COPA Best Practices

Recommendations for improving system performance and coping with high transaction volumes in costing-based CO-PA:

• Limit the number of segment level characteristics in the operating concern to only those necessary for reporting and making CO assessments.

• Work closely with the Basis team to make sure there is sufficient disk space for the CO-PA tables. Organize a separate directory on the server for CO-PA data. Since CO-PA often requires special technical attention, it is vital to have a significant level of Basis support.

• Optimize the secondary index in the CE4xxxx table. Since CO-PA looks up a profitability segment number in the CE4 table for each line item that is transferred from a billing document, indexes on the CE4 table play an important role in system performance. By default, the primary index (ID 0) is the key from the segment level table. The secondary index (ID 1) is customizable and includes a subset of the segment level characteristics. The smaller number of characteristics in the index allows the system to access data more quickly. The standard secondary index delivered by SAP may not be suitable for a particular level of reporting, so this index should be reviewed and customized for each project.

• Summarize line items in documents as they are transferred to CO-PA. This functionality reduces the number of line items in the CE1 table if multiple lines exist for the same item on a billing or financial document. You can maintain configuration for this type of summarization under IMG Actual postings > Initial Steps > Summarize data during update. If line items will not likely repeat on billing documents or financial documents, this recommendation will have the least impact on performance.

• Use summarization levels for reporting. If reports will be generated out of CO-PA, design
standard reports that use common characteristics. This way, a limited number of summarization levels can be created to improve report performance. By storing data at a summarized level, CO-PA takes less time to generate reports because the system has fewer lines of data to read. When configured, summarization levels act like segment level characteristics, but at a higher level. CO-PA has in built functionality that proposes summarization levels for specific reports.

• Use the “Fast Rollup�? method to fill summarization levels. A Fast Rollup method can be used to take a snapshot of CO-PA data and dramatically reduce the time required to fill summarization levels. Special system setup is required to use the Fast Rollup method because it uses a parallel query. OSS Note 136216 explains technical details for setting up the system. Instructions from SAP on how to use the Fast Rollup method are attached along with this document. Note that the Fast Rollup method requires a significant amount of Basis support.