Sunday 12/03/07

This is a brief dump of what is in my mind after attending two sessions at the SAP Insider Jumpstart day.

Today was Jumpstart Day.

The first event we attended was FI/CO 101 which is the Accounting module of R3.  This was our choice because of the business perspective of SAP which really is a marriage of business processes and technology.  Most ERP implementations will start off implementing the accounting part of the software, so this session turned out to be very useful.

Plusses and minuses

Minuses include:

Presenters attempted to present 200 slides on the whole of FI/CO in 3 hours to a mixed audience of business and technical backgrounds many of whom may have had jetlag.

Pluses:

I studied an MBA last year and Accounting was split into two courses, Financial accounting and Management accounting.  This session helped me to understand that SAP supports these two fields of accounting with FI and CO.  FI is for the Financial accounting side for example Assets and Liabilities, while CO is for the Cost/Management Accounting side such as Costing and budgeting.

Although I found it very difficult to stay awake during this session, my conclusion is that it was a tremendous benefit, because it is helping me to see the marriage between business and technology like FI and Financial accounting and CO and Cost accounting.  I learned about what needs to be done and in what order within the FI/CO module, for example, the first thing is to create a General Ledger, Company Code and make an organisational structure and so on.

I also learned the differences between R3 4.7, ECC 5 and ECC 6, and how these allow multiple ledgers.

I learned that there local ledgers which are used for multiple currency scenarios.

I met a lady whose name I don’t remember, who explained that SAP run events are normally them giving a sales pitch, and the SAP ASUG (User Group) events are the customers complaining and sharing tips and feedback for improvements.  The SAP Insider events are a combination of the two and delivered by consultants.