Reporting Environment in SAP R3

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Reporting Environment in SAP R/3

SAP offers a collection of more than 2,000 powerful and flexible business reports in R/3. These reports are spread across all application modules. Navigating through several information systems to find specific reports is a huge challenge. SAP also provides several reporting tools in R/3 to build queries and reports against operational data. Details of such tools are discussed later in this chapter.

The Simplification Group at SAP has developed Report Navigator and Report Tree tools that make it easier to organize and search reports in R/3. For additional information on Report Navigator, visit the SAP simplicity Web site at http://www.saplabs.com/simple.

Major application modules in R/3 fall in the following business areas:

• Logistics

• Financials

• Human resources

• Industry specific

Several information systems exist in R/3 that provide a reporting and data analysis environment limited to specific application modules. Information systems in R/3 are similar to data marts where subject-specific data is collected and stored in database tables dedicated for reporting. R/3 information systems provide you with information that enhances the capabilities of more than 2,000 standard R/3 reports. Here you can combine data from non-R/3 data sources with R/3 data for reporting. In the following sections, I will discuss data warehousing environments provided within R/3 for data analysis and reporting for information systems relevant to Business Information Warehouse.

Open Information Warehouse and Information Systems in SAP R/3

Information systems in SAP R/3 are components of SAP's Open Information Warehouse (OIW) framework. The vision behind OIW is to provide a cross-application data analysis environment providing very summarized information with charts and graphs suited best for senior executives, as shown in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3: SAP R/3 Reporting Environment.

Individual information systems-LIS, FIS, HIS, and so on-in SAP R/3 are limited to a specific application area and associated data objects, except the EIS. These information systems provide an effective method of retrieving summarized data. Following are the major information systems in R/3:

• Executive Information System (EIS)

• Logistics Information System (LIS)

• Financial Information System (FIS)

• Human Resources Information System (HIS)

Granularity of data available in information systems depends on the type of reporting environment selected. At the EIS level, you access summarized information that can go horizontally across one or more application modules. In other information systems, you are limited to only one application area at a time. With ABAP/Query and ABAP, you can access transaction tables; hence, access to transaction level detailed information is available. ABAP Query and Report Writer/Report Painter are regarded as ad hoc reporting tools.

Logistics Information System (LIS)

The LIS is widely used by R/3 customers and plays a major role in preparing information for SAP BW. It consists of the following sub-information systems (the list may vary based on the SAP R/3 OLTP release):

• Sales Information System (SIS)

• Purchasing Information System (PIS)

• Inventory Controlling (INVCO)

• Shop Floor Information System (SFIS)

• Plant Maintenance Information System (PMIS)

• Quality Management Information System (QMIS)

• Retail Information System (RIS)

• Warehouse Management Information System (WMIS)

• Transportation Information System (TIS)

Under the LIS environment, several predefined database tables enable customers to quickly develop reports. The following describes how LIS reporting systems work.

Based on business events in R/3-for example, creating an order (transaction VA01)-the LIS Interface (Communication Structure) gives selected data generated by transactions to update rules that in turn update special tables, called information structures.

R/3 transaction tables and LIS information structures are updated in two modes: synchronous and asynchronous. When the synchronous mode is selected, both the transaction tables and information structures are updated simultaneously. However, when the asynchronous mode is selected, transaction tables are updated first, and information structures later. In this case, you will not find up-to-the-second information in LIS info structures for reporting. The reason is that the R/3 system commits transaction data quickly and notifies the end user that the transaction is complete. This enables the end user to start another transaction. But in the background, SAP R/3 delivers the LIS table update job to another dialog work process to update LIS information structures. This delay might range from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on your system's available resources. Transaction OMO1 is used to define the synchronization scheme for a specific LIS information structure. LIS information structures are simple database tables named S001 through S499. These tables are used for reporting and analysis. You can define your own custom information structures to capture specific data for reporting (name range S500 through S999). SAP BW pulls data from all LIS information structures defined in SAP R/3; however, the update logic for SAP BW-specific information structures varies from traditional update rules used for LIS reporting.

