Wednesday, July 18, 2012

HPC Order Adjuster for SAP Internal Orders


Even in the most disciplined of organizations, corrections and changes to SAP internal orders are inevitable. Employees inadvertently charge to the wrong order number; project managers need to move labor from one cost center to another; or expense orders occasionally must be recategorized as capital work instead of operations and maintenance.

The typical solution is often a lump sum journal entry by the accounting department, which sacrifices detail to expedience. The HPC Order Adjuster eliminates the shortcomings of such basic, corrective journal entries, to the advantage of project managers, accountants, business analysts, and other stakeholders in your organization. It's a set of ABAP code that enables authorized SAP users to move designated transactions from one order or cost center to another, automatically generating fully auditable documentation of the adjustment.

The HPC Order Adjuster simplifies what would otherwise be a prohibitively labor-intensive correction process by seamlessly integrating the order research and adjustment steps into a single graphical interface. Based on your specified search criteria, the Order Adjuster fetches all relevant transactions from your database. Once you mark the transactions or cost elements to be moved to a different order or cost center, it creates a parked document for each transaction via an SAP BAPI call. Upon formal approval, the original order is credited and the new order debited. Learn more about how the HPC Order Adjuster works, or contact us for a demonstration.

Monday, July 16, 2012

New Project: Automated SAP FERC Processing


This week kicks off a new project for another utility company on SAP. We're going to assess the utility's SAP FERC processes, many of which have become manual and are now conducted outside of SAP over the years. Our customer understandably wants to automate these labor-intensive steps, so we'll be considering a number of different ways to optimize their current configuration of the SAP regulatory reporting module and streamline its processes. 

We'll also take into account some related initiatives the company may undertake in the future -- such as leveraging Plant Maintenance further, utilizing the HR module, and migrating to the SAP New General Ledger -- and factor these elements into our FERC automation recommendations.

The net result of HPC's assessment will be a highly actionable report for the utility company. It will lay out several optimization paths to automate currently manual processes and to manage labor, fleet, and cost center costs more effectively within SAP, thereby minimizing the use of external spreadsheets and applications.

In our experience, many utilities that have been running SAP for years benefit from this type of rapid evaluation and action plan. Over time, the configuration of their FERC module and related business processes morph into something less than ideal, and the best way forward is an outsider's fresh look. If your regulatory reporting processes aren't easily managed within SAP, such that management can't get the data it requires quickly and efficiently, contact us to talk about your own assessment. And if you're considering a New GL migration as well, let's talk about prototyping it for you.