New Logic for SAP CO-PA Segment Number Determination

Current CO-PA Segment Determination Logic

All business processes such as Sales Order, Invoices, Journal Entries, CO-PA Direct posting, and Plan values, derive the CO-PA Segment based on a unique combination of characteristic values. If new values are encountered, the system creates a new segment number in the CE4xxxx table and assigns the segment number to line items.

Different tables for two types of CO-PA modules – Account-Based and Costing-Based would use this unique segment number for storing the actuals or plan values. From S/4 1511 version onwards, Account-Based CO-PA is designed to store values in the Universal Journal table – ACDOCA and simplify the CO-PA reconciliation between General Ledger Accounting and Profitability Analysis. While the elimination of CO tables simplified reporting for Account-Based COPA, the table access for CE4xxxx table was performed by multiple business processes.

Issues with CO-PA Segment Determination and Storage Logic

The following issues were identified in the above solution of using the same segment numbers for multiple business processes.

• Performance Issues: Every business process needs to check the table CE4XXXX to determine whether a new “Segment” is needed. This impacts system performance significantly and is counterproductive to the simplification driven by SAP Solutions.
  
• Summarization Issues: The Characteristic summarization process is invoked in table CE4XXXX such that information sometimes gets lost unexpectedly in a business process if a characteristic is summarized.

Simplification Solution in SAP S/4 1709 (On-Premise and Cloud)

SAP changed the logic of assigning the Segment Number. A New Table is created CE4XXX_ACCT and segment numbers are uniquely generated in this table by respective business process. No summarization is applied to the CE4XXXX_ACCT table.

Business Processes Not Covered by Simplification

Following Business Processes still use CE4XXXX and do not use the segment number created in the new table CE4XXXX_ACCT

• Costing-Based CO-PA – this type of CO-PA is not in SAP’s target architecture and still uses the CE4XXXX table for storing the Segment Number
• Cost Center Allocations
• Top Down Distribution
• Classic COPA Planning (KEPM)

Impact existing data on 1610 and Previous Versions

Custom programs that are reading the table CE4XXXX directly need to be further analyzed to see whether the ACDOCA table can be used for data retrieval.

SAP automatically redirects the data of COEP (old account-based) to the ACDOCA table. SAP standard functionality 1709 stores all segment data in the ACDOCA table.

This blog post is part of a weekly series titled SAP S/4 1709 Simplification Digest. Come back every Friday for a new post or you can subscribe below to get updated every time a new post is published! Contact us to learn more about changes in SAP S/4 1709 and how it impacts your organization.