| What's new in SAP ERP 6.0? |
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| Written by Mark Chalfen | |
| Tuesday, 06 March 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Moving on to the rest of SAP ERP, SAP has increased what you get in your core mySAP licence, and any possible implementation or upgrade should look at these new areas to see if some non-SAP systems could be removed from the landscape. The main benefit is removing stand alone systems and allowing all to talk together, reducing associated hardware and support costs. Duet is a new collaboration between SAP & Microsoft. In essence it allows seamless exchanges between the two products. A simple example of this is the use of Microsoft Outlook & SAP. A user could create an appointment or meeting in their calendar, this could relate to time worked on a project or something similar. With Duet, the Outlook appointment will interface into SAP and update a users timesheet. Likewise, from Outlook SAP data can be viewed as well relating to, say, approving a holiday request or an expense form. Further to this, SAP reports can be sent to Outlook, data in an excel spreadsheet relating to budgets could be uploaded and directly update SAP. This will add real value to clients and save users time entering data into two core systems. Compliance has been a key business driver of the past few years and this will only increase in importance as time goes on. By implementing ECC6.0, you will be able to meet new legislation such as SOX compliance, and also meet local and Group GAAP in your core SAP system as well as International accounting standards. The removal of offline spreadsheets will not only save the business time and improve reporting but it will meet with core values encompassed in SOX. Segregation of duties is another area that has been brought to light, and now SAP offers a Compliance Calibrator. This will inform you of any possible situations you have with your current authorization set up, and it will provide a solution to resolve them. Furthermore any new authorization requests can be analysed to see if they will cause non compliance. Lastly one of the problems Companies have during authorization audits is the level of access SAP support staff in the live environment. SOX recommend the fire-fighter process, which is supported by SAP as it allows the user to run the transaction but a manager's approval is required before the task can be executed. Back to NetWeaver, the main visible benefit for end users is the BI component. This is SAP's mature offering in Business Intelligence, which gives extremely flexible information to a wide range of people in the business. This information can be broadcast out, which is extremely useful for casual users of Sap that don't like to logon to get the information they require. Further to this we can look at how profit center reporting has changed. In the New GL classic PCA has been replaced by New GL. By using New GL and the latest version of BI, users can now get real time PCA data, this removes the need to run PCA reports in the core system which uses the largest table in the system for reports, and previously this could cause performance issues in the system. The benefits are mainly around decision support, which can boost the business case for an upgrade in both areas of reduced costs and increased revenues. In closing, there can not be a generic answer to the question. As with most upgraded solutions there are benefits, some many be superficial, and some may add real value. Within ECC6.0, there are some real benefits that will enable costs to be reduced, performance to be enhanced and new legal requirements meet all within SAP. Detailed planning is required to make the correct decision for your individual business. It may be the right time to review your current systems and processes, indeed this may highlight that whilst you business has changed over the years your system has not. If you would like to get a detailed system check please contact Bluefin. |
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