SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

It is said that there is no accounting for taste. Meaning, there is no mathematical formula that can define and score what individuals prefer. This is because each person has their own “taste” or set of subjective preferences they find appealing, and attempting to distill this highly variable process of selecting what one finds attractive, tasteful, even beautiful to a digital formula for universal criteria is considered impossible.

For some reason, this same subjectivity has reigned in the world of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions for too long, as I will argue. With the advent of xP&A (Extended Planning & Analysis), which can be thought of as high-intensity EPM, deciding which solution to buy is more critical than ever.

Over the last decade, Column5 has been very involved in supporting SAP BPC Solutions, and a common theme for our customers has been the performance and stability of their system. With this in mind, we set out to address this challenge by developing the Darwin program.

Darwin has evolved (pun intended) to become a comprehensive platform of advanced features and pre-defined processes helping organizations maximize the value of SAP Analytics investments.

This blog focuses on how customers leverage Darwin’s advanced calculation capabilities to address common performance challenges specifically.

During November and December, Column5, in conjunction with our client DNB, three interesting and informative webcasts ran on the exciting and rewarding journey taken by DNB ASA, Norway’s largest financial services group.

This series of webcasts focused on the following specific and important elements of Enterprise Performance Management:

• Financial Consolidation for Statutory and Regulatory Reporting
• Intercompany Reconciliation
• The Last Mile of Financial Reporting

Each topic was underpinned by informing the attendees how SAP EPM solutions help companies achieve excellence and efficiency based on this real life DNB example.

This blog will present a comparison of BW-IP, BPC NW 10.1 Standard and BPC NW 10.1 Embedded. Each of these products is currently offered by SAP as planning solutions, but each has characteristics and functionality which will influence the decision to use one rather than another. This article aims to clarify the differences between each of the products and aid in the decision as to which of them to implement.  Each product will be better suited to a given company’s needs according to certain criteria, and this blog will set out to identify which product is best in each case.

SAP BPC is a tool that can be customised to facilitate planning, budgeting and forecasting processes for different
 functional areas such as Revenue, Human Capital Management, Operating Expenses, and Capital Expenditure. In this blog we will talk about how to integrate these functional areas into one unified BPC reporting model, for fully integrated planