Why SAP BPC Now?
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
Complexity is the growing pain of a successful business, and nowhere is the pain of complexity felt more acutely than in the planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation processes upon which all businesses operate.
Spreadsheet sprawl can be a death knell for growing businesses. As can dependence on disjointed, homegrown legacy systems. Both increase the likelihood of budgeting fiascos and/or extended close cycles, and both signal your business’ need and readiness for the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) solution.
SAP BPC -- available in versions for both the Microsoft and SAP NetWeaver platforms -- combines planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities with management and legal consolidation functionality in a single application, providing business users with the intuitive, role-based tools, structured processes and centralized data they need to integrate corporate and departmental planning, shorten budget cycle time, close the books faster and ensure compliance with regulatory and financial standards.
You know your business is ready for SAP BPC if you are experiencing any and/or all of the following planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation pains:
- Ongoing data reconciliation issues as a result of loading data needed for planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation processes from multiple, disparate source systems
- Chronic close extensions -- especially around year and quarter end -- because of late journal entries; e.g., top-line adjustments, audit adjustments, currency and other imputed earnings adjustments, etc.
- Inability to provide a fully documented audit trail for consolidated numbers -- unable to trace source transactions for a particular trial balance or consolidated balance sheet account
- Manual adjustments -- with material impact -- made to financial statements because of complex CTA/FX calculations
- Inability to reconcile with local, functional and group currency between underlying ERP and consolidation systems
In addition to addressing the pain points above, here are the top five reasons why you should implement SAP BPC today:
- Familiar, easy to use - Enables rapid adoption by leveraging native Microsoft Office tools (e.g. Excel) and web browsers accessing a central database
- Unified planning and consolidation - Single application reduces maintenance, improves data integrity, and simplifies deployment while enabling flexible planning & consolidation functions
- Owned and managed by business users - Business users manage processes, models, & reports and can create reports on the fly without help from IT
- Business-process centric - Configurable business process flows guide users and ensure enterprise-wide process consistency
- An open, adaptable application - Extends the value of your investment in both SAP and non-SAP environments
Attend Optimal’s session during Reporting & Analytics 2011, November 2 – 4, in Las Vegas to learn how our Simplified Consolidation and Optimized Close offering can be leveraged with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for more efficient financial consolidation and closing processes.
Save $100 by registering as a guest of Optimal.
Optimal is also proud to be a gold sponsor for the BPC Bootcamp, November 2 – 4, in Las Vegas.
BPC Bootcamp is the most comprehensive seminar available for finance and IT teams that evaluate, use, support, and deploy SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll learn at BPC Bootcamp:
- Streamlined planning processes for:
- Sales and operations
- Headcount
- Capital planning
- Budgeting
- Planning, budgeting, and consolidation benchmarks
- Guidelines for the SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft versions of BPC
- Best practices for both legal and management consolidations
- Data modeling, security, performance, and usability dos and don’ts
- Data migration strategies from older planning applications to BPC
- 7 lessons to get your BPC project off on the right foot
Want to know what your peers are doing on the financial planning/consolidation front? Take the Optimal SAP Quick Poll: Got SAP BPC Plans?
