Business Planning with SAP BPC

A company’s long-term success no longer depends solely on the demand for products and services. It is also a result of a good organization, in which planning and consolidation are essential components in order to make informed decisions within the company. A powerful planning & consolidation solution such as SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) not only enables you to better understand the current state of affairs; it also provides you with an ideal basis for all aspects of business planning thanks to integrated financial intelligence and forecasting models.

In order to remain competitive, companies must leave behind traditional long planning processes. The aim is to optimize and significantly accelerate all planning processes. Everyone knows that “time = money.” It must be possible to adapt plans quickly and accurately to changes. Otherwise, planning is already outdated when it is created and therefore worthless. But how can process costs be reduced? The answer is simple: with automation and optimization.

SAP BPC provides a comprehensive toolbox for modeling, administering, and controlling a planning environment. The solution is intuitive to operate, and it makes administration and data exchange of the planning models easier, provides these, and creates reports.

Monotonous routine activities represent potential sources of error, they cost unnecessary time, and ensure frustration among planners. In order to counter this and make the planning process more comfortable, preparatory or regularly recurring activities for planning rounds can be automated and executed at defined times. Here’s an example: Copy the actual data of the previous year and adjust it with the multiplier +5%. Whole workflows are thus easier to control. They can be thought out and fixed and tasks can be assigned directly. Plan data changes and administrative activities can be traced at any time using system reports or monitors.

Company planning consists of many sub-plans such as cost center, project, and personnel planning. The sub-plans have to be coordinated organizationally and technically, for that’s the only way to create a harmonious overall plan. The first challenge is to identify dependencies and integrate all partial planning processes. This is the prerequisite for deriving the actions required to achieve the planning objectives.

SAP BPC supports this project not only from a technical perspective, by enabling the exchange of master and transaction data between individual BPC and non-BPC planning models. It also helps to structure time sequences and technical dependencies, for example as top-down, bottom-up, and counter-current planning.

The importance of integration is illustrated with this greatly simplified example:

SAP BPC is part of the SAP Business Warehouse, and this is exactly what enables a single-point-of-truth (SPOT) approach. The characteristics of the SPOT approach can be summarized in the statement: “All the data you need in the right place and in the expected quality at the right time.” This means that the data needed for both reporting and planning can be collected, prepared and made available in the business warehouse. In addition to SAP sources such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP ECC, non-SAP sources can also be connected. This means that additional loading processes for reporting and comparison of plan and actual figures are superfluous.