1 Enterprise Reporting Strategy

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.

2 Acquisition and Divestiture Strategy

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.

3 Performance

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.

4 Security

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.

5 Change Management and User Adoption Approach

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.

 Leveraging SAP S/4HANA’s group reporting tools

The new Group Reporting tool provides a smooth process between the local and group closing activities since both are in the same database within SAP S/4HANA. It is well-integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud and offers the following capabilities:
 

• Direct access to legal and management accounting from the universal journal, without needing an ETL or data warehousing tool to transfer the financial records from the transaction system to the consolidation system.
   
• Customers can perform consolidation and planning activities in a single application and in real-time, having a detailed perspective of the business at any point in the period. That speeds up the closing process to provide more time to analyze and make business decisions upon the results.
   
• Introduces Financial Statement (FS) Items, replacing the Group Chart of Accounts. The setup and maintenance of FS Items are managed inside Group Reporting, which means the Operating Chart of Accounts is not affected.
   
• Rule-based eliminations, validations, and reports by desired breakdown items are shared for both local and group closing activities.
   
• Fully enabled drill-down reporting to the line-items of the entity, leveraging all details of the underlying Universal Journal, having a significant granularity of data, and a clear roadmap for integration with SAP Disclosure Management.
  
  

System Integration

If part of the organization is not running within the S/4HANA Finance system, the data can be loaded via the SAP Group Reporting Data Collection module. It is an additional Cloud-based Data Collection application delivered on the SAP Cloud Platform, with native integration to S/4 HANA Group Reporting. It helps to access data that is not in S/4HANA and for data Transformation.

If you want to visualize and present the figures or add advanced planning & forecasting, the system connects directly to the SAP Analytics Cloud. This Cloud solution provides deep insights into the business using reporting and data visualization, which will help in making better decisions. With live data connections, the integration between SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud enables business analysis at a group or corporate level without data replication.

There is a roadmap to connect SAP group reporting to SAP Disclosure Management to help you deliver the final stage reporting. SAP Disclosure Management is designed to produce, fill, and publish your financial statements and reports, with embedded workflow, collaborative and audit features.