• Quality Management Information System (QMIS) • Retail Information System (RIS) • Warehouse Management Information System (WMIS) • Transportation Information System (TIS)

Under the LIS environment, several predefined database tables enable customers to quickly develop reports. The following describes how LIS reporting systems work.

Based on business events in R/3-for example, creating an order (transaction VA01)-the LIS Interface (Communication Structure) gives selected data generated by transactions to update rules that in turn update special tables, called information structures.

R/3 transaction tables and LIS information structures are updated in two modes: synchronous and asynchronous. When the synchronous mode is selected, both the transaction tables and information structures are updated simultaneously. However, when the asynchronous mode is selected, transaction tables are updated first, and information structures later. In this case, you will not find up-to-the-second information in LIS info structures for reporting. The reason is that the R/3 system commits transaction data quickly and notifies the end user that the transaction is complete. This enables the end user to start another transaction. But in the background, SAP R/3 delivers the LIS table update job to another dialog work process to update LIS information structures. This delay might range from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on your system's available resources.

Transaction OMO1 is used to define the synchronization scheme for a specific LIS information structure. LIS information structures are simple database tables named S001 through S499. These tables are used for reporting and analysis. You can define your own custom information structures to capture specific data for reporting (name range S500 through S999). SAP BW pulls data from all LIS information structures defined in SAP R/3; however, the update logic for SAP BW-specific information structures varies from traditional update rules used for LIS reporting.

Tip The LIS-supported reporting environment does not access original transaction tables at analysis time. You are limited to the analytical data stored in an information structure but have full visibility to the reference data stored in SAP R/3. Design your custom information structures to capture document-level details if that is what you need for analysis.

Financial Information System

The Financial Information System consists of the following major sub-information systems:

• Treasury Information System (TIS) • Finance Information System (FIS) • Controlling-Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) • Enterprise Controlling-Profit Center Accounting (EC-PCA)

The FIS allow users to carry out evaluations for customers, such as payment and cash-flow history; currency risk; and overdue items, such as due-date breakdown. The financial accounting tables are the primary data source for FIS.

Profitability analysis provides sales, marketing, product management, and corporate planning analysts with information for the purpose of controlling and decision making. This requires data from several application modules within SAP R/3, such as revenue and sales deductions from the sales and distribution module, special direct cost from financial accounting, and project costs from project systems.

Executive Information System (EIS)

Under the OIW framework, information objects are stored in their own database objects within an R/3 instance. Information in such data objects is designed for summarized data for senior management. Data in EIS is pulled from any SAP module desired into a structure called an aspect. An aspect can have up to 256 fields split between characteristics and value fields. Two hundred user-defined characteristics are available for all aspects within an instance.

SAP delivers programs that can pull data from the Sales and Distribution Sales Information System (SDSIS), Controlling-Profitability Analysis (CO-PA), Controlling Overhead Management (CO-OM), Enterprise Controlling-Profit Center Accounting (EC-PCA), Financial General Ledger (FI-GL), Financial Special Purpose Ledger (FI-SL), and Financial Consolidation (FI-LC).

Data is loaded via batch jobs, not as in LIS, which is based on SAP R/3 business events. EIS reports are client specific and have to be created from scratch. A client is a logical organization of a specific business community and associated configurations in one SAP R/3 instance. Several clients can co-exist in an R/3 instance, each governed by its own configuration, the business rules.

Data from an aspect can be pulled in an Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Report Painter is used to create forms for the report and provides powerful graphical capabilities such as charts and graphs, with the exception of visual controls and drill-down reporting capabilities, such as buttons and navigation tree visual controls.