Scroll Top

Say Goodbye to JAIC and DDS

TAKE NOTE (Insights and Emerging Technology)

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a high-profile focus point for AI adoption across the Pentagon, has ceased to exist as of June 1, as it and two other offices are rolled under the newly created Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer.

Two other key parts of the Pentagon’s technology network will also be subsumed officially into CDAO, when the new office reaches its full operational capability: the Defense Digital Service, which provides rapid technology solutions across the department, and the Office of Advancing Analytics, or ADVANA. In all three cases, the personnel who make up the offices are expected to remain as part of the CDAO staff, but will be diffused with the office stovepipes removed.

More change is coming, the CDAO will draft a legislative proposal that would permit the Chief Data Officer, responsible for strengthening DoD’s data culture, to report directly to the office of the CDAO. Currently, the CDO is “operationally aligned” to the office of the CDAO and has been rolled into one of its directorates, but still reports to the DoD chief information officer.

The Pentagon named former Lyft executive Craig Martell as CDAO in April. As CDAO, Martell is tasked with scaling up DoD’s data, analytics and AI to enable quicker and more accurate decision-making. The new office will also play an important role in the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts.

Other appointee’s to the CDAO office include Margaret Palmieri as the deputy CDAO, Sharothi Pikar, formerly of US Cyber Command, as DCDAO for acquisitions and Greg Little, formerly of Advana in OUSD-Comptroller, as the DCDAO for enterprise capabilities. Dan Folliard will take on the role of chief operating officer.

What that means in practice is; the CDO, DDS and JAIC are each going to report up to the CDAO and create a tech stack that integrates data, software and AI. The goal here is to optimize their value and try to consider them more holistically.

Read More

Interested in learning more about RPA? Download our FREE White Paper on “Embracing the Future of Work”

UNDER DEVELOPMENT (Insights for Developers)

What Is The SAP Universal Journal

Intro

The SAP Universal Journal brings together the once-separate components Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) into one pool of relevant business data. This single source of truth collects all accounting-relevant transactions and makes them available to all relevant application components: Financial Accounting (General Ledger), Controlling, Asset Accounting, and Material Ledger.

Technically speaking, the SAP S/4HANA Universal Journal combines the most important fields from these components within a single line item table, which enables the components to read and process the data required for their business processes from a single location.

The advantages of having all this information in one place are evident: No reconciliation activities are needed, data redundancies are eliminated, and line items are entered only once. All of this reduces the memory footprint and increases the throughput of the system. Overall, companies can even benefit from lower TCO thanks to the Universal Journal.

The Introduction of the SAP Universal Journal

Before the introduction of the Universal Journal by SAP, the components Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) were managed separately because of technical restrictions. This made it challenging to move data into appropriate tables for reporting or storing different details in tables. Here is a figure representing this below:

Universal Journal

Even if the principles of financial controlling and accounting are similar, these are independent processes. This necessitates the creation of a separate database table for each of these areas when aiming for the highest benefits.

Though reconciliation ledgers were used in the past to marry financial accounting and controlling, this was not enough. The S/4HANA database technology was the only logical solution that united these two components of accounting into a single physical table. With the combination into a single table, the SAP Universal Journal made it easier to read financial data and interpret it from a single point.

The Universal Journal is the single truth source because it has line-item details in its first layer. It is the table ACDOCA. Here is a diagram depicting how business accounting has changed through the years until the advent of the Universal Journal…

ACDOCA

Read More

– Dig Deeper –
The SAP S/4HANA Finance – Universal Journal

Q&A (Post your questions and get the answers you need)

Q. We get many questions on the SAP universal journal. I have created this little FAQ that represents some common questions and answers. See SAP note at end for more…

Is Central Finance and Universal Journal the same thing?

A. No. The Universal Journal is a table combining multiple fields from diverse financial control and management modules. On the other hand, Central Finance is a system in S/4HANA that combines master data with financial transactional data from multiple non-SAP and SAP systems in a central location.

Q. Is Project Systems a part of the Universal Journal?

A. No. Some of the data related to financial controls in Project Systems is contained within the Universal Journal. Nevertheless, this module in itself is separate in S/4HANA

Q. Does the Universal Journal include the Combined Profitability Analysis tool?

A. No, this is a separate functionality that was introduced by SAP’s support team and is not part of the Universal Journal.

Q. Can you create KE30 reports in HANA for account-based CO-PA?

A. Yes, KE30 reports can be created as they were done in ECC. With Account Based CO-PA the data is extracted from Table ACDOCA as opposed to COEP.

Q. Why is BSEG continuing in Universal Journal, but BSIS, BSAD, BSIK, and BASK are not?

A. Although the BSEG table exists in S/4HANA, it does not contain all line items as it did in ECC. The reason it still exists in S/4HANA, is because there are several applications such as sales and purchasing components which use the interface to BSEG, and SAP has not yet converted all applications to divert to ACDOCA from BSEG. The long-term vision is that table BSEG will be used only for open item management – and postings that do not related to open items will no longer create entries in table BSEG.

As a first step towards this vision, postings from Controlling such as assessments and distributions do not create entries in table BSEG. Instead they only create entries in table ACDOCA. Also, foreign currency valuation postings or manual currency adjustments (such as FBB1) do not create entries in table BSEG anymore. These postings have a status in the BKPF table (BKPF-BSTAT) of ‘U’.

However, BSIS, BSAS, BSID, BSAD, BSIK, BSAK are index tables, which stored duplicate data in ECC for faster access to open item/ cleared items processing. With the computing power of S/4HANA based on the in-memory database and columnar storage, these index tables are no longer needed as the data is extracted from database on the fly in real-time.

More questions?

Find more answers on specific questions regarding the Universal Journal here:

SAP Note 2428741 – “Universal Journal FAQ”

Cheers!

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, why not share it with your friends!