Page 158 -

Chapter 5
5. After the goods were issued, an invoice was generated so the customer would
be billed; the invoice was given document number 90000048.
6. At the same time, the accounting entries for the sale were generated. The
posting document number is 90000000.
The Document Flow screen can be used to drill down to see the details of any one of
these events. The term drill down refers to the ability to view the details behind a summary
138 of information. For example, the user can double-click the order number (120) and see the
details of the order—products ordered, quantity, customer name, and so on. From that
display, the user can double-click the product numbers or the customer number for more
details on the products or customer. To see the debits and credits in the accounting entry,
the user can double-click the accounting document to see the scheduled entries.
Users can access the document flow from any SAP screen that is used in the sales
order process. If a customer were to call and ask about the status of an order, the sales
representative could access the document flow and see whether the goods had been
shipped. If the customer called with questions about an invoice, the representative could
use the document flow to access the documents related to that invoice, such as the
original sales order or the picking request. This sort of research can be done quickly with
SAP ERP. With unintegrated systems, establishing the audit trail and researching source
documents can be very difficult and time consuming.

Built-In Management-Reporting and Analysis Tools
Accounting records are maintained in the common database of an ERP system. The
advantage of using a database is that accounting employees can query the records to
produce standard reports as well as answer ad hoc questions. An ad hoc question is one
that is spontaneous. For example, a Fitter manager might walk into an analyst’s office and
ask for a sales report for the third quarter—by division and by product. Traditional
accounting packages are not optimized to set up and execute queries against accounting
records, but database packages are. When the records are kept in a database they can be
queried because of the built-in database language.
Thus, an analyst at Fitter who wants to identify the 10 largest orders placed by Health
Express in the past year could execute a query in SAP ERP to show the answer. In
principle, this query could directly access the transaction records to get the answer, which
would mean that analysts running queries would be accessing the records at the same time
as current transactions are being recorded. This competition for resources can slow down
processing in even a large database system, such as those used by ERP packages.
Early on, SAP addressed the need to minimize the demands on the database system
from queries on the transaction records by providing special reporting capabilities within
the ERP system in the form of database tables that store aggregated data. For example, a
table could store sales data summarized by customer on a weekly or monthly basis. Using
data from these special tables reduces the demands on the database because less data
needs to be pulled from the database; the data comes from special database tables created
for reporting, not from the tables used to process sales transactions. For example, SAP
ERP provides the Sales Information System (SIS) tool for analyzing sales data and the
Logistics Information System (LIS) tool for analyzing production and logistics (shipping)
questions. Both the SIS and the LIS come embedded with SAP ERP and use special
summary tables to improve reporting efficiency.

Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.