A common business requirement is to report monthly sales bookings for the organization. Sales bookings are one of the most important indicators to determine how you are doing. They are the yardstick most businesses use to monitor performance.

Although this information is predominantly related to the Sales and Distribution (SD) module, the finance department often drives this kind of request. As an FI person, you will want to know details such as how many orders are booked, the value of those orders, and the high-moving products.

Typically, most organizations write their own custom ABAP reports to gather this kind of bookings information. Developing custom ABAP programs is resource- consuming, and the programs often lack the functionality of exception reporting.

The Sales Information System (SIS) data warehouse may be a much better alternative for you. Part of the standard R/3 system, the SIS data warehouse provides a fast method for you to set up your own reports. One of the biggest advantages of SIS is that it stores data in a specific summarized form, providing rapid response time. Although not as robust, SIS has many of the same OLAP (online analytical processing) tools as SAP’s Business Information Warehouse (BW) application, including drill-down, drill-up, and slice-and-dice. Using SIS, you can gain in-depth knowledge of your company’s operations by exploiting data warehouse features in a standard R/3 system. This is especially important if your company is not yet ready for BW.

In this article I will show you how to leverage SIS to find the information you need, using as an example a client request for monthly sales-order bookings figures.

SIS is a subset of the Logistics Information System (LIS), which is an R/3 data warehouse containing logistics details (such as inventory, sales, purchasing, warehousing, and maintenance). LIS is a collection of templates called "information structures." You can use these information structures to store summarized information for your business. (See, "What Is an Information Structure?" below.)

The standard SD customer information structure is S001. It includes other characteristics such as customer, material, sales organization, and distribution channel. However, I have found that users often want more details than it provides. Typically, a user not only wants to know how many bookings are made, but also more specific details, such as which sales orders are booked in a given month or how many of those orders are still waiting to be processed.

Let me demonstrate how to include the sales order bookings information requested by the user.

Set Up a User-Defined Information Structure in Six Steps

To meet the specific requirement of having sales order details in your data warehouse, you can activate your own self-defined information structure. The best way is to copy the standard structure and then make appropriate changes. To name it, assign a number from 501 to 999, a range SAP provides for customer-specific structures.

Once the self-defined structure is created, the primary task is to populate and update it with relevant application data. Various configuration settings are available for this purpose. To control how data is populated in these structures from the SD module, you will work with a combination of update groups and update rules for specific business objects.

The following six steps will take you through the process of setting up an SIS structure. (More detailed step-by-step configuration details are available in my white paper, "Step-by-Step Guide to Activating a Self-Defined SIS Structure," which you can download at the bottom of this article.) The IMG menu path for SIS configuration is Logistics General>Logistics Information System (LIS).

Step 1. Create Your Own Information Structure

This step requires development access, and therefore you might need a developer access key. Use transaction code MC21 (menu path Logistics Data Warehouse>Data Basis>Information Structures>Maintain Self-Defined Information Structures>Create) to create a user-defined SIS structure. (See Figures 1 and 2.) Give a customer-range number 990 (any available number between 501 and 999). To make it easier, use Copy from to copy the S001 structure and add these characteristics: Sales Order and Sales Order Item. To add characteristics, select Choose Characteristics> Selection list and double-click on field catalog SD: Bus transaction (order) to choose fields MCVBAK-VBELN¹ and MCVBAP-POSNR. (See Figure 3.) You can view technical names by toggling the Switch Display icon.

Click on Copy + close>copy to accept the changes. Generate the structure. Once it is activated, the system creates a table S990 in the ABAP Dictionary.

Figure 1

Initial screen to create a self-defined information structure

Figure 2

Structure S990 created as a copy of S001

Figure 3

Scroll down and choose fields Sales document and Sales document item from the field catalog

What Is an Information Structure?
Information structures are the key components of the data warehouse. They contain information relevant to given applications for analysis. Typical examples include customer sales bookings, sales office sales, and material-wise sales.

All information structures are made up of three basic components. (See the figure below.)

• The period unit at which you want information to be summarized, such as monthly sales bookings or weekly shipping.
• Characteristics used to summarize information. Typically these are “by” phrases (sales “by” customers or “by” material).
• Key figures, which are value amounts or quantities summarized in these information structures.

The standard R/3 system is delivered with many common information structures. All these information structures are assigned numbers. The customer information structure¹ (S001) in the SD module is one example of a useful structure. It has monthly customer-related bookings and sales information. Standard analysis reports are available for you to do the detailed analysis for this information structure. Various analytical tools include standard drill-down on characteristics, selection parameters, ABC analysis, ranking lists, and cumulative frequency curves. In addition, R/3 provides flexible analysis tools to create evaluation structures so that more detailed analysis can be done with the help of Report Writer.

Typical information structure

¹ Technically, it is a transparent table in the database. You can also view table contents with transaction code SE16 on table S001.

