Embarking on a group reporting journey with SAP S/4HANA requires thoughtful planning and alignment with your organization's overall reporting goals.
As financial consolidation plays a critical role in decision-making, leveraging SAP S/4HANA's group reporting tools ensures you can streamline processes while meeting business requirements. In this post, we explore five key considerations that will help you navigate this journey, from aligning with your enterprise reporting strategy to ensuring effective change management and user adoption.
You should consider integrating the group reporting tool of SAP S/4HANA Finance into the enterprise reporting strategy. Most notably, you may choose to integrate group reporting across user data needs, types of reports being produced and the problems they are solving, and a deliberate purpose and approach to designing reports to support specific reporting requirements. Additionally, reporting should take into consideration performance needs of users, which is another key consideration we’ll cover.
As you’re designing your group reporting solution, you’ll want to consider the role your enterprise’s acquisition and divestiture strategy plays in the overall design. For instance, if you acquire a company, how do you plan to integrate that company into the consolidation process? Would it be a high-level journal entry, or would you upload a flat file to table ACDOCU to be used as part of consolidations? If a divestiture occurs, how is it handled as part of your consolidation of investments? Is it seamlessly integrated, or does it require some manual intervention?
You’ll also want to consider testing various acquisition and divestiture scenarios as you go through your integration test cycles to ensure the solution you’ve designed and built supports any potential acquisitions or divestitures.
Performance is an important consideration that must be kept in mind from the very start. We’ve seen far too many examples of companies not considering performance in their data model design and reporting architecture.
This is why it’s so important to consider the role performance plays as part of your group reporting design. Starting from data model design, it’s good to understand the number of dimensions required in your data model. Consolidation data models typically keep their dimensions between 12 and 15, depending on the reporting requirements set forth by the business. You should also consider the number of monthly financial transactions that will need to be consolidated. Large, multinational companies typically have millions if not billions of transactions each month that require thoughtful architecture design to ensure that a job such as currency translation doesn’t take too long to run.
And, finally, understand the business’s reporting service-level agreements (SLAs) so you can properly design a solution that meets their performance needs. This can typically be accomplished through data model and architecture design.
Similar to performance, security must be considered from the very start of group reporting prep and design. We recommend bringing in a security expert or two who can share insights into how to integrate security design to support effective use of the group reporting tool. How will users be administrated? How will users be authenticated? These are things that should be a part of those initial security discussions.
Typically, a role-based security approach is used to restrict system access to authorized users. Role-based security includes role permissions (e.g., ability to view a set of profit centers or legal entities) and user-role relationships.
A group reporting design and implementation wouldn’t be complete without careful consideration given to how users will be trained and how they will adopt the new solution, which is why we recommend considering your company’s change management and user adoption approach and strategy. How many users will be impacted by the change? When is a good time to introduce new functionality and processes to users so they can be successful in using the tool? Paying close attention to the scope, timing, and delivery of training, as well as measuring the success of user adoption, are critical components to ensuring the organization and its users are ready to take on the new tool and all the benefits that come with it.
Successfully implementing group reporting with SAP S/4HANA involves more than just technology—it’s about integrating strategy, performance, and security, while carefully managing organizational change. By keeping these five key considerations in mind—enterprise reporting, acquisition and divestiture strategy, performance, security, and change management—you’ll be well-positioned to create a robust and scalable group reporting solution that supports your organization's financial consolidation needs.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Group Reporting with SAP S/4HANA: The Financial Consolidation Guide by Eric Ryan, Thiagu Bala, Satyendra Raghav, Azharuddin Mohammed, and. Sumit Kukreja