Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 6/2018

„ACADEMICA BRÂNCUŞI” PUBLISHER, ISSN 2344 – 3685/ISSN-L 1844 - 7007

INTEGRATION OF KPI APPLICATIONS IN THE MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING

SUITES USING SAP FIORI, PORTAL AND CLOUD. A STUDY CASE

BANTA VIOREL-COSTIN

THE BUCHAREST UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMIC STUDIES

e-mail: bantaviorel@gmail.com

Abstract For many companies, the ERP solutions, using SAP Portal, Clud and Fiori have been adopted in order to help manage

their work, to have integrated solutions with clear targets, and to have a comprehensive visibility of existing processes.

This article highlights the need to implement an ERP system, in our case SAP, with a clear purpose: all our processes

should be managed together, all results obtained from this system, should be accessible to all interested persons. Our

research, for this paper, was oriented to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) established for an economic entity, for

daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly-performed work within an accounting department using SAP Portal. My wish

is to provide a perspective, for people belonging to the academic community, showing how they can manage their

activities, making use of applying formulas established in our research. This developed solution – the ZKPI

application, was adapted in SAP, using ABAP as a programming language, more than that, WebDynpro was the

technology used. With a clear scope, this application, ZKPI, was integrated with the main core system in the company -

SAP.

Keywords: KPI - Key Performance Indicators, ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning, Portal, SAP, Cloud, SaaS,

ABAP, oData, WebDynpro technologies.

Classification JEL: C61, C81, C88, M41, Y10

1. INTRODUCTION

One of the goals we made when we developed an application to measure economic activity

in a complex organization was to highlight for each member of staff what he / she does. What we

wanted to bring new, helping us with this article, was the development and adaptation of an

integrated IT application in an ERP-SAP system [1], [2]. SAP (System, Applications and Products)

is one of the largest ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) integrated IT systems in the world,

adapting it to large companies is a great success. The year 1990 brings the ERP term for the first

time through the prestigious consultancy firm Gartner Group, which is then used in all the

integrated system developments after that year. The software development that has been created

with the help of which large computer systems have been created has taken into account the

possibility of integrating several modules, including their adaptation to the various business areas

of each company, with the specificities of the large implementations of world [3], [4].

Figure 1 brings to the forefront the evolution of integrated ERP systems as well as their

membership in each stage of their evolution over the years. The SAP company started its business

in 1972, initially composed of 5 former IBM employees who wanted to build a software product to

help companies in everything that the accounting part meant. The first product, after one year of

activity, was the SAP R / 1 product, designed to manage the accounting within a company [5].

After that, success came faster than expected, the number of employees has grown a lot, so today,

around the world, SAP counts no fewer than 83,000 employees. In addition, the company has also

developed a great project, namely the SAP University Alliances, an alliance that aims to adapt the

university methodologies to high standards, the IT application being the one that makes the

transition from educational explanations to the practical part of them [6].

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Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 6/2018

„ACADEMICA BRÂNCUŞI” PUBLISHER, ISSN 2344 – 3685/ISSN-L 1844 - 7007

Figure 1 Evolution of ERP solutions

2. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION – MODELS USED FOR

CALCULATION OF KPI’S

With the help of this article, we wanted to combine the functionalities developed in SAP,

using SAP Fiori and SAP Cloud, with the methodologies provided by the procedures used in the

key performance indicator - KPI techniques. My wish, developing this application, was to create a

Z application / module, integrated into an SAP ERP system, and to monitor the activity of an

economic department. This department has clear rules established by the department manager, rules

that have been implemented with the help of the application [7]. This application helps the

department manager to properly distribute its employees in such a way that the tasks are performed

under normal working conditions. In the present case, we will discuss a treasury and tax department

that has the purpose of treasury and fee paid, paid and cashed. This department is part of a Business

Unit Finance, a large oil and gas company [8], [9]:

- Treasury

- No of total payment processing transactions;

- No payment procesing transactions / FTE;

- % Automatic degree

- Tax

- Number of Tax reports prepared

- The number of tax returns

- Total amount of taxes recovered by the Tax Department (in mn EUR)

When we started the discussions with our business colleagues (department managers), for

this KPI type of activities [13], for colleagues in the economic departments, the perception of what

we have to do was very poor. This motivated us a lot, so the time spent on this development was a

long-lasting and very interactive one [14]. In this article, we want to analyze the Treasury and Tax

department; more precise are payments and taxes reports, tax returns transactions. Everything

(analysis, technical solution, development and implementation) was done inside SAP Competence

Center and the proposed integrated in-house SAP solution it was called Z-KPI tool [10], [11], [12].

