The 123s of ABC in SAP

11ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING/MANAGEMENT WITH STRATEGIC ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT

The SAP R/3 core business applications focus on business process automation, capturing, and tracking of transactional information throughout the organization. This data can be used to provide valuable information for day-to-day operational execution, monitoring, controlling, and auditing. However, data is often not presented or generated to support initiatives that are less structured in nature. To support these more analytical (nontransactional focused) initiatives, SAP provides the New Dimension products. The New Dimension products focus on the optimization and simulation of several areas; for example, advanced planning and optimization (APO) focuses on logistics, customer relationship management (CRM), and strategic enterprise management (SEM). The SEM functionality and its support of ABC/M capabilities is the focus of this chapter.

STRATEGIC ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT

The “buzz” in the business world today is the “new economy.” In the old economy, organizations determined a strategy and then executed against it. In the new economy, the market environment changes so fast that the strategy is often outdated before the organization even begins to support it. Today’s tools enabling strategic management must be flexible enough to quickly adjust strategic scenarios to highlight ways for generating profits first. Strategic enterprise management is now more focused on speed and agility. Organizations require tools ...