Even if your organization has not yet made the move to the SAP HANA platform, your organization can still become a benefactor from the intellectual renewal that is on-going at SAP that is being driven by the HANA in-memory database technology. This is because with SAP's effort to optimize the SAP Business Suite running on SAP HANA it creates the opportunity to reinvent everything, and if done correctly, to simplify it as well.
To give you some background into further what I mean, consider the following customer success story which demonstrates not only the power of SAP HANA, but also the spirit of reinvention. A large SAP customer in the consumer packaged goods industry was eager to see how the Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) accelerator with SAP HANA could help reduce the run time of their very complex schedule of top-down distribution jobs which they execute each period end. While working with this customer, SAP not only demonstrated the power of SAP HANA by cutting hours from the run times of their top-down distribution jobs, the developer also created the next generation of CO-PA top-down distribution tools which greatly improve the usability of the application. The enhancements to the CO-PA top-down distribution are announced in SAP Note 1695850 with effect from ERP release 6.0 enhancement package 5 (6.05) with support package 7 (SAPKH60507) and all equivalent SPs in later EHPs. Note that SAP HANA is not required to take advantage of the usability improvements in the enhancements to top-down distribution. However, running SAP HANA as a financial accelerator or as the primary database underneath the ERP system will certainly improve the speed of the top-down distribution, along with many other transactions.
I have been working with these enhanced top-down distribution transactions and have shared some knowledge about them in the SCN Wiki for ERP Financials. To help gain visibility to this information, I have written this weblog to share the following links:
Top-Down Distribution of Actual Data
KE28 (Configure and) Execute Top-Down Distribution of Actual Data
KE28A - Variant Start of CO-PA Top-Down Distribution
KE28T - Technical Settings for CO-PA Top-Down Distibution
KE28L - History Log
KE28R - Mass Reversal
I hope you find these Wiki pages useful and that your organization achieves a similar success as to that gained by the CPG customer mentioned above.
