CO PA

Profitability analysis is a component of enterprise resource planning (ERP) that allows administrators to forecast the profitability of a proposal or optimize the profitability of an existing project. Profitability analysis can anticipate sales and profit potential specific to aspects of the market such as customer age groups, geographic regions, or product types.

Profitability analysis can help key personnel in an enterprise to:

v  Identify the most and least profitable clients.

v  Identify the most and least profitable products or services.

v  Discover which sources of information offer the most reliable facts.

v  Optimize responses to changing customer needs.

v  Evolve the product mix to maximize profits in the medium and long term.

v  Isolate and remedy the causes of decreasing profit margins.

Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) enables you to evaluate market segments, which can be classified according to products, customers, orders or any combination of these, or strategic business units, such as sales organizations or business areas, with respect to your company's profit or contribution margin.

The aim of the system is to provide your sales, marketing, product management and corporate planning departments with information to support internal accounting and decision‑making.

Two forms of Profitability Analysis are supported: costing-based and account-based.

·        Costing-based Profitability Analysis is the form of profitability analysis that groups costs and revenues according to value fields and costing-based valuation approaches, both of which we can define ourselves. It guarantees us  access at all times to a complete, short-term profitability report.

·        Account-based Profitability Analysis is a form of profitability analysis organized in accounts and using an account-based valuation approach. The distinguishing characteristic of this form is its use of cost and revenue elements. It provides you with a profitability report that is permanently reconciled with financial accounting.

We can also use both of these types of CO‑PA simultaneously.

Integration

Profitability Analysis, alongside Profit Center Accounting (EC-PCA), is one of the application components for profitability accounting.

Features

In the application component CO-PA, we can define your master data,  the basic structures of this form of profitability analysis. This includes both units we want to evaluate (characteristics) and the categories in which we analyze values. In costing‑based CO‑PA, we define “value fields” in which to store your data for analysis. In account‑based CO‑PA, the values are structured by account.

Using the SAP master data (customer, product, customer hierarchy) or CO‑PA derivation rules, the system can derive additional characteristics based on the ones entered manually or transferred from primary transactions. The combination of characteristic values forms a multidimensional profitability segment, for which you can analyze profitability by comparing its costs and revenues.

If we reorganize parts of our company, such as our sales districts or customer hierarchies, we can change the assignments between characteristics for data that has already been posted.

The actual postings represent the most important source of information in CO‑PA. You can transfer both sales orders and billing documents from the Sales and Distribution (SD) application component to CO‑PA in real time. In addition, an interface program is available to let we transfer external data to the SAP system. We can also transfer costs from cost centers, orders and projects, as well as costs and revenues from direct postings (G/L account postings in FI, orders received in MM, and so on) or settle costs from CO to profitability segments.

In costing‑based CO‑PA, we can valuate incoming sales orders or billing documents to automatically determine anticipated sales deductions or costs. We can also revaluate our data periodically to adjust the initial, real-time valuation or add the actual costs of goods manufactured.

In CO‑PA Planning, we can create a sales and profit plan. Whereas both types of Profitability Analysis can receive actual data in parallel, there is no common source of planning data. Consequently, we always plan either in accounts (account‑based CO‑PA) or in value fields (costing‑based CO‑PA). In costing‑based CO‑PA we can use automatic valuation to calculate planned revenues, sales deductions and costs of goods manufactured based on the planned sales quantity.

The manual planning function lets we define planning screens for our organization. With this we can display reference data in planning, calculate formulas, create forecasts, and more. Planning can be performed at any degree of detail. For example, we can plan at a higher level, and have this data distributed top‑down automatically.

In automatic planning, you can copy and revaluate actual or planning data for a large number of profitability segments at once. We can also transfer planned sales quantities from (costing‑based) CO‑PA to Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) for the purpose of creating a production plan there.

The Information System lets we interactively analyze existing data from a profitability standpoint using the functions of the drilldown reporting tool. There we can navigate through a multidimensional “data cube” using a number of different functions (such as drilldown or switching hierarchies). The system displays data in either value fields or accounts, depending on the currently active type of Profitability Analysis and the type to which the report structure is assigned. (Each report structure is assigned to either costing‑based or account‑based CO‑PA.)

We can change the display parameters online directly from the displayed report. We can store report structures with predefined sort orders, number formats and so on, and execute these online or in the background at any time.