Furst-McNess presented a project summary about COPA in SAP S/4HANA during Clarkston Consulting’s Virtual SAP seminar series, and in this session, they described the need for change, the project implementation details and goals, and then reviewed the project’s successful outcomes, and finally their experience with Clarkston Consulting.

It is crucial to understand the need for change that is driving the project. In this case, Furst-McNess was having multiple challenges with their financials including:

• Several front-end systems for users that were not well integrated to SAP, especially in the 3rd party transaction areas.
• P&L reporting was based on report painter and used cost-based COPA for management reporting. This required the use of multiple reports to understand data.
• The month end cycle timeline was extended due to many manual tasks such as:
  • Allocation of SG&A costs to COPA
  • Changes in hierarchy
  • Reconciliation between COPA and financial P&L
• Inflexible reporting
  • Disconnected from SAP
  • Manual and repetitive sorting required to generate different views
  • Fixed layout limited ability to manipulate reports
  • Any data changes in SAP required rework in reporting tool

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Furst-McNess had several goals for the S/4HANA implementation. They were looking to:

• build a stable platform to leverage commodity management solutions
  support future growth
• improve business processes aligned to SAP best practices
• harmonize master data to build trust in the enterprise systems
• drive more consistent business outcomes; and
• simplify the user interface and provide better visibility to manage day to day operations.

With these clear challenges and organizational goals, the team was able to envision the future systems with the Furst-McNess subject matter experts and determine that migrating to SAP S/4 HANA with integrated COPA would be the best path forward.

The team shared a deeper dive into the technical solutions of the project such as how they utilized embedded Business Warehouse to improve integrated COPA in SAP S/4HANA reporting, the use of BEX Reports created on a virtual COPA view, and how they were able to use Fiori to build dashboards for the end users.

Lastly, the team talked through the functional and business benefits that the project delivered, and they described the value that their partnership with Clarkston Consulting was able to deliver to the business.

To view the presentation, please click on the link to download the materials.

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Contributions by Zach Madel and Sudhir Joshi.