SAP BPC: Unified tool for Planning & Consolidation (Part I of II)
This is not an exception but a norm. As per their needs, different functions in an organization implement planning/budgeting/consolidation tool of their choice. Hence each function only succeeds in achieving its limited objectives; failing to align the organization level objectives.
Multiple planning/consolidation landscape leads to number of challenges/issues, some of them are listed below:
• Integrating information silos for unified view of organizational data
• Maintaining data Integrity and quality.
• Higher maintenance cost as multiple applications are maintained.
• High dependency on IT for minor changes in the system.
What does an organization do to overcome these challenges? How does an organization bring together all its planning and consolidation applications? Well, they can use a single unified performance management solution with an integrated reporting structure. This provides collective insights into different business functions enabling better decision making capabilities for strategic alignment. I think SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) would be the right tool for such a platform; as it offers a unified solution for planning, financial consolidation and reporting.
Following are the key highlights of using such a solution using SAP BPC:
• One single view of data for all planning and consolidation. This reduces cycle time and maintains data consistency.
• Owned and managed by business with minimal support from IT.
• Recommended by SAP for all new planning and consolidation implementations.
• Excel based front end tool.
• Integrated with other EPM tools i.e. Profitability and cost management, Strategy management, Financial Consolidation, Intercompany etc.
• Also available in MS version targeted to non-SAP landscape.
In the next part of this blog I will illustrate further on -
1. What are the pros & cons of using multiple tools for planning & financial consolidation vs. a unified tool?
2. What are the best practices for designing a unified application for planning & financial consolidation using SAP BPC?
Comments
Is it a correct myth that BPC is good at financials area only ? as in it works well first on very less amount of data as there are severe performance degradation on higher data volume plus it is good only in financial planning scenarios. What about the other planning like operational planning ?Is BPC good in that as well ?
Posted by: Amit Agarwal | October 21, 2009 09:10 AM