How HANA Impacts Product Cost Reporting – ASUG Webcast Part 1

Last month SAP’s Janet Salmon provided this webcast to ASUG.  It has been a long time since I heard anything new in SAP’s CO module, so I attended.

This was on the agenda:

• Accelerators for Product-Cost Drilldown and Material Ledger
• Virtual Data Model for Product Cost Reporting
• Financials on SAP HANA: what you can expect

Part one of this blog covers the accelerators.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Janet Salmon reviewed Figure 1 – there are many types of HANA

The first part of the presentation covered HANA accelerators, where HANA is a separate database and called a “side car”.  There is a trigger to send data to HANA database.  “Give me the materials that had a a goods movement” and then using that information inside ERP.

SAP HANA Live, recently GA, can be a side car scenario.  The idea is to go further.

HANA Accelerators – take tables out of ERP and moving them to HANA and querying quickly.   With HANA Live, you have more modeling capabilities; you need to understand ERP logic.

CO-PC Accelerators (CO Product Costing)

Figure 2: Source: SAP

On the left you have the classic ERP system, SAP Business Suite and the database – COSP, etc.

Then you replicate to HANA in near real time.

The transactions see if HANA is active and get it from there – if there was a problem with HANA you go back to your traditional database.

She said this was a simple replication scenario.  Transactions look the same as before (such as KE30) but only faster.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 shows where she demonstrated a new transaction – SE16H; today most of us use SE16 or SE16N to view tables.

SE16H is optimized for HANA and tells you to get the data from side car.  The database is HDB.

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Drill downs for production can be sizable to analyze, especially at the end of the period.  Use a transaction to summarize the objects; want to go faster and deeper to look at product costs such as cost center and activity for responsibility reporting.

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Using transaction code KKO0, the reports are optimized for HANA and now it summarizes data on the fly and not reading pre-built aggregates.

Figure 6: Source: SAP

She said in Figure 6 what used to happen there was a summarization object. No aggregates any more and no batch jobs and when you drill down you see it immediately and real time.

To be continued..