This year’s developments in the RBE Plus environment focus on the following:

• uncovering anomalies quickly,
• Enabling easy consolidation,
• Progressing from coarse metrics to fine granularity,
• Ensuring structure follows strategy (gearing user activities to strategies).

The RBE Plus Potential Analysis scans an SAP system with the aid of about 14,000 different SQL queries, referred to as check steps. The results are issued in the form of scorecards and EXCEL documents, and given to the analysts. Anomalies in the data can be detected very rapidly thanks to data gathered from around 800 RBE analyses on live SAP systems. What’s more, alerts have been defined to automatically point out discrepancies and inconsistencies, including disproportions between master and transaction data. This can indicate an inflated master data pool or marked deviations from the generally accepted benchmark – for example, the ratio of customer transactions used to standard transactions used. Both IBIS analysts’ knowledge and experience and benchmarks have been drawn on to define alerts.

Pressure to cut costs is driving many IT decision-makers to consolidate SAP systems and SAP organizational units. But before choosing a consolidation scenario, certain issues must first be addressed: what needs to be included in the target system? How should identical functions be dealt with? What’s to be done when required functions are missing? The RBE Plus Comparison Analysis supports this decision-making and implementation process by uncovering gaps in the target system, identifying objects with identical keys in source and target systems, examining semantic differences and their usage intensity. This enables decisions to be made objectively, based purely on facts.

	System 1	System 2
Sample documents		x	gap
Third-party transactions	x	x	identical key
Electronic banking	x (third-party product)	x	identical key
Application areas	x		gap

For this very reason, expanding the RBE Plus Comparison Analysis will be a high priority in this year’s development planning. Development will include the implementation of comparison matrices, which will point out and analyze differences in each application area. It will also become simpler to search for semantic differences in the same customizing objects, since object identities will be examined.

The scorecards introduced during the last development campaign mirror the most essential analysis results in the form of metrics and are aimed primarily at executives. For an in-depth analysis of the metrics, such as the degree of automation for invoice entry in the general ledger, the current development campaign focuses on furnishing details in the form of EXCEL documents; improved transparency facilitates the analysis of salient metrics.

RBE analysts have discovered that considerable discrepancies are prevalent in most SAP systems. On the one hand, discrepancies in the organization of structures are apparent in the roles and the assignment of these roles to users; and discrepancies in processes on the other hand, are seen in the sequence of documents and transactions. What else can explain why the average ratio of power users who enter customer invoices seldom surpasses 40 percent? In this context, power users are those who input 80 percent of the document volume. Which may lead you to wonder: what does the other 60 percent that enters only 20 percent of the documents do? This is how the “ratio of power users for specific application areas” metric reveals inefficiencies in the organization of structures. To optimize this and process operations, additional metrics are being developed within the scope of the RBE Plus User and Role Analysis. These will help highlight inconsistencies.