SAP Controlling Structures Continued

SAP Controlling Structures are used in FICO of SAP.Costing-based CO-PA stores its transaction data in its own data tables which are created when activating and generating the operating concern. This means that its data will never affect the execution speed of a report in another CO application.Account-based CO-PA stores its transaction data in the transaction data tables for Overhead Cost Management. This means that its data will affect the execution speed of reports for other CO applications (which share the same transaction data tables).

The definitions of profitability segments for both CO-PA sub-modules are stored in the same table,the CE4XXXX table (where XXXX = operating concern). The system always accesses this segment definition table when posting transaction data for costing-based or account-based CO-PA. Profitability segments, the account assignment objects for profitability analysis, are unique combinations of characteristic values, which the system creates and numbers automatically from the
information in the originating transactions.

The CE3… and CE4… tables work effectively together to store the summarized transaction information (both actual and plan) for costing-based Profitability Analysis.The CO-PA drill-down reporting tool accesses the data in the CE3… and CE4… tables. Line item data and details from the CE1… and CE2… tables can be accessed through line item display features.

CO-PA Database Structures

The data of CO-PA is split up into characteristics and value fields. The characteristics are stored in the data division of the table CE4xxxx . The key of the CE4xxxx basically consists of the profitability segment number that is used as a join field for table CE3xxxx. The key of the table CE3xxxx consists of the profitability segment number and the posting-period (as well as some other technical fields which are not listed ). The value fields are specified in the data division. n Table CE4xxxx represents the profitability segments ( the profitability segments are created based on the business considerations which are defined when creating an operating concern ). The table CE3xxxx contains the values posted to the profitability segments that are additionally available broken down into the posting period. Typical record lengths: CE4xxxx = 250 bytes, CE3xxxx = 2000 bytes.

Segment-Level Characteristics

It is advisable for performance reasons to keep to a minimum the number of profitability segments and therefore summary records required in CO-PA. This can be controlled through the selection of segment-level and non-segment-level characteristics.It is possible to configure the system so that certain characteristics are not used in defining profitability segments. The impact of this is that the values for these non-segment-level characteristics will appear on CO-PA line items, but will not be available for reporting with the COPA drill-down reporting tool.

For example, it is desirable to have the originating sales order number on each CO-PA line item (CE1) which originated in SD, but it is not desirable to also have a new summary record in CO-PA (CE3) for each new sales order (this would create as many summary records as line items!).It's possible to customize which characteristics are segment-level and which are non-segment-level, and to have different settings for costing-based and account-based CO-PA. Certain fixed characteristics are non-segment-level by default, but they can be changed if desired.

SAP recommends that data be summarized on a higher level (something other than the customer / product level) for account-based CO-PA to minimize the number of summary records, due to the fact that its transaction data is stored in tables which are shared with other CO applications.

Quick start

Use SAP Operating Concern Templates

This is where you can gain an initial overview of Profitability Analysis without having to have any specialist knowledge and without having to have made any settings previously. Furthermore, operating concerns that have already been preset are available, allowing Profitability Analysis to be quickly integrated into your productive system. To do this, you can customize these operating concern templates. At any time, you can reset the templates to their original settings.When you start the transaction for operating concern templates, the system loads the template for the consumer goods industry. More operating concern templates should be made available in future releases.

The details view provides you with an overview of the delivered settings and of the modifications that you can make. By choosing Application examples, you can view reports and planning layouts. The system fills them with example data to demonstrate more clearly how the application works. You can then delete the example data later. If you wish to implement an operating concern template as a template for your Profitability Analysis, you first need to copy it using the copy function found under Tools. This is also where you can choose to reset an operating concern template back to its initial state.