Step 2. Maintain Update Groups

Update groups represent various business events within an application. The R/3 system is delivered with two standard update groups in the SD module: one for the delivery process and another for the returns process. (See Figure 4.) You can use the existing system-delivered update groups (menu path SIS IMG>Logistics Data Warehouse>Updating>Updating Definition>General Definition Using Update Groups>Maintain Update Groups). Use Update Group (UpdGrp) 1 for the standard order process of SIS: Sales Document, Delivery, Billing Document, and use UpdGrp 2 for the SIS: Returns, Returns Delivery, Credit Memo.

Figure 4

Update Groups for sales and distribution statistics

Step 3. Maintain Update Rules

Update rules define how information from specific sales activities is filled into information structures. Review the update rules for the S001 information structure, as you need to define such rules for structure S990 and update groups. (See Figure 5.)

Again use the Copy from function to copy the rules from S001 to S990. Create updating rules (menu path SIS IMG>Logistics Data Warehouse> Updating>Updating Definition> Specific definition using Update Rules>Maintain Update Rules> Create) for Info structure S990 and Update group 1. (Copy from Info Structure S001, Update group 1.)

Because you copied the rules from the earlier structure, the rules for characteristics also defaulted. So, make sure the characteristics are filled properly for different SD events. Note that you should change the Source table and Source field assignments for Sales document number and Sales document item number. Click on Rules for charact and verify source information for every key figure by clicking on previous Key figure and next Key figure.

In the case of S990, the sales document number is present in MCVBAK and MCVBAP structures (MCVBAK-VBELN and MCVBAP-POSNR) for event VA sales order: sched. agreement. (See Figure 6.) For event VC shipping process, the sales document number is present in MCLIPS structure (MCLIPS-VGBEL and MCLIPS-VGPOS). For event VD Billing document, the sales document number is present in MCVBRP structure (MCVBRP-AUBEL and MCVBRP-AUPOS).

Now Save and Generate by clicking on the Generate icon.

Repeat these rules for the combination of information structure S990 and Update group 2. (Copy from Info Structure S001, Update group 2.)

Figure 5

Update rules for incoming orders

Figure 6

Source characteristics for sales document and sales document item

Step 4. Maintain Statistics Groups

The beauty of the SIS is that you can populate SIS information selectively, based on your requirements. For example, you may want to fill the SIS database only with selected customers and selected order types. You can fine-tune your rules based on various parameters: customers, materials, sales documents, or delivery types, for instance.

You can do this by maintaining and assigning statistics groups for customers, materials, and order types accordingly. The Customer master record (Sales view) and Material master record (Sales 2 view) have to be updated with the appropriate Statistics Group (Cust stats. Grp and matl statistics grp).

1. Select Maintain Statistics Groups... for customers, material, and sales documents. For your testing purposes, existing pre-defined statistics groups should be fine (menu path SIS IMG Logistics Data Warehouse>Updating>Updating Control>Settings: Sales>Statistics Groups).

2. Assign statistics groups by filling in the SGr column with the number of the group. Make sure that sales document, billing document, and delivery types specific to your company are assigned appropriate statistics groups.

3. Update Customer and Material master records for statistics indicators. Update Customer master (Sales view) (transaction code XD02) and Material master (Sales 2 view) (transaction code MM02) records with appropriate statistics indicators.

Step 5. Assign Update Groups to Item and Header level

Assign the update groups at header and item level (transaction codes OVRO and OVRP) for the combination of Sales organization, Distribution channel, and Division (menu path SIS IMG Updating>Updating Control> Settings: Sales>Update Group). An example is shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7

Item-level assignments for update groups 1 and 2

Step 6. Activate SIS Update

Finally, you need to activate the update of this structure (menu path SIS IMG Updating>Updating Control>Activate Update>Choose Activity as Sales and Distribution).

Here you designate the period unit and mode of update. The period unit controls how data is summarized, whether daily, weekly, monthly, or by posting period. If you would like to summarize by posting period, you also need to enter the fiscal period variant.

The update mode controls whether it is Synchronous updating, Asynchronous updating (2), or Asynchronous updating (3) method. Typically, you will set it as Asynchronous updating (2). This combines advantages of the other two options in that it updates the structure simultaneously with the original document, but separately. Therefore, if the SIS structure update fails, at least the original document is saved in the system.

Test With Standard Analysis Reports

Now you should test your SIS structure by posting various SD transactions (creating an order, delivering the order, and invoicing the delivery) and executing standard analysis reports at various stages.

Depending upon the status of the order, whether it is delivered or invoiced, analysis reports will show appropriate amounts in Open orders or Invoiced/Sales values columns. (See Figure 8.)

Standard analysis can be executed by transaction MCSI (menu path SAP>Logistics>Sales & Distribution>Sales Information System>Standard Analyses>Self-defined analysis) and by choosing structure S990. Execute the report for the selection parameters and you will be able to drill down to Customer Booking by Sales Order numbers. (See Table 1.)

Figure 8

Standard analysis report