Central Finance- Non SAP System

[sherryharminder]

Introduction:

Central Finance (CFIN) is an SAP provided solution to plan and implement a roadmap for migrating legacy ERP systems into S/4HANA with minimal disruption to the legacy financial systems.  Documents posted in source systems are replicated into S/4HANA and posted to the S/4HANA ledger after transforming the source system data to a common data format. By standardizing data into a common format CFIN enables cross system functions like allocations, segmentation and consolidations in S/4HANA and also paves the way for migrating month-end and year-end book close from source systems to S/4HANA. This blog post will covers the technical and functional aspects of the CFIN implementation. In this document we will cover details of the integration between non-SAP, SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT), and SAP S/4HANA systems

SAP Central Finance Architecture:

Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of the CFIN implementation, we have 2 SAP ECC systems as source systems shown in architecture diagram, and NON SAP applications like PeopleSoft 9.1, PeopleSoft 9.0, Oracle and Cost point.  The SLT replication server and MDG systems are standalone.  The MDG system (also an S/4HANA system) is used for master data and key mappings.

The legacy SAP ECC applications, are connected directly to S/4HANA via SLT. Since SAP does not support or provide any tools to connect non-SAP systems directly or via the SLT, we developed a custom solution.

CFIN Architecture

We can replicate the data based on the scenarios and the requirements, as illustrated in the above figure, different scenarios can be used to replicate the documents, if you read the architecture diagram PeopleSoft system is connected via DB connect and other is connected via file transfer. So again how your systems are being used, that way you can configure them.

In this blog post we will be focusing only on the NON-SAP system integration with S4.

The most interesting topic we found in central finance is the integration of the NON-SAP application with S4HANA, it is quite challenging to configure the NON-SAP application with S4HANA, as it involves lot of customizing. We created custom programs, tables and used advance replication options to replicate the posted documents from all NON-SAP applications. After replicating posted documents to custom SLT tables, we used custom modules and standard SAP functionality to replicate documents to S4.

For more details, please refer the below KBA, which talks about the integration of NON SAP systems.

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2481900

Also if anyone interested to know about SAP system integration, I have referred the SAP KBA for that as well.

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2154420

Ok, lets stick to the topic of NON SAP systems for now 🙂

SAP standard solution says you bring the data to SLT from any NON SAP system then further use SAP driven solution to replicate the data to S4. So for this you can create a custom functions to map and filter data from source system tables to customs tables on SLT. All that mapping can be performed using the rules and assignment which are available in LTRS. We have created a custom program scheduled to run every 15 minutes( varies from project to project) to process data on Z tables and performs following four major functions:

1. Splits PeopleSoft 9.1 documents into multiple SAP documents based on the multiple PeopleSoft fields used for S/4HANA company code derivation.


2. Split each document from step #1 into multiple documents if the total number of lines in the document is more than 900 lines.


3. Generate a unique object key for each replicated S/4HANA document to enable duplicate identification in AIF.


4. Map PeopleSoft field values to SAP fields and post the processed data to the CFIN SAP SLT tables (/1LT/CF_E_HEADER, /1LT/CF_E_ACCT and /1LT/CF_E_EXT_IT).

The delivered /1LT/CF_E_HEADER table acts as a trigger for the non-SAP systems replication.  As soon as a header record is posted to the table SLT pushes document details to S/4HANA. Like SAP replication, external system documents received from SLT go through key and value mapping and standard FI substitutions and validations before posting to S/4HANA.  Any documents with mapping or validation issues/errors are managed in AIF.

For AIF error handling, please refer the below blog post:

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/02/15/monitoring-and-error-handling-for-interfaces-in-aif/

Conclusion:

In order to enable large enterprises with multiple legacy financial systems to accelerate their migration to S/4HANA with minimal disruption to the existing systems, they must choose the best integration option to ensure success of the CFIN project. Some of the key aspects the team should consider before deciding on the type of integration includes:

• How much data is being replicated?


• How soon do you need data in target systems?


• Can legacy systems support these type of integration?


• Does it cause any performance issues on the source system? Answers to these questions will help users to decide which type of integration best suited for implementation.

SAP central finance configuration and replicating data to S4 is quite interesting as well quite challenging, I hope this document will give insight and interest to readers, how to integrate SAP and NON SAP systems with S4.

 

Regards

Harminder Singh

[former_member689289]

Well written article, it's a good read.

[sherryharminder]

Thanks!! Hope it will give you insight on NON SAP system integration with S4.

[former_member783767]

Thanks for the Very informative blog. Excellent Post with in detailed information, it is very rare to find topics like NON-SAP systems integration with S4.

[sherryharminder]

Thanks Kumara for the Kind words!!

[former_member756770]

Thanks Harminder, it really helped me understand what SLT can do other than just table replication to HANA. This is very nice blog for those who is looking for advanced features of SLT to integration/migration Non SAP to SAP and how we can customize based on the requirements. Looking forward for more blogs.

[sherryharminder]

Thanks Srinivas, will write more articles/blogs!!

[skumarverma]

Hello Harminder, Thanks for sharing the knowledge.

You mentioned custom approach to get the data from non-SAP system. Other option which SAP talks about is Magnitude. Have you seen pros and cons of these options especially which company have dozens of non-SAP to be connected to CFIN?

[sherryharminder]

Hello Sanjay,

It depends on multiple factors, its not easy to track down the number of documents getting replicated using SLT, then if you look into the SLA's, number of duplicate documents getting posted.

We are using BODS for the reconciliation and developed custom programs to avoid those gaps.

Also, it depends how's your business like how many documents being getting posted from each non-sap system. We don't see challenges with the number of connection with non-sap system, but the magnitude of 1 system sending how many documents per minute.

 

 

 

[Danielrn]

Hello Harminder, Where in your architecture do you write your custom code?? to take the data from the source and puting into the SLT, you mention Z tables but is not clear for me where those that code run privious to SLT. Is it in BODS?

 

 

[sherryharminder]

Hello,

Those Z-code and Z-tables are in SLT itself. Using LTRS, we are bringing that data into Z-tables with custom includes. We are using BODS for reconciliation (between source and target) not to bring the data.

Go through sap note:-2481900 (for NON-SAP systems)

Also, before reaching to SLT, it is coming from NONSAP system (PS,CSP in our case) and then staging into Z-tables at SLT. Hope I clarified it!!