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Stephane_Neufco
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert


User management is a more and more important topic for large enterprises to be compliant with internal controls and external regulations such as the Section IV of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Today corporate responsibility has been enhanced to combat corporate and accounting fraud and internal control effectiveness is being severely assessed. With SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15 we reinforce our specialty financial consolidation product with a set of new features which makes user management easier, more precise and significantly increases visibility of data access rights (who can do what for which data?).

 

 

An SAP customer connection program

Being one of the SAP influencing channels, our customer connection is a program that enables SAP to enhance and optimize our products by listening to you and reacting to your specific needs. In cooperation with our customers who have an active maintenance contract, SAP Financial Consolidation user groups collected and submitted improvement requests in a jointly defined “user management focus topic” cycle. Requests that have been supported by a significant number of customers have been evaluated by our development team, taken to development and are now available in release 10.0 SP15.


Legend: SAP Customer Influence, Customer Connection Program, user management focus topic


 

New SP15 features reinforce user management

























































What customers said What SP15 delivers


  • Last connection: “The product does not give any detail on when a user connected the last time to the tool. This requires the administrators to use other external information source to detect sleeping users.”




  • SP15: A new Last connection date column is now displayed in the Security view. More information.




  • Multi-user: “Currently the multi user mode is activated for a whole database. Consequently packages from all reporting ids on the same database can be opened by several data entry users simultaneously.”




  • SP15: A new function is available to select categories for multi-user data entry mode.




  • Filtering on active users: “Currently, while doing the export from the product, functional rights or allocation of functional profiles for all users (active or not) are exported. This requires filtering the exported data with the list of active users to get the correct situation.”




  • SP15: When a user wants to export functional rightsor the allocation of functional profiles, the user is now asked whether she/he wants to filter the export on active users or not.




  • User access by functional profiles: “To find out which users have a given functional rights, one needs to use the function “Export the allocation to the functional profiles” from the menu and open the file in Excel. Active as well as non-active users are exported. This is information which is asked for regularly during internal & external audits.”




  • SP15: A new node on the functional profiles allocated provides for each of the functional profiles a list of users which have that profile. The view is printable. Only users which are active are displayed.




  • User access by functional rights: “To find out which users have a given functional right, one needs to proceed in 2 steps. First, find out which functional profiles contain the requested functional rights. Second, find out which users have the matching functional profile (not easy to do as profiles are displayed by user and not user by profile). This is information which is asked for regularly during internal & external audits.”




  • SP15: A new Security Audit view on the functional rights provides for each of the functional rights a list of users which have those rights. Only users which are active are displayed. The view is printable. As an additional option, filtering on reporting unit and category is now also allowed.




  • Which user can do what (data entry, publisher, reader) on which reporting unit?: "Currently, unless you have a specific development, it is impossible to see in a simple way for a given list of reporting entities which users have access to it and with which profile. This is information which is asked for regularly during internal & external audits.”




  • SP15: A new view shows for a selection of reporting units who has access to them and with which profile.




  • Data access group: “Currently there is no possibility to import / export the data access groups. We have over 700 data access groups in our SAP Financial Consolidation. These data access groups have to be maintained manually in the product. The user manager has no opportunity to transport the data access groups in other product environments (e.g. development, test, production) or other data source (e.g. sub-group).”




  • SP15: Export/Import functionality gives the user the opportunity to export/import the data access groups to Microsoft Excel in CSV or XML format.




  • Access definition: “Currently there is no possibility to import / export the access definitions. We have over 400 access definitions at our enterprise for SAP Financial Consolidation."




  • SP15: A new access definition Import/Export feature is available. It works similarly as the data access group Import/Export feature above described.




  • Export/Import the complete users: “Currently the standard functionalities do not allow exporting users and their profiles, filters, owner groups, etc. in a format that can be imported into other SAP Financial Consolidation databases or external access management applications. This feature would allow transferring easily user created in one SAP Financial Consolidation database to other databases. It would simplify greatly the use of external access governance applications by allowing reading the users and their rights in SAP Financial Consolidation and by allowing a semi-automatic provisioning of accesses into the software.”




  • SP15: The product now provides a facility that allows exporting users and their profiles, filters, owner and access groups, etc. in XML format. The file can be reloaded into other SAP Financial Consolidation databases or external access management applications. It is possible to select the users and profiles to be exported. User import in XML can come from SAP databases or other sources such as external access management applications.



 

SP15 screenshots

You can see below some screenshots of the new user management features available in SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15.

Legend: Activating the multi-user mode with selected categories in SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15





Legend: New security audit view in SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15


 


Legend: New import/export feature in SAP Financial Consolidation 10.0 SP15



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