The arguments that have been used to develop such an application, to the detriment of buying a

similar product software market, were as follows:

- The product will be integrated into core used system SAP;

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Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 6/2018

„ACADEMICA BRÂNCUŞI” PUBLISHER, ISSN 2344 – 3685/ISSN-L 1844 - 7007

- Internally developed (maintenance can be maintained without additional costs);

- Knowledge both KPI and programming are internally maintained;

- All developments tailored to the requirements of colleagues in accounting in line with

business analysis.

In the oil and gas company, where I have performed this study, the following KPIs (some

of) [20] are used and are presented in this paper. So, we have GL – General Ledger topics; Inv. –

Invoices topics; AR - Accounts Receivable; PP - payments proposal; FA - Fixed Assets; CMDM -

Central Master Data Management), we are focusing for the Treasury and Tax department (1FTE =

125h) (table 1):

KPI NAME FORMULA QUATERLY FORMULA

KPI Total activities '=Current Activities + Internal controls + Closing +

Group/Authorities Reporting + Projects & training +

Business support + Mgmt & Admin

'=sum monthly total activities

KPI FTE/Current

Activities

'=Current Activities/125 '=average monthly FTE

KPI %Utilization rate '=(Total activities-Mgmt & Admin) / (active

FTE*125)

'=average monthly FTE

KPI %Activity index '=Total activities/(active FTE*125) '=average monthly FTE

KPI %Automatic bank

transactions

=1-(Number of manual bank transactions/Total no. of

bank transactions)

‘=average monthly transactions

Table 1 KPI name / formula used

We collect some data (table 2) and we have some conclusion regarding this.

Treasury

2016 Q Av. 2017 Q Av. Q4/16 Q1/17 Q2/17 Q3/17 Q4/17No of total payment processing transactions 161.169 163.189 222.943 158.906 157.218 168.525 168.106 No payment procesing transactions / FTE 37.394 39.111 55.736 40.229 39.403 37.120 39.930 % Automatic degree 89% 90% 93% 89% 89% 90% 92%

4,31 4,2 4 3,95 3,99 4,54 4,21 Table 2 – Data colected treasury

Figure 2 Graph of colected data payment report

For taxes, we collect the following data:

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Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 6/2018

„ACADEMICA BRÂNCUŞI” PUBLISHER, ISSN 2344 – 3685/ISSN-L 1844 - 7007

TaxBUCHAREST 2016 Q Av. 2017 Q Av. Q4/16 Q1/17 Q2/17 Q3/17 Q4/17Number of Tax reports prepared 2.158 1.858 2.553 1.684 1.613 1.664 2470Thereof number of tax returns 1.017 620 743 655 633 620 571

Table 3 – Data colected tax

Explanations: in Q4 2017, the reconciliation letters sent to local authorities influenced the number

of raports. In addition, the number of tax returns in Q2 and Q3 was grater then Q4, due to the tax

returns prepared for advertaising campain performed in Q2 and Q3, in case of OPM (table 2).

Figure 3 Graph of colected data Tax report

3. SOFTWARE DESIGN – MODELS USED FOR KPI’S Any implementation of ERP solution, in the case of SAP, comes with a number of software

applications designed to help the business with regard to the analysis, modeling and

implementation of existing processes in a company. Thus, existing processes can be easily

modeled, their implementation leading to a better monitoring and efficiency of business activity.

The business environment needs to adapt as much as possible to the SAP standard to make it more

efficient in terms of day-to-day work. Moreover, this adaptation to the standard comes with lower

costs in maintaining the ERP software, the software being maintained by the manufacturing firm

(be aware that any changes made to the interior, by internal developers, must be re-compiled in

case of an upgrade). WD technology was used for creating ZKPI tool, (for this research, we used

ABAP programming language for ZKPI tool and WebDynpro (WD) facilities are used). So, was

easy to applied the ZKPI tool functionalities in the business environment (the main points were to

help the management of the business to reach the targets (KPI objetives)) [14], [15], [16] and [17].

