The combined solution for optimized financial planning and consolidation
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.
The application includes planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation capabilities. This makes it easy to adjust planning and forecasts, accelerate budget cycles, and safely comply with accounting standards.
SAP BPC offers numerous functions to optimize modern planning and budgeting. At the same time, the tool promotes collaboration and helps to make informed decisions within the company. The improved planning efficiency shortens cycle times so that strategic business projects start on schedule.
How can business planning be optimized?
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 Otherwise, planning is already outdated when it is created and therefore worthless.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.
How do you keep an eye on the company’s future at all times?
Every company faces its own challenges. Business planning and corporate planning are fundamental milestones on the road to success. Different kinds of logic and projections can be used to significantly increase professionalism in these areas and to integrate comprehensible forecasts of future business developments.
More informed decisions can be made, and better results can be achieved based on what-if analyzes and scenario plans. Once modeled, SAP BPC enables fully automated forecasts in addition to traditional planning, taking into account specially defined progress logics – without any additional manual effort on the part of the planner. The extrapolation can be checked based on key figures, so that recommendations for action can be derived from limit and/or threshold values.
In order to be able to react to the constantly changing requirements and circumstances of the market and be prepared, scenario analyses in SAP BPC can be used to examine different visions of the future and draw conclusions about strategic orientation. The use of influencing factors/probabilities as well as value drivers also facilitates the evaluation of the future images.
How can all sub-plans be fully integrated into company planning, taking into account dependencies?
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:
What is the benefit of a single-point-of-truth approach?
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.
Get to know our valantic SAP BPC specialist Sandra Sertl in a free, non-binding consultation.
In a joint workshop we will identify individual optimization potential for your planning process and give you a first impression of the SAP BPC look and feel based on realistic data.
With SAP BPC and valantic, your business planning and consolidation will take you to the next level!
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A distinction is made between the following SAP BPC versions (embedded and/or standard modeling), based on the underlying BW:
With SAP BPC, all company planning including financial planning can be realized and thus optimized. This includes, for example, cost center planning, profit & loss, as well as balance sheet planning, project planning, personnel planning, and/or marketing planning. In addition to providing the planning architecture, interoperability between the individual planning models is also ensured.
SAP BPC enables two modeling approaches that can be used separately or jointly:
For both modeling approaches, both embedded and standard, there are direct migration paths to SAP BPC version 11.0/11.1.
The transition to the SAP Analytics Cloud can be done gradually via hybrid modeling approaches. However, it should be noted that there is no direct migration path, and a remodel must be done in the SAP Analytics Cloud.
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation allows you to enter plan data via Excel. For this purpose, the so-called Analysis for Office is installed; it is an Excel COM add-in. With the help of this add-in, users can connect directly to the SAP planning tool. After entering plan data, the data is transferred directly to the underlying BW by clicking the “Save” button and can be used there for reports, for example.
It is also possible to use web input screens.
After data entry and transfer via the “Save” button, the plan data is saved directly in a BPC model, which is either an SAP BW InfoCube or an SAP BW Advanced Data Store object.
This SAP solution requires the presence of a BW. It depends on the version of the BW that serves as the platform:
A specialist department can develop planning models independently in a standard environment without having to have knowledge of modeling in BW. Of course, a certain degree of model understanding is beneficial.
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation enables the automated transfer of master data from the ERP or S/4HANA in both the embedded and standard environment. Furthermore, the master data can be expanded manually and modified via web screens.
SAP BPC 11.1 is the strategic on-premise planning tool provided by SAP. From a technical point of view, quantum leaps are no longer to be expected, as this is an established solution, but optimizations and corrections will still be provided.
With this SAP solution, modeling of the planning environment is flexible. The time slices for planning can therefore also be selected as required. It is possible to record with offset financial years, quarters, months and – if desired – plan data even on a day-by-day basis.
If the SAP planning tool is operated via BW/4HANA or BW on HANA as a platform, there are no restrictions on the number of dimensions.
A comment function is included in both the embedded and standard environments. Comments can even be captured at different levels (cells, columns, rows).
Both planning environments (embedded and standard) allow currency conversion of the planned and actual data.
Yes, the so-called retraction can be implemented via an additional development in SAP BPC (or in the corresponding BW). This development is supported by the building blocks provided.
Yes, multiple hierarchies and structures can be used. These can either be automatically transferred from the ERP or S/4HANA or created manually in SAP BPC.
Sandra Sertl
Lead Consultant SAP BPC