Before you get started with SAP HANA…you should also consider cleaning-up your backend system first

In previous blogs about Functional Scope of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager and New functionality “Business Process Analytics” – how to improve your business processes in SAP Solution Manager my colleagues and I explained what these tools can do for you and what you can possibly achieve. Besides providing global transparency over your business processes, increasing process efficiency by reducing process costs and increasing process effectiveness (see also Systematic errors vs real exceptions or improving efficiency vs effectiveness), it was always the goal to provide the possibility to clean-up (transactional) data. All your business reporting and planning activities are based on transactional data. As a general rule of thumb you can say: “The better your transactional data quality/accuracy is (as input), the better or more accurate your reporting and plannings results are as an output.” The same still holds true when you will utilize SAP HANA. SAP HANA will provide reporting and planning results faster than ever before, but these results won’t be better, more accurate or more reliable if you do not provide accurate transactional data as input.

In my blog Protect your SAP ERP investment & improve your core business processes I provided one example of how old business documents (in that case purchase requisitions) can affect your current business (in that case it was the MRP run and ATP check in ERP). Similarly you could find examples on how other backlog documents (sales orders, deliveries, purchase orders, planned orders, stock transport orders, trasfer orders etc.) are also leading to similar problems. Some insights on the possible effects of overdue sales orders were given in the blog Systematic errors vs real exceptions or improving efficiency vs effectiveness.

Considering these examples (and there are many more out there if you work with different customers) I can only highly recommend investigating your SAP system (ERP, CRM, SRM) and cleaning-up transactional data if required. That is generally recommended but especially if you want to fully benefit from SAP HANA’s processing capabilities you should consider a system clean-up as a preceding step.