This is a post I have been meaning to do for a long time about how one customer is using LiveCompare to regularly extract transactional and master data from all of their SAP system's for auditing purposes.

Their original issue of just trying to extract the right data from the SAP system's was a major headache for them. The data extracts were being attempted by the Auditors themselves using standard SAP transactions before an Audit for a particular country was due. For large SAP tables this was virtually impossible, the system would time out or the auditors would have to try and download the data in chunks and then piece them together before feeding the results into their auditing tool (ACL) for further analysis.

Their vision was to actually have this data automatically extracted on a monthly basis and stored away so it was already sitting there when an audit was due. This would mean the auditors could get on with auditing rather than spending weeks trying to extract the required data. Having this up to date data, would also mean the auditing department could become more pro-active and inform the business much quicker when an issue was discovered.

LiveCompare was introduced to them on the back of a LiveModel demo but they instantly recognised that it could do the job of extacting data with its 'Read SAP Table' action.

Of course it wasn't as simple as that, for instance -

• they only needed certain fields for certain dates
• they only want to keep a rolling 6 months worth of data
• the data needed to be accessable by their auditing tool
• all the extracts needed to be fully automated
• etc, etc

After several iterations of workflow development the example attached is working for them with all their requirements solved (there is a workflow for each table or pair of tables they need to extract but they all basically do the same thing)

1. It automatically chooses the correct RFC destination based on the Project set up using the 'Get Administration Objects' action
2. It automatically calculates the previous month's start and end date so it know which rows to extract in the table
3. In this example it also calculates the previous 5 months dates so it can extract any 'Retro Posting's' in the table
4. It also calculates which month's worth of data should be deleted from the database (they only keep 6 months worth of rolling data)
5. It can then do the actual read of the SAP table (field's to extract are managed by an external data source which feeds the 'Columns to Read' parameter)
6. In this example it also reads another table using the header data from the first table (BKPF to BSEG) 
7. Now that the correct data has been extracxted it is then copied into another SQL database which is linked to the ACL Auditing tool. The deletion of the first month's worth of data is done at the same time
8. Finally the data is deleted from the LiveCompare database tables to save disk space ! 

Having the workflow set-up like this means they can be scheduled to run every month with minimal maintenance from the auditing team. It also mean's that when they bring on a new system all they have to do is set-up a new project in LiveCompare and copy in the workflows and schedule them.