10 Ways Excel Drives More Value

From Your SAP Investment, While

Making Your Life Easier

Summary
The CIOs of every major corporation face common objectives: reduce costs and find ways to
drive more value from existing enterprise investments. Information technology (IT) expenses
are under extreme scrutiny in particular the operational, data management and support
costs of managing ERP systems, such as SAP .
This white paper highlights 10 ways Winshuttles tools and applications utilize Microsoft
Office applications and allow you to optimize your SAP investment. The benefits outlined in
the following white paper are realized by the reduction of SAP operational costs, delivering
across the board efficiencies and accelerating top and bottom line improvements. Whether
youre the CIO, the leader of an SAP competency center, or a business process owner looking
for more effective ways to manage your SAP operations, the following ideas will help you
accelerate the return on your SAP Investment.

2014 Winshuttle, LLC. All rights reserved.

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www.winshuttle.com

Introduction
Across all industries, businesses have actively sought ways to reduce operating expenses,
particularly with respect to their ERP implementations. There is now an increased focus on
innovating business processes across the board as many experts are forecasting a generally
improving economic environment. According to a leading IT research and advisory firm, the top
priorities for CIOs at this time are business process improvement, cost cutting at the enterprise
level, and workforce optimization. Although the enterprise adoption of SAP has led to a more
integrated workplace, there are still many opportunities for further improvements in business
processes, specifically in the data management area.
While there are many ideas for improving business processes sometimes these come with
additional costs. Conversely, there are many ways to reduce the operational costs associated
with an ERP implementation, but these may result in increasing the workload and burden on
key resources. Based on our experience with thousands of SAP customers, Winshuttle knows
that providing business process solutions with which knowledge workers are comfortable,
such as Microsoft Excel, not only enables intuitive access to data, it also increases productivity,
and decreases training time. The ideal balance is achieved - improved business processes and
reduced operational costs.

10 Ways Excel Drives More Value From Your SAP

Investment
1. Reduce SAP Operational Costs
Enabling the effective use of Microsoft Excel as a front-end to create new master and transactional
data in SAP leads to tremendous business efficiencies. Normally, this data is entered manually or
a custom program is written to automatically process the data both expensive methods. With
very little training and the right tools, Excel users can create single or multiple records, affecting
a single SAP transaction or a chain of transactions. Excel sheets can be readily customized by
business users to create easy-to-use, sophisticated data entry forms.
Data entry automation typically results in cost savings across many departments, such as in HR
for new hire actions, in Procurement for new purchase orders or contracts, in Supply Chain for
new materials and new sales orders, and in Finance for journal entries.

Figure 1: A Journal Entry creation template set up in Excel

to load data to the FB50 transaction.
Figure 2: Mass transactional change - A sample
spreadsheet set up to change the delivery date
for many line items in multiple purchase orders.

2. Extend Data-Driven Business Processes to Include Your Business Partners

Many business processes are driven by transactional data, such as invoices, sales orders or
reconciliation statements that need to be exchanged between the companys SAP system and
its customers, suppliers and service providers systems. In nearly every case, companies can
derive significant cost, time and accuracy savings by automatically passing data between these
disparate systems. While there are a variety of software choices available for real-time data
integration between multiple systems, these software packages are typically complex, have
large footprints, and are difficult to install and use for business users.
One way to address this issue is via easy-to-use SAP data management software. Excel
spreadsheets or Access databases can become the common data interchange mechanism. Data
is extracted or received from external systems in spreadsheet formats and can then be easily
loaded into SAP using mappings defined in the data loading software.

Figure 3: An incoming receivable statement in a spreadsheet (left) automatically posted into the Incoming
Cash SAP transaction (F-28).

3. Shorten the Time-to-Value for SAP Implementations and Upgrades

Data migration processes including data extraction, transformation and loading - are core
activities essential to every new SAP implementation or upgrade. Depending on the data, Excel
spreadsheets or Access databases can be the ideal staging platform for the data being migrated.
Data is extracted from legacy systems into Excel or Access for cleanup and transformations.
After the changes have been applied, the master data or transactional data then is loaded into
the SAP system.
Allowing business users to carry out much of the data migration process themselves will lead to
better quality data and significant cost and time savings while complying with all of the critical
SAP governance and security standards.

4. Make Better Business Decisions

While many SAP customers have implemented sophisticated and valuable data warehouses
and business intelligence (BI) systems, there is a still common need within the business user
community for on-demand, real-time data to support certain business processes. Examples of
this requirement might include creating a list of all materials movements in the past week, pulling
a report of all accounts receivables documents over 120 days old, or compiling a list of all orders
received this week with line item details.
Winshuttles data extraction tool, Query, addresses both the needs of the business users and
the security concerns of the IT. Query enables business users and technical users to download
live SAP data into Excel, Access, and other common formats for immediate analysis and action.
They can then use Excels powerful business intelligence features like pivot tables, interactive
charting and reporting dashboards to assist in driving key business decisions. And it does this
while preserving both the table-level security in SAP and the organizational-level security in a
users standard SAP security profile. Enabling business users to create ad-hoc reports to address
specific operational problems can greatly reduce the cost of handling on-demand Query requests
and help companies make better decisions.

Figure 4: Query Select Screen

5. Reduce SAP Training Costs

Knowledge workers in every enterprise use Excel as a tool to collect and analyze data. By allowing
them to interact with SAP without leaving Excel, you can shorten cycle times for important
transactions. Additionally, these knowledge workers do not need extensive SAP training if
they know Excel, they already know SAP. Through the use of a simple toolbar in their Excel
spreadsheets, users can upload or download data to and from SAP, without ever interacting
directly with the SAP user interface.

6. Improve Data Quality

Once an organization has defined an optimal business process, it can be very costly and
counterproductive when employees deviate from that process or forget to perform critical steps.
A significant issue with the quality of data and thus data integrity arises if users deviate from
approved business processes.
Winshuttles software allows SAP customers to automate data-driven business processes by
creating data loading or downloading templates in Excel that are customized to each business
process. Once these templates have been defined they can be published to Excel in a run-only
format which allows users to perform the data loading or downloading task as defined by the
business process designer. This ensures the user cannot alter the business process. Thus, the
process preserves data in a high quality format and ultimately ensures data integrity.

7. Focus IT Programming Resources on the Highest Value Initiatives

Anyone who has been part of a major IT initiative will agree that one of the biggest threats
to the on-time completion of a successful IT project is the constant flow of interrupts that
draw time and attention away from the primary goal. Within most SAP customer environments,
ABAP and SAP Legacy System Migration Workbench programming resources are limited, and
when these resources have to stop work on major projects to respond to ad hoc data loading
and downloading requests from the user community two things normally result: 1) the core IT
projects are delayed, and 2) the business user has to stop, define the request and then wait for
the response from IT.
By providing business users with easy, secure tools that let them address the majority of their
data loading and extraction needs without programming, IT can focus on their highest value
initiatives, and business users can avoid delays to critical processes.

Figure 5 illustrates the spectrum of data loading or downloading projects. Small,

simple tasks may be best handled manually. IT programming resources should
focus on the high value projects - high volume, complex tasks with well-defined,
consistent processes.

8. Lower SAP Application Support Costs

The SAP application support team is the central point of contact between business users of
SAP and the IT organization. According to a recent customer presentation at ASUG (Americas
SAP Users Group), 80% of their SAP help desk tickets were data related. Using easy-to-use data
entry and data download software within the SAP support team can allow support analysts to
rapidly handle these requests, saving significant time and expense.
Additionally, by distributing these tools back into the business organization, the support team can
delegate data-centric tasks back to the business users, without compromising on data security
and governance. This can have a two-fold effect: 1) it will reduce demand and therefore costs
on the SAP support team, and 2) it will eliminate delays to business operations and increase
accountability within the business user community.

9. Help Ensure Compliance with Security and Governance Standards

Powerful tools require the use of proper controls, security and workflows. Governance, Risk and
Compliance (GRC) best practices demand complete traceability of SAP data entry into and
data downloading from SAP. A common deployment and collaboration framework can make an
enterprise-wide deployment of these tools much easier to manage.
Winshuttle Central can help with licensing control and enterprise wide deployment of Winshuttles
suite of tools for SAP solutions. Central delivers the necessary controls, security and traceability
that enable enterprises to deploy Winshuttles software across the organization. In addition to
using the standard SAP controls and security profiles, Central provides further governance and
control for the interaction of Winshuttles products with SAP by using Microsoft SharePoint
framework. As evidenced by the ROI analyses of Winshuttles customers, a well-planned
deployment of the Winshuttle product suite can deliver the best of both worlds significant
cost savings and improved adherence to SOX and corporate governance requirements.

10. Enable M&A Success

As the economy strives for a recovery, many IT managers are anxious about an increase in
mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity and the attendant data management challenges
that accompany these events. Winshuttle provides global enterprises with the necessary data
management tools and best practices (business process workflow, data Query, data migration,
data integration, data maintenance and data entry) on both a transactional level and a mass data
management level to effectively standardize on a single system of record, a critical objective of
any M&A activity.

Conclusion
Today more than ever, it is essential to make the most out of your businesss current SAP
investment. Automating data management, enhancing key business processes and reducing
your SAP costs in the 10 areas discussed will help you achieve this, while at the same time
making your life easier.

Empowering People | Making Heroes

Founded in 2003, Winshuttle is a global company with sales and support
offices worldwide. For more information about Winshuttle solutions or to
contact a representative near you, please visit www.winshuttle.com.