You draw up a logical concept in order to determine an enterprise’s cross-system and cross-client structures, information flows and business processes. This concept provides a basis for Customizing in the R/3 System.

In general, you may portray your enterprise’s structures in one or in several R/3 systems.

It is not necessary to represent the individual economic units of an enterprise by independent, linked R/3 systems.

By representing an enterprise in a central R/3 System, you may maximize integration of the business processes and information flow required.

Reasons for distributing the logical concept across several R/3 Systems include:

• Technical facts such as performance, availability, maintenance, upgrade:
• An enterprise’s regional structures
  The availability of the data for external reporting requirements (taxes, balance sheets) as well as control of the financial accounting functions are the most important business requirements that have to be met.
• An enterprise’s structures are geared towards business units
  The prerequisite for this is that business requirements focus either on logistical integration within the business units or between different companies in the group.
  Reporting requirements in Financial Accounting should focus on the cost and profitability analysis for each business unit.

There are many different ways of designing system infrastructures, ranging from a regional to a business-unit-oriented system topology. As a rule, an enterprise’s system infrastructure constitutes a combination of these two approaches.

When implementing distributed R/3 Systems, you may choose between different distribution techniques, such as ALE or the Ledger Roll-Up technique of the application component FI-SL (Special Ledger).

For more information, see: