Datasheet
6 chAPter 1
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confIgurAtIon toolS
TIP
SAP is an integrated system, which means conguration choices and decisions
made by people conguring other models in the system can have an impact on FI/CO. Any
business transaction that has a nancial impact will have an integration point with FI/CO;
therefore, the FI/CO team is often central to all design reviews.
A New Approach to System Customization
For many years, organizations struggled with extremely long project timelines in
order to develop information systems that met their specic requirements. Most IT
projects used structured development methodologies that were very unforgiving
in terms of missed or changing business requirements. e development of custom
code was a tedious process requiring armies of programmers as well as signicant
end-user involvement.
e project timeline was also extended because oen business owners didn’t know
what they wanted until they saw it, which led to what is commonly referred to in
the IT industry as analysis paralysis in projects. Upon project completion, large IT
stas needed to be retained to maintain the custom programming and to update the
programs with requirements that may have changed during the long development
cycle. Numerous companies also had departmentalized systems, which oentimes
did not share information. ese numerous departmental systems became “infor-
mation silos” within the organization. Separate systems per function and/or depart-
ment can lead to inconsistent results.
ese disparate and numerous systems also created the need for many distinct
interfaces between systems that were not designed to talk with each other. Despite
the interfaces, the systems would never be integrated. Worst of all, accounting sys-
tems were updated with nancial data by means of batch programs. Batch programs
are run on a xed schedule, generally daily, weekly, or monthly, which means that
the data is never current.
To fulll the new requirements of information systems, a new breed of soware
systems, now called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, was created. ERP
systems provide a single source of data with designed integration between dierent
functional modules (for example, Accounting, Sales and Distribution, Materials
Management, Production Planning, and so on) to take full advantage of an enter-
prise’s stored information. A common set of source code was needed for these pack-
ages so that changes in technology could be rapidly introduced via upgrades to the
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