Chapter 10. Consolidated Reporting and Dashboard Design
During a large SAP implementation, I worked as the project manager to coordinate the progress of the implementation for the customer teams and implementation teams.
The team leader on the customer project side had made it a habit to measure the SAP functionality against Excel. Therefore, it became the logo of the project and project members would say "I can do this in Excel faster." Basically, the obvious value of an integrated SAP solution was challenged. Even though the claim was ridiculous to some extent, it also had some truth to it. It is essentially true that if you look at each form in SAP, you can quickly recreate it in Excel and enter data. However, with SAP, you take an integrated approach that goes beyond a series of Excel sheets. In fact, the true value is the real-time integrated view that eliminates all of the Excel islands. Furthermore, SAP allows collecting the data required for reporting as users work with the system...