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Excel remains an important productivity application at most companies and many information workers maintain or receive their data in Excel files, especially accounting, budgeting, and other financial data. In companies that have implemented various SAP solutions, these Excel data silos end up being very counterproductive due to delays involved in getting the Excel data into the SAP system in a timely fashion. This article describes how to easily integrate Excel data with SAP solutions and the resulting benefits from such integration ? reduction in financial closing time, reduction in data entry resources, and availability of timely data for reporting.
According to a recent CFO magazine survey, spreadsheets were the most widely used technology out of 14 finance-specific technologies1. SAP itself has found that corporate information workers spend about 80% of their day in Microsoft Office applications disconnected from their SAP enterprise systems2.
The popularity of spreadsheets is not surprising. Offering familiar features such as bulk copy and paste, formulas, and various lookup and formatting functions, spreadsheets are a very convenient way for many business users to create or update data. In addition, the ability to easily transfer and share these spreadsheet files makes them an extremely convenient tool for group collaboration and review. Furthermore, the ubiquity of Microsoft Excel makes it a very easy and convenient format to transfer data between organizations.
In finance and accounting departments in any industry, we find many examples where transactional data (or even master data) is created or transmitted as spreadsheets ? general ledger entries, A/P invoices, A/R invoices, budgets and other planning data, incoming payments, bank reconciliation statements, purchase orders, etc.
Many process efficiencies are now available to corporations who have adopted mySAP, ECC, APO, and other solutions provided by SAP. Standardized business processes and the centralized data repositories are just a few excellent benefits offered by these SAP products.
The existence of so much corporate data in Excel and so many business processes built around Excel often becomes a barrier to the realization of the full potential of the SAP solutions, lowering the return of your investment (ROI) in SAP.
Keeping the data accurate and real-time in the SAP system requires the timely entry of Excel data into the SAP system. In many companies, this Excel data continues to be manually entered into SAP ? resulting in unnecessary delays during month-end, quarterend, or year-end closings and the consequent unavailability of timely data for reporting purposes. Moreover, the manual double entry of data is an enormous waste of personnel resources increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the SAP solutions.
One alternative to the manual entry of Excel data into an SAP system is to write custom ABAP or VB programs to automate the loading of spreadsheets for specific applications. However, developing robust custom programs for specific Excel upload applications is an expensive proposition and takes several man-months of effort ? involving multiple iterations of requirements gathering, programming, testing, documentation, transporting, and refinement.
Many companies have developed custom programs for very specific business applications using very specific Excel data formats. Since these programs are tied to a particular data format and a particular set of fields, any changes to the data format or additions or removal of fields needs to be re-programmed and takes a long time.
The more acute problem with using programming as a solution for integrating Excel data with SAP solutions is in the sourcing and allocation of scarce programming resources. Most programming resources in many IT departments are involved with more mission critical projects, such as implementation of new products, upgrades, portals, etc. Automating the transfer of Excel data files into SAP takes a significantly lower priority among the various IT projects.
Consequently, with the programming option unavailable, business users continue to manually re-key Excel data into SAP -- continuing to waste time and data entry resources.
In addition to custom ABAP programming, there are technical tools available from SAP for loading Excel data into an SAP system. These options are not really intended to be used for Excel data integration, but continue to be used for that purpose at various companies.
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