History
Simplement has been focused on how to best extract SAP data for more than twenty-five-years. With all of this experience, customer insight, system experience, market experience, we poured the best features into one of the first S4 SAP Certified tools to extract SAP data: Roundhouse. Roundhouse enables organizations to extract SAP data from their SAP (ERP) systems in real-time. Roundhouse is SAP Certified and works with ECC on any platform or S4/HANA to deliver data to any database target a customer chooses. Data is then consumed and shared in Power BI or Tableau or other solution.
What’s the Problem?
Why do you need this? Ask your analysts. Ask our Fortune Global 100 customers. When trying to investigate a root cause of an issue, are your analysts getting close enough and guessing? How do you know? The power that Simplement gives analysts, is complete, detailed data. What does that mean? They find the user, date, change, previous entry… They can see EVERYTHING necessary to find an RCA, correct the cause at the source, in the data, then determine how to prevent a recurrence. The best practice after finding an error like a master data error, is checking ALL of the entries to see if any other errors are waiting. Ask your analysts how they would do that presently.
Do you know what your analysts are using now? They are using BOBJ, BW output, tcodes and fishing through the SAP system, maybe SE16N. They are using everything possible to get good answers. A tcode populates data into multiple tables depending on the change. MM02 changes, depending on the field, can go into 10+ tables. SAP is powerful software with great complexity and there are 100,000+ tables in SAP. 100,000 tables with some containing 50 billion records at the largest customers (with archiving!).
The problem Simplement solves is giving analysts a proper TOOL with access to see any data, in any table, and controlled for governance, so they only see what they should see.
Governance
Roundhouse was built for governance, standard. If a customer is interested in Human Resources (HR) data and extract a sensitive table, Roundhouse can put that data in a database ONLY accessible by HR staff. Want the rest of your data in another database? Want a split for financial data in a dedicated, only accessible to finance database? Easy. We designed it with that functionality. Want to put data into multiple database types like AWS, and Databricks, and SQL, and Snowflake, and…? From the same SAP system? We built that in too.
Simplement = Simple
Simplement starts with “simple” for a reason. We design for easy install, easy configuration, easy administration, and easy to consume data. Our focus is SAP, so even for the data type used by one customer, we still tested every single data type, length, conversion, date, time, obfuscated dates, EVERYTHING. A Tool is not a good tool if it gets only part of the job done easy. We make it easy to get the extract SAP data, and easy to consume in reporting. For most business functions, we already have templates and reports already configured which means you can have data in days and reports in weeks.
Multiple SAP Systems?
How are you joining the data at the moment? You might not know depending on your role and access, but do you know if it is optimal? Data consolidation from multiple SAP systems is hard. Simplement makes it easy to consolidate data, instead of overburdening IT, scrambling to coordinate extract jobs to get the data you need from multiple systems. So many hidden costs are reduced using Simplement. No one is keeping track of the extra hours here and there, spent by so many people to create, modify, and validate reports.
And when it is done, what if you want to adjust something. Its best not to ask! Usually, right when the report is complete, someone goes, can you add… and the response is a death stare. Roundhouse can pull all of your SAP data together, in split servers or split databases for governance, real time, data to catch issues as they happen, data for mining, or consolidate data for KPIs, from all of your systems.
Need to change a report? Easily add description tables, master data tables, transactional data tables – in a day or a few days. With just a few clicks. Get that report perfect, quickly, and easily.
Acquisitions with SAP
Planning an acquisition? What will you do with that system data? What if you could create consolidated data reports within days to weeks? Then drop the BOBJ / BW burden. Our customers typically drop BO / BW. Something else our customers get: surprised and reply with “we’ve been trying to build this report for years.” When you consider the magnitude of staff, consultants, and funds our customers have, and we get the satisfaction of hearing about a huge impact within months of install.
Imagine being able to check for fraud or poor accounting or engineering issues within months of an acquisition? Imagine being able to dig into every corner of that new acquisition and find out some surprises were not disclosed. Finding issues a year or more afterward merging creates a gray area. We deliver access to any and all SAP data to help you find anything.
Guess how difficult this will be. Just add replication to the new system and feed your existing database(s) and merge it into your existing reports. Client is a key column identifying system data, included in nearly every single SAP table, and this will delineate the source of the data. There might be some tuning. We can help you figure it out in the most cost effective manner, quickly.
If you would like to discuss any of this or any of your own difficulties with reporting SAP data, please reach out to us and ask for Christopher Grancher
