Cost Center Summarizations 
Cost center summarization enables you to condense transaction data on the cost center group level in the Cost Center Accounting component (CO-OM-CCA). The system updates the summarized data of a cost center group in its own data record in the summarization table.
You can access this data in the information system. This improves performance in the Information system.
When you execute summarization, the SAP System progresses from the lowest hierarchy area in a cost center group to the highest. For technical reasons, you must assign a representative cost center to every group node during master data maintenance (see: Representative Cost Centers).
Summarization provides the Report Painter reports with totals records. This has the advantage of making the report runtime significantly shorter, depending on the degree of summarization, than with use of the totals records from the subordinate cost centers.
To evaluate the summarization data, you must create custom reports. The system includes sample reports in the 1RU library.
Implementation Considerations
You should consider carefully whether to generate an extract of the report data or execute a summarization. Summarizations generate a far greater amount of data than extract generation does (see Executing Report Painter Reports).
If you need few reports, we recommend you periodically save the reports in background for the entire cost center hierarchy and access the extracts afterwards online (see Variation). This spares you the repeated definition of new summarization reports.
You use summarization if you wish to access a large number of reports (including those defined spontaneously) within the entire the cost center hierarchy.
Features
You create summarizations during Customizing in the Implementation Guide (IMG) for the highest group node of a cost center group. This can be the highest group node of:
The standard hierarchy
An alternative hierarchy
Summarization carried out within the application framework can also be used:
For as many subareas of the hierarchy as desired
For individual periods
In both cases, note during the evaluations afterward that data with differing degrees of relevance is included within a summarization.
Several forms of summarization are possible:
Normal summarization applies to the object information, meaning the system replaces the cost center in the totals records with the representative cost center given for the cost center group. The degree of summarization depends on the data constellation, in particular that of the secondary allocations.
You can achieve a much higher degree of summarization by ignoring selected data. If, for example, you wish to generate the cost structure for the entire corporation in strategic reporting, you can leave out information on partner updating. This results in far faster runtimes for the evaluations.