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Reporting 37

Figure 2-10: Transaction data

accounting or controlling [CO] documents, and material documents.
These three documents are “virtual” documents in that they reside in the
enterprise system and are printed only occasionally as needed. FI and CO
documents record the fi nancial impact of process steps. For example, when a
company receives a payment from a customer, there is a fi nancial impact, and
an FI document is created. Material documents record materials movements,
such as when materials are received from a vendor or shipped to a customer.
Documents typically consist of two sections, a header section and a detail
or line item section. Figure 2-11 illustrates the concept of headers and items
using an example of a purchase order, which is a type of transaction document.
The top part of the document is the header. The three materials included in
the purchase order—knee pads, elbow pads, and off-road helmets—are the
line items. The header includes data such as purchase order number, date, and
payment terms that are relevant to all line items, meaning that these data are
relevant to the entire document. In contrast, the data in the line items, such as
quantity and price, are specifi c to each item. A document can include multiple
line items, as illustrated in the fi gure.

Demo 2.3: Review a purchase order

REPORTING

As you have probably concluded from the discussions of master data, organi-
zational data, and transaction data, enterprise systems produce and consume
massive amounts of data in the day-to-day execution of business processes.
In fact, it is not uncommon for companies to have several terabytes (trillions
of bytes) of “live” data passing through their ERP systems on a weekly basis.
More importantly, after data are no longer needed for process execution, they

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