Decoding data: Making SAP reporting tools work for you

⇨ SAP reporting enhances accuracy and transparency in financial reporting while enabling data-driven decision-making, but it faces challenges like complexity, disconnected data, and high costs.

⇨ Fivetran's dbt model for SAP simplifies the reporting process by replicating common extraction reports, aiding organizations in understanding and analyzing critical business data efficiently.

⇨ Utilizing Fivetran's technologies can help businesses overcome SAP reporting challenges, transforming SAP data into user-friendly formats that improve productivity and streamline operations.

SAP reporting is a collection of tools, solutions and features that allow businesses to gather, analyze and report data to provide insights into departmental performance levels of a business.

SAP reporting can help businesses improve the accuracy and transparency of financial reporting, reduce manual effort involved in consolidation, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, empower executives with data-driven decision-making capabilities, standardize and harmonize processes, improve efficiency and enhance operational sustainability.

While SAP reporting has many benefits for organizations, it comes with challenges that include processes being complex and inefficient, disconnected data, and being costly and time-consuming .

Fivetran, a cloud-based data movement platform, helps users in their SAP reporting journey with the dbt model for SAP. This model replicates common SAP extraction reports to help users better understand and analyze their business-critical data. These models include all the primary master data extractor reports and some financial extractor reports.

For customers wanting their master data extractor reports, Fivetran has included master attribute and master text tables including Company code, Customer, Employee, G/L Account Number, Material Data and Vendor in its dbt model for SAP. Additionally, for customers wanting transaction data, Fivetran has recreated general financial extractor reports such as General Ledger, which include Balances, Leading Ledger and Line Items Leading Ledger.

These models work in tandem with Fivetran’s SAP connectors including High Volume Replicator (HVR) SAP Netweaver, SAP ERP on S/4HANA or High-Volume Agent (HVA) SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and build off the output of its SAP source package. When organizations deploy these models with their chosen dbt tooling, users can turn loaded SAP data into analytics-ready tables. If choosing Fivetran Transformations for dbt Core, users can manage and orchestrate the model runs sequentially with the connector load.

By providing extractor reports replication within SAP’s UI saves a business’s data team from having to rebuild the necessary reporting which allows the team more time to focus on gathering insights. These models also allow companies to extend their existing reporting by retaining the initial field naming, which prevents any current reporting from breaking and ensures companies can utilize Fivetran’s models more easily. Fivetran has also built out robust documentation of field definitions between the SAP field conventions and their intended business descriptions.

Organizations looking to leverage their SAP data can avoid the challenges that come with SAP reporting. Leveraging technologies such as Fivetran’s dbt model, SAP data can be transformed into easy-to-read and customizable data, boosting productivity and harmonizing operations.