End Closing. I believe it is a very useful tool that will provide significant benefit to many Organisations. It will improve the visibility of tasks during Period End and provide a quicker escalation path where there are errors. The most recent changes have further improved this solution, and in my opinion this is a must-have tool for any Organisation that uses SAP Financials.
If you have an questions regarding the Closing Cockpit, or are interested in implementing it please contact me at
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