In October a few members of the DataConsulting team were invited to spend a week in the offices of our partners Dab in Deggendorf, Germany. Dab are experts in SAP data extraction and data analysis with a range of products that can speed up the hard work for any internal auditor. We were invited to spend time with them, learning about the software they sell and how to help users in the UK implement it.
We were all extremely impressed with the professionalism and knowledge of the entire team (not just in data analytics, but also beer and wine).
Dab’s products fall into two specific areas, SAP data extraction and SAP data analysis.
dab:Exporter extracts data tables from SAP and then converts that data into data formats that are appropriate for data analytics, for example ACL analytics or ACL Analytics Exchange. There is also the option to extract for SQL or CSV.
The really clever stuff is part of the analysis suite. Dab have spent years testing and perfecting their data table extraction so that you can easily extract the data you need from SAP. These are split out into various modules including: Vendor Master Data, Purchase to Pay and Order to Cash. Once you have all the data you need you can import it straight to ACL software to start running your own scripts. Or, even better use one of the prepared scripts that Dab have already written and go straight ahead with analysing your data at the touch of a button. There are over 100 of these scripts available so there’s plenty of inspiration there for tests you can run. I’d encourage anyone running data analytics from an SAP system to get in touch to find out more about them.
Come the end of the week only one thing needed to be settled and we were challenged to a few games of FIFA on their in-house PlayStation. Typically every match went to penalties and after four games we were tied 2-2. We’ll definitely be visiting again for a rematch.
