I assume you have some background knowledge here. What you need to decide is if under all circumstances will you be able to assure that a cost center is always associated with one and only one profit center. Some might already know that is a pretty safe assumption, but if you have been in the business a while you do know there are ways to break that relationship in old versions of SAP and change it over time in any version as well as allow for multiple profit centers in a GL posting for one cost center. Some ways are within SAP standard functionality and some ways are not. But if all that is true, who says profit center is a property of cost center in a BPC cost center planning application? You would be suprised who would say it is! I, however, would not because I know better.
The question is should you think in terms of multiple proifit centers possible for one cost center and is it worth it to do so? What do you not have to do if you do this in a primary real time posting?
This Demo video shows you some of the essence of what you need to control with the client in the back end to make the base level member updates to BPC create the right output. If you can keep to the standard designs of ECC you can move much faster. The real issue will develop later in other posts here when instead of cost center planning alone with a single profit center, we design a profit center planning application that includes cost center, internal orders and other controlling objects as well as revenue and we allow the relationship between cost centers and profit centers to 1) Slowly change as is the "standard" SAP design and 2) be posted more freely at runtime. That is much more tricky fro businesses to maintain as business process over time. We should all know that cost center data is period enabled if you will. Thus in the Old School terminology, Profit Center could be considered to be a Slowly Changing Dimension rather than a property or Hierarcy of Cost Centers. Each year a cost center my get a new assigned profit center. Ok not great business thinking...but it is what you can do in SAP and if you can do it, your BPC design should accomodate it or somewhere down the line you are going to find your integration is not easy and natural.
If a customer wants more flexibility in cost centers and profit centers than this design holds, then you cannot rollup cost centers to profit centers because the relationship might no longer be 1 to 1 either in real time or across time(changing the profit center relationship annually in cost center master for example)
How that is accomplished is subject of other posts to come.
The same is true of functional area, but it is more common to change that field and by default, SAP allows it to be posted as changed. This video assumes you will maintain the standard one to one relationship of cost centers to profit centers as is established in SAP ECC Cost Center master data by typical design and use assessments or distributions to move shared services costs and the resulting profit center changes as would be necessary due to the master data relationship. We will in later posts discuss how to look at Partner Profit Center in BPC as an alternative hierarchy.
In reality, this relationship in most SAP ECC implementations will not hold over time requiring profit center and functional area to become dimensions particularly if you design and build a profit center planning application that considers revenue and costs by more than just cost centers. Few experts would say these results are what most companies would always want, but only experts would be able to reason with companies about why this is the standard design behavior of SAP. The question is are they other standard designs that clearly indicate profit center as a dimension? The reason I am on this so much is because I have seen more than a few designs from BPC experts that have no back end background and always see profit center as a property or a hierarchy parent and candidly while I will still here prove them "right" it is a completely wrong design.
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