Venkat Subrahmanyam

AFTER COMPLETING THIS LESSON YOU WILL BE

ABLE TO
OVERVIEW OF CENTRAL FINANCE OPTION.
EXPLAIN THE IMPLEMENTATION OPTIONS AND
REQUIREMENTS.

If you have multiple ERP systems, you have to

consolidate the financials just to meet regulatory reporting
requirements.

Most companies are consolidating several ERP and/or

non-ERP systems into a business warehouse like SAP BW
and may use reporting tools from the Business Objects
tool set.
Data import from ERP systems into BW is batch driven,
mostly overnight. Not real-time.
Data is aggregated in BW. Access to line item can be
achieved through report-report interface, but makes it hard
to find and correct line-item mistakes.

Central finance helps companies report on financial

figures sourced from different systems. These systems
might be running classic G/L, New G/L or might not be
on SAP at all. They might be having different customizing
settings and un-harmonized master data.

1.

2.

With the central finance solution there are three interfaces

that feed data from the source systems into the target
systems accounting interface
An interface for reposting FI/CO postings: Financial
documents that are posted in the source system get
reposted as new FI documents in the central finance
system. If these postings are relevant to CO (like expenses
on cost elements) CO will be updated too.
An interface for reposting CO postings. This interface
reposts CO postings where the CO document is the
loading document. These postings are not reflected in
financials in the source system.
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3. An interface for replication certain cost objects ( such as

production orders, internal orders, QM orders etc.)

The posted documents are stored in the universal journal

of the simple finance system. The new G/L features and
flexible reporting based on line items instead of
aggregates and totals.

Fiori user interfaces and other reporting tools can also be

used in the central finance.

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A central Journal can be established on premise or in the

cloud.
In a cloud deployment scenario data is replicated using the
same mechanisms as used in on premise
installations(SLT).
The respective SLT portions will have to be available on
both the sending (on premise) and receiving system (
cloud).
Non SAP reporting and analytics (as well as additional
SAP simple finance or partner products) need to be
connected to the cloud instance or be made available
within the cloud installation as required.
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KEY INSTALLATION COMPONENTS

SAP HANA hardware( on- premise, cloud) and software
(database/appliance).

SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) i.e replication

server(plus partner products like Datalytics for non- SAP
ERP Systems).

SAP S/4 HANA( ERP with simple finance)

SAP HANA Live/Fiori and Smart business cockpits.

SAP Business intelligence tools line Analysis for office.

Additional simple finance products like integrated

business planning, cash management etc.
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ROADMAP TO CENTRAL FINANCE

Under the existing scenario in SFIN2.0 we only have two

things

Central finance reporting.

Central finance planning.

In future the central finance can have the following

Central invoices

Central Cash management

Central material ledger

Central fixed assets.

Consolidation
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HOW DOES AN SAP LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMATION

REPLICATION SERVER WORK (NON SAP SYSTEMS)
SLT establishes the connection with the databases i.e the
application tables and creates a logging table.
Every time there is a change in the application table there is a
database trigger ( Trigger is a starting mechanism).
When this trigger takes place the logging table logs all the
changes.
These changes are passed back to the SLT where the read
module reads all the changes, does some mapping,
calculations and transformations which goes to write module.
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HOW
DOES
AN
SAP
LANDSCAPE
TRANSFORMATION REPLICATION SERVER WORK
(NON SAP SYSTEMS)
The write module goes to the particular application table
of the HANA database and includes these changes in the
database.

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HOW
DOES
AN
SAP
LANDSCAPE
TRANSFORMATION REPLICATION SERVER WORK
SAP SYSTEMS)
For SAP system the Read module will be present in the
SAP source system itself.

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POSTING INTERFACES ( FI,CO)

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POSTING INTERFACES ( FI,CO)

Since reposting harmonizes the data, by the time this data
comes to central finance it is already in the required
format.
These will be updated in the universal journal as any other
simple finance transactions.

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IMPLEMENTATION
Implementing the central journal is not ERP from
Scratch". The effort and the duration can be only up to 1015% of the traditional ERP implementation.
Most of the business processes might be already existing
in the SAP systems and can be re-used or re-applied.
The actual roll out effort varies based on data
harmonization applied, business transformation desired
and the number of systems and processes touched.

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IMPLEMENTATION
ROLL OUT
It will be based on the processes, business areas and
source selected. It is not as big bang implementation.
TIMELINE- Phased in quarterly ( milestone-based)
increments.( First roll out possible in as little as 3
months).
RESOURCES
Basis/Admin( System setup, security setup).
Technical( HANA/HANA LIVE/SLT Replication, ABAP)
Functional ( configuration, business processes, master
data)
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