Discovering Master Data

Business Units represent logical divisions within an organization, usually by functional areas. Typically, when you hear about a specific department within a company, that department is a business unit.

For instance, many organizations have several departments tasked with specific functions, such as finance, IT, marketing, sales, and so on. In many companies, these functions are often structured as business units.

In SAP Fieldglass, Business Units are represented in a hierarchy.

So, a company’s hierarchy could have the organization as a whole represent the Parent Business Unit, while Finance, IT, Marketing, Sales, and Human Resources represent the first functional levels.

Network Solutions, Network Design, and Network Implementation, then, might represent second level functional areas under IT.

The Cost Center, like a business unit, can also be considered a logical division within an organization but is used strictly to allocate and track financial transactions. So, cost centers depend more on the financial tracking structures an organization has in place rather than the hierarchical reporting structure of a business unit.

In SAP Fieldglass, Cost Centers are used to allocate the costs of temporary workers and other related expenses to the appropriate departments within the organization. So, where the worker is assigned to work in a particular business unit, the worker’s costs are charged to that unit’s cost center.

So, if a company hires a worker for six months to cover for an absent worker on the Finance team, the costs are charged to the Finance department’s cost center.

Site, the third required Master Data, is where the work is to be performed. Site defines regions or geographic areas where an organization operates in order to reflect the conditions of those areas.

For example, a company that has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, London, Tokyo, and Sydney would do business in different time zones, maintain different currencies, procure workers from local suppliers, pay different tax rates, and so on.

Site provides a data reference to help keep track of those local conditions and applies them accordingly when transactions are created in the SAP Fieldglass application.