Overview

SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) is SAP’s flagship product for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and both legal and management consolidations. SAP BPC provides a highly scalable, robust database combined with business process and logic capabilities to provide a true Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform. SAP BPC is a unified solution that does not require individual software components to perform a core set of business functions and tasks.

Let’s begin to understand BPC’s capabilities with an overview of the five core EPM business processes it is most commonly used to address.

History of BPC

BPC also includes Business Process Flows (BPFs) that can be used as a formal workflow for both financial and operational processes, or as a menu to organize various assets including input forms, reports, books and dashboards.

BPC attracts users with its innovative user experience, including native Excel integration. BPC’s founders at OutlookSoft understood that Excel was crucial for finance users to accomplish their daily tasks. Copying and pasting information into a proprietary tool or using a web interface cannot match the flexibility, power, variety, and convenience of Excel. They successfully turned Excel into a “window to the database” and they removed many of the traditional pain points previously associated with Excel.

For the BPC Embedded model, SAP recommends using the Analysis Plug-in due to its superior integration into BW metadata. The EPM Plug-in has some architectural limitations and will not receive any functional enhancements on the Embedded model.

Planning

Planning is typically defined as long-range planning spanning multiple years, that can be entered in any combination of periodicity (week, month, quarter year). Some companies use models with strategic or long-range planning that span years or decades into the future. These plans are usually at a higher level than the budget or forecast. The planning cycle also combines a variety of financial and non-financial information to form a complete view. BPC provides a platform to integrate business planning, connecting strategy, operations and financial processes.

Budgeting

A budget cycle is a full outlook for the upcoming year based on your business calendar. Some budgets start out with predefined assumptions or targets (top-down), while others begin with a set of detailed inputs from various participants across the organization (bottom-up). It is quite common for organizations to develop a budget with a combination of both top-down and bottom-up assumptions, with multiple versions being developed during an iterative and collaborative process.

Forecasting

Many companies have abandoned the traditional 12-month budget in favour of a rolling forecast, which looks at the remaining months of the year and a full 12-18 months (or more) into the future. BPC easily combines the actual periods with forecast periods into one category or version. This facilitates more efficient reporting and analysis. For example, the May forecast version (category) would have four periods of actual data (January – April), and at least eight periods of forecast data. This also allows users to easily compare the current forecast to previous forecast periods.

Consolidations

BPC has built-in financial intelligence including robust legal and management consolidation capabilities. These capabilities include the ability to import data from various data sources. SAP BPC customers can enjoy a variety of integration options, including real-time consolidations with SAP’s flagship ERP solution, S/4HANA. BPC also fully supports non-SAP ERP systems. Many BPC users have multiple ERPs – one of our customers had so many acquisitions they consolidate over 90 different GLs with different COAs. Reporting and analysis features include P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow statements to accommodate internal and external financial reporting requirements.

Legal and Management Reporting & Analysis for both Operations and Finance

BPC enables a wide variety of reporting and analysis formats including what-if scenarios with real-time modelling, by leveraging Excel to dynamically read data and write back to the database. Users can easily develop both ad-hoc and production reports, including financial statements, in their required format. BPC includes a book publication wizard within the Excel interface that dynamically generates any combination of cost centers, profit centers, product lines, etc. and product books into a distributable PDF document. An optional Disclosure Management solution is available from SAP to help automate filing with various regulatory agencies, including SEC.

Our Expertise

Consulting:

At Data Labs India, we specialize in designing and implementing new business processes tailored to your organization's unique needs. Our SAP BPC experts work closely with you to understand your business objectives and create efficient, future-proof processes that drive success.

Optimize Current Processes: Unlock the full potential of your SAP BPC solution by optimizing your existing business processes. Our consultants conduct thorough assessments to identify areas for improvement, streamlining your workflows, and ensuring optimal performance.

Audit & Assessment: Ensure the health and compliance of your SAP BPC system with our comprehensive audit and assessment services. We evaluate your system's configuration, data integrity, and security to provide you with actionable insights for enhancement and risk mitigation.

Training:

Executive Training: Empower your leadership team with executive training tailored to SAP BPC. Our programs equip executives with the knowledge and insights they need to make informed decisions and maximize the benefits of SAP BPC for strategic planning and performance management.

Business User Training: Ensure your business users are proficient in SAP BPC to leverage its capabilities effectively. Our training programs cater to users of all levels, from beginners to advanced users, enabling them to navigate the system confidently.

Developer Training: Build an in-house team of SAP BPC developers with our specialized training courses. Our training equips developers with the skills to customize and extend SAP BPC solutions to meet your specific requirements.

Implementation:

Install & Configure Solutions: Trust our experts to handle the installation and configuration of SAP BPC solutions. We ensure that your system is set up correctly from the start, minimizing downtime and ensuring a smooth implementation process.

Collect Requirements & Design Models: Our consultants work closely with your organization to gather requirements and design data models that align with your business objectives. We tailor SAP BPC to your unique needs, ensuring a solution that delivers results.

Deploy, Train & Handover: We manage the entire deployment process, from training your teams on the new SAP BPC implementation to providing comprehensive handover. Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, so you can start reaping the benefits quickly.

Support:

Offshore Support (Technical & Functional): Count on our offshore support teams for technical and functional assistance. We provide round-the-clock support, resolving issues promptly to keep your SAP BPC system running smoothly.

Onsite + Offshore Support Model: Our flexible support model combines onsite and offshore support to meet your specific needs. Whether you require on-the-ground assistance or remote support, we have you covered.

Ad Hoc Support: For those unexpected challenges, our ad hoc support services offer quick, on-demand assistance. Whether it's troubleshooting, performance optimization, or system enhancements, we're here to help.

We'd be delighted to guide you through a smooth digital transformation journey

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