What data you need mate?

Posted by Amir Hassan May 12, 2012

FICO Consultant: Were done with successful UAT phase of the project, now we need to migrate
legacy data to SAP ERP.

User: What data? And from where can I get it?

FICO consultants are less likely to face this question if they had prepared a Data Migration
Strategy (DMS) Document and presented to the users in Business Blueprint Phase.. But
preparing this document is not easy right?

Many junior consultants would try to search the web to find a DMS document or try to contact
some senior folks for guidance, which is fine. Senior folks may try to search folders of their
earlier projects. Even if we get few DMS documents, we need to understand well what data we
need? And educate the users so that they may provide us good data. In the following few
paragraphs, in a simplest possible way, I would try give you the concept of data we need in each
of the FICO sub modules.

Off course, we need Master Data of all important objects like GL, Customer, Vendor, Asset,
Cost Center, Profit Center, Activity Types, SKF and so on but I would keep my focus on
transactional data only, as this is what users need to understand. Ill also not go to the technical
details of upload methods like LSMW, BDC etc. assuming we all know it.

Apart from normal GL accounts, we need one or more Data Migration GL Accounts, which must
have a ZERO balance after the data migration. Its a key check for accurate data migration in
FICO. The data migration GL Accounts must have line item display and Open Item
management ON in their master data.

General Ledger:
For simplicity we assume that we are migrating data from the start of a new fiscal year. In this
case we dont need to migrate P&L Accounts. Only Balance Sheet accounts should be
migrated. Even if the data migration is required during a Fiscal Year, I would not recommend
migrating P&L Accounts. In this case we should consider Financial Statements of the Last
Closed Fiscal Period and post the difference of P&L accounts to Retained Earnings account
defined in OB53.
Here well talk about all balance sheet accounts except reconciliation accounts of Customer,
Vendors, Assets and Materials. The key decision to make here is to move all open items in
each GL Account OR only the ending balance? Obviously its a business decision but being
FICO Consultant we should strongly recommend our customer to move only the ending
balances of all GL Accounts. An exception to this rule may be Inter-Company GL accounts.
We may need to break up the ending balance of IC GL Accounts for each Trading Partner
Company code.

For each debit balance GL account e.g. Assets, data migration account will be credited. Vice
versa for Liabilities and Equity accounts.

Assets:

For assets data migration we need to do some settings in SPRO for each Company Code we want
to migrate. The following settings are necessary:
The company code status must be set to 2:

We need to specify the date of Legacy Data Transfer. It determines the last closed Fiscal
Period/year in Legacy System:

Rests of the settings are optional depending upon different factors, such as if the data migration
takes place at Fiscal Yearend or during a Fiscal Year.

After the settings we can upload Asset Balances (APC and Accumulated Depreciation) through
AS93. We also have the option of migrating NBV (Net Book Value) if required by Business
Users. In my experience its better to migrate APC and Accumulated depreciation both which
automatically calculates NBV.

AUCs (Asset Under Constructions) are treated differently than normal fixed assets. We may
need to migrate Open Items of AUCs. Its because the earlier AUC Line Items may still be open
at the time of Data Migration OR more values are expected against some AUCs in future.

Accounts Payable:

All of the open vendor items (Invoices and Debit/Credit Memos) should be migrated to SAP
ERP during Data Migration. By Open Items I mean real open items: Means Invoices or
Debit/Credit memos which are not actually paid. Some times in many legacy systems Users may
not have Clearing functionality i.e. they cant knock off Invoices with Payments and
Debit/Credit Memos. In this case Users may have to do an extra effort to identify the real Open
Items. If they cant than its better to take only Vendor Balances, obviously with Users
acceptance/approval.

Data Migration GL Account gets debit for each Open Invoice and Credit for each Debit Memo.

Accounts Receivable:

Customer balances are very similar to Vendors. I would recommend migrating Open Items and
not merely ending balances. We need to make sure Trading Partner Field is properly filled in all
Intercompany Customer and Vendor Account Open Items.

Data Migration GL Account gets Credit for each Open Invoice and Debit for each Credit Memo.

Cost Center Accounting:

No balances are loaded to Cost Centers in case of Year End Data Migration. We may need to
upload Activity Type Quantities and Planned Rates through KP26. We may also need to upload

SKF (Statistical Key Figures) for Allocation Cycles which may be used as Cost Drivers / Tracing
Factors.
Periodic Cost Allocation business processes are not normally followed by many companies in
Legacy Systems, so we may not need any upload for allocation cycles. There may be few
allocation cycles which may be manually created after agreeing with Users.

Product Cost Planning:

This one may be the most complicated task in data migration as we may need to create Standard
Cost Estimate for all of the Materials (Specially Finished and Semi Finished Goods). Since
Standard Cost Estimate is highly integrated with BOM, Routings, Work Centers, Cost Centers,
Activity Types, SKF, Material Master etc getting an accurate or close to the legacy Standard
Cost Estimate may require a lot for repetitions and adjustments in prices / quantities.
I may write a separate blog for this in future.

Profitability Analysis and:

No data migration may be required in COPA unless you agree on migrating P&L Accounts,
which I would never recommend.

Profit Center Accounting:

In case New GL and Document splitting is ON, we need to assign Profit Center in all of the GL,
AP, AR and Asset Balances. No separate PCA transactional data upload may be needed.

Data Migration in SAP is a big subject, I understand it cant be covered in one short write-up. I
write this document to share my experience with all of you and to know your experiences as
FICO Consultant which you faced during the Data Migration phase. I hope this blog may initiate
some productive discussion about SAP Data Migration and we may share our knowledge.