Tip 

The LIS-supported reporting environment does not access original transaction tables at analysis time. You are limited to the analytical data stored in an information structure but have full visibility to the reference data stored in SAP R/3. Design your custom information structures to capture document-level details if that is what you need for analysis.

Financial Information System

The Financial Information System consists of the following major sub-information systems:

• Treasury Information System (TIS)

• Finance Information System (FIS)

• Controlling-Profitability Analysis (CO-PA)

• Enterprise Controlling-Profit Center Accounting (EC-PCA)

The FIS allow users to carry out evaluations for customers, such as payment and cash-flow history; currency risk; and overdue items, such as due-date breakdown. The financial accounting tables are the primary data source for FIS.

Profitability analysis provides sales, marketing, product management, and corporate planning analysts with information for the purpose of controlling and decision making. This requires data from several application modules within SAP R/3, such as revenue and sales deductions from the sales and distribution module, special direct cost from financial accounting, and project costs from project systems.

Executive Information System (EIS)

Under the OIW framework, information objects are stored in their own database objects within an R/3 instance. Information in such data objects is designed for summarized data for senior management. Data in EIS is pulled from any SAP module desired into a structure called an aspect. An aspect can have up to 256 fields split between characteristics and value fields. Two hundred user-defined characteristics are available for all aspects within an instance.

SAP delivers programs that can pull data from the Sales and Distribution Sales Information System (SD-SIS), Controlling-Profitability Analysis (CO-PA), Controlling Overhead Management (CO-OM), Enterprise Controlling-Profit Center Accounting (EC-PCA), Financial General Ledger (FI-GL), Financial Special Purpose Ledger (FI-SL), and Financial Consolidation (FI-LC).

Data is loaded via batch jobs, not as in LIS, which is based on SAP R/3 business events. EIS reports are client specific and have to be created from scratch. A client is a logical organization of a specific business community and associated configurations in one SAP R/3 instance. Several clients can co-exist in an R/3 instance, each governed by its own configuration, the business rules.

Data from an aspect can be pulled in an Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Report Painter is used to create forms for the report and provides powerful graphical capabilities such as charts and graphs, with the exception of visual controls and drill-down reporting capabilities, such as buttons and navigation tree visual controls.

Comparing SAP R/3 Reporting Systems

A common feature among R/3 reporting systems is that they all collect data in special data tables. This is a preferred method for operational reporting due to real-time data acquisition from linked SAP modules. Several reporting systems derive data based on update rules.

External data can also be imported in the reporting information structures for consolidated information view.

These information systems use a variety of tools for presentation and analysis such as ABAP, ABAP Query, Report Writer/Painter, and LIS.

All information systems require in-depth R/3 configuration knowledge.

This is the most important reason that reporting requirements must be a part of overall OLTP business workflow-business rules.

Using linked SAP modules requires absolute integration with process configuration teams. The process requirements must be stable, because the workflow determines what data is captured based on a variety of states and conditions defined to meet business operations and analysis requirements.

SAP R/3 is primarily designed for a high transaction rate. Information processing in an OLTP and a data warehouse are very different. A few differentiating characteristics between an OLTP and a data warehouse are listed in Table 2-1. Data warehouses require a very different configuration due to large data volume and unpredictable data navigation schemes. It is impossible to configure an OLTP system as a full-featured data warehouse without having an impact on OLTP operations. Therefore, the nature of reporting on OLTP systems must be limited to support real-time operations and not historical reporting. The next section addresses reporting issues associated with R/3 information systems.

Table 2-1: Comparison of Operational and Reporting/OLAP Environments

Characteristics	Operational	Reporting/OLAP
Transactions Rate	High Volume	Low to High
Response Time	Very Fast	Reasonable
Updating	High Volume	Very Low
Time Period	Current Period	Past, Present, Future
Data Volume Per Request	Low	High
Scope	Internal	Internal, External
Activities	Focused, Clerical, Operational	Analytical, Exploratory, Managerial
Queries	Predictable, Periodic	Unpredictable, Ad Hoc

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