SAP Reference Structure
Purpose
The SAP Reference Structure is a hierarchical structure containing all the elements that customers need to create their Business Blueprint. It contains substructures with structure items, such as enterprise areas, scenarios, process groups, processes, and objects. These items are in turn assigned associated items, such as questions, IMG activities and organizational units, depending on the level concerned.
- The SAP Reference Structure helps you identify your enterprise’s requirements and set your project scope.
- In order that your enterprise’s structures are optimally mapped to functions in your SAP System, you can edit structure items as follows:
- Copy
- Set order
- Rename
- Set in scope
- Add structure item
- You can assign one business owner and one consultant for a structure item in the SAP Reference Structure.
Integration
The SAP Reference Structure allows you to navigate through the
Question & Answer database.
Features
The SAP Reference Structure offers you a guide to identifying your enterprise’s specific needs and selecting the functions you need to map them to your SAP System. It consists of the following substructures:
- Business Strategy
Contains information about an enterprise’s general business strategy, for example, markets, product strategy, competition and strategies for specific enterprise areas
- Organization
Describes how your enterprise’s organizational structure can be portrayed in your SAP System. It contains cross-application/central organizational units and enterprise-specific organizational units and is organized by enterprise area.
- General Settings
Here you identify general settings in line with the IMG, such as languages, countries, and currencies. These settings are required to set default parameters in the IMG.
- Master Data
Describes the structure of master data in your system. This substructure is organized by enterprise area. Relevant master data objects are assigned to each enterprise area. Master Data also contains an overview of general master data objects.
- Business Processes
- Lets you analyze and describe your enterprise’s procedures and processes and how these can be mapped to your SAP System. Contains enterprise areas, which are further broken down into scenarios, process groups, processes, and objects.
- A great deal of additional information is available at structure item level, for example, information on input and output, organizational units, transactions, functions and IMG activities. Information on IMG activities is required for the ASAP - IMG link, which allows you to navigate directly from the
Business Process Master List (BPML) to the IMG activities that are relevant for a particular structure item.
You can use the Diagram Explorer to display items from different levels of the SAP Reference Structure (scenarios, process groups, and processes).
In an industry-specific implementation project, you use value chains to generate your Business Blueprint. Value chains describe all key processes for a specific industry, across all enterprise areas.
- Cross-Application Components
Describes functions that are relevant for several or all enterprise areas (for example, European Monetary Union: Euro, Document Management System).
User Roles
This substructure contains SAP user roles, which are structured by enterprise area, for example General management, Coordinator for period-end-closing activities. The project team can use these roles to analyze and document project-specific requirements for user profiles, and to collect relevant information on user-role-specific authorization profiles. User roles can be assigned to individual structure items.
- Training and Documentation
Contains information about planned end user training and documentation standards for implementing the SAP System.
- Development
Holds all documentation entered in the Technical Analysis section of the substructures Master Data, Business Processes, and Cross-Application. The substructure Development is broken down into Conversions, Interfaces, Reports, Forms, and Other Development.
For most substructures, you can also generate reports, which summarize the information you have gathered.