Defining a Derivation Strategy

When attempting to locate a characteristic value for each characteristic for transactions relevant to CO-PA, the system goes through a sequence of steps. This sequence of steps is known as the derivation strategy.

The system performs the steps in order from the first to the last derivation. If a derivation needs another derivation, the source derivation must be positioned before the dependent derivation. The very last derivation is usually the dummy profit center.

The following instructions can be configured for each step:

• Conditions under which the step should be executed.

• Whether initial values are allowed for the source fields in a step.

• Whether the step should overwrite an existing characteristic value.

• Whether an error message should generate if the step is unsuccessful.

Each step represents one of the customizable derivation techniques, such as table lookups, derivation rules, regions, product hierarchies, customer hierarchies, moves, clears, and enhancements. The values of one or more characteristics can be determined in a single step.

Derivation occurs for all transactions relevant to CO-PA, including direct entry into CO-PA and external data uploads into CO-PA.

Characteristics such as division and profit center have fixed derivation steps. This means that the system automatically generates non-modifiable steps that may be used to determine their values. These steps may be in the form of a standard derivation technique or function call.

You can use other derivation steps to overwrite the values determined through fixed derivation steps. This overwriting of values can be achieved with all characteristics, except controlling area, company code, product, and customer. These characteristics have fixed and non-modifiable derivation.

The system incorporates fixed derivation to ensure that many organizational elements are populated. This enhances the possibility of reconciliation with other data modules in the SAP system.

A table lookup is a derivation method that CO-PA uses to access the characteristic values from SAP master data tables when this information is not available in the originating transaction. For example, an invoice might not contain the purchasing group for a material being sold. CO-PA can capture this information for the invoice item using a table lookup.

Table lookups can be performed when the key of the table to be accessed is filled with the characteristic values that are already known to CO-PA for the transaction. For example, a country value can be determined when the customer identity is known. This is because the customer is the only key to the KNA1 table, which contains general customer information, such as addresses.

The ability to customize table lookup derivation allows you, as the configurator, to control the types of characteristic values that are used to access other characteristic values. For example, you can configure the table lookup for the characteristic country to find the country value for the ship-to field instead of the country value for the sold-to field.

Using table lookups, you can access entire or parts of field values in the tables in which keys are filled with the known characteristic values of transactions. For example, you can configure the derivation lookup for the product hierarchy to import the entire product hierarchy value or only the first few characters of the hierarchy into CO-PA.

The SAP system generates some table lookups automatically, based on the definition of a characteristic. The SAP system generates these table lookups when the operating concern environment is generated. You can modify the non-fixed lookups. Other table lookups, such as those for user-defined characteristics, must be created from the beginning.

Derivation rules are used to determine characteristic values through user-defined logic. They are frequently used with user-defined characteristics, although their use is not limited to user-defined characteristics.

With derivation rules, characteristic values, known as target values, are directly determined based on the values of other characteristic values, known as source values.

Similar to other derivation steps, you can configure derivation rules either to apply to all situations or to apply only when certain conditions are met. For example, they can be configured to apply for sales organization 1000 only. You can also configure derivation rules to produce an error message when a characteristic value cannot be determined using the rule entries. You can also ignore the error and proceed.

In contrast to other derivation steps, you can configure derivation rule entries to be either related to a specific interval or time (time-dependent) or applicable at all times (time-independent). Derivation rules can be set up in sequence with other derivation steps and methods to produce complex derivation logic.

With a move, you can directly transfer a characteristic value or part of the characteristic value to another characteristic. Under specific conditions, you can also move a constant to a characteristic.

In the figure, Derivation with Move and Clear, the value in the Sold-to field is copied to the Ship-to field with the Move function. This occurs if the Ship-to field is originally not populated by any previous derivation step.

When specific conditions arise, the Clear function is available to clear a value from a characteristic. In addition, the employee value is cleared to not assigned when the product is a specific value. This is because the employees should not get sales credit for certain items.

The system automatically generates a move derivation step to move the dummy profit center value from Profit Center Accounting (PCA) to CO-PA, if other steps cannot determine a profit center.

In this step, you activate the derivation of profitability characteristics for general ledger line items into the universal journal posting. These do not carry an account assignment to a profitability segment.

The requirements are as follows:

• Margin Analysis must be active.

• The corresponding general ledger account must be one of the following account types:

  • Primary cost or revenue

  • Secondary cost

The activation is possible for the following object types:

The Customizing Monitor provides an overview of all derivation steps. Additional functions are available when you use the SAP List Viewer to display the derivation analysis. You can search for specific value fields and determine their use in derivation.