SAP is used in many companies as an integrated system. SAP wished, over time, to meet its

customers’s needs by supplying innovative technologies. Thus, when SAP launched WebDynpro,

the data wanted to be display in the Web form. The business environment has received this

innovation very well and has put it into practice in most of the applications (they can create UI’s –

Web User Interface) [18], [19] and [20], that have been developed over time.

A series of meetings were initiated when we decided that we needed such an application,

each party involved (analysts, developers, economists, team bosses, department heads) came up

with the input from each area. These discussions were constructive, with the final application being

able to respond to 98% of the initial requirements. Implementation was considered a real success,

moreover, the implementation / maintenance costs remaining in the amounts discussed initially:

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Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 6/2018

„ACADEMICA BRÂNCUŞI” PUBLISHER, ISSN 2344 – 3685/ISSN-L 1844 - 7007

Figure 4 New dimension of zKPI tool - IT Infrastructure – SAP Fiori interface – SAP Cloud

4. SAP zKPI’s MODULE APPLICATION IMPLEMENTATION

This application was meant to integrate into a core system within a company, in the case of

SAP. The technology used was WebDynpro, the purpose of which was to make use of this

application to the WEB. I thought how I could turn this tool, easy, into mobility. We also wanted to

integrate this application with SAP Poral and SAP Fiori applications [21], [22], [23] and [24].

ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) was used for this KPI z-module

software, as a programming language, WD and SAP Portal [25]. This programming environment

was made by SAP, a German company, as we can find in the technical specification information.

This programming language has been developed since 1980 and it is a 4GL programming

language [26] and was used starting with SAP R/3 concept situation. We have included the concept

of LDBs (Logical Databases), and this concept is included in one of the first programming

language - ABAP, this means that, the concept regarding abstraction perspective is included in the

database. Everything mentioned above is included in the latest version of ABAP programming

language.

More than that, starting with 1992’s, this language have been used for creating programs in

R/3 product. SAP NetWaver platform/concept support ABAP and Java in terms of development, all

three components, business applications, the operating system and the databases, have an

abstraction component, this means and helps SAP not to be dependent directly on machines,

servers, databases, so we can conclude that we can change (install) from one platform to another

[27], [28].

CONCLUSIONS

I consider that the development of this application has been a real success, monitoring the

daily, monthly, quarterly and annual activity, being a means of deciding to allocate the existing

human resources to a department or team. The business environment can make timely and informed

decisions in order to solve the problem that has arisen in the work it carries out.

This article highlights the fact that the existence of an application, within an ERP integrate

system – SAP with SAP Portal and SAP Fiori, can only help the business environment in daily

activities. We have done this study to show to those who are interested how to model an application

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Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 6/2018

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in an integrated system, and how this application-module can be done with as low a cost as

possible.

Undertaking such a study will allow those studying KPIs in different companies to compare

the resulting data and formulas accepted by the business environment so that they can accept a

common proposal of what counts and highlighting the activities performed. The ability to measure

KPIs from multiple company codes is seen as a plus by those who run the company. One of the

main objectives, was to analyze qualitatively the data, and to develop a common guideline for KPI

analusis and measures performed, agreed by both, managers, teamleads and employees.

Contextually, the adaptation of a software application in the KPI management area in an

ERP-SAP system is commonly used by large companies, that use internal development as an

instrument, help to save unjustified expenses. These costs are low, because there are not involved

external resources in the implementation of the application. The architecture chosen fully meets the

needs of the business environment, the need to work remote is one of the points that was taken into

account when the development began. Security rules have been taken into account, so the

application can be used on and off intranet.

We wanted the data to be added interactively, so the ability to add bulk data from different

applications is easy now. We have implemented a large number of case studies from other

companies, adapting them to the specifics of the oil and gas company being made together with the

business environment. Everything that exists as a methodology for managing KPIs has been

implemented and taken into account in this application. Undertaking such a study will allow those

studying KPIs in different companies to compare the resulting data and formulas accepted by the

business environment so that they can accept a common proposal of what counts and highlighting

the activities performed.

As a final conclusion, the development of such an application, using internal developers,

brings about low production costs. The majority of post-production changes are made by the

developers team from SAP Competence Center, so there will be no external costs for the company,

which I consider to be a great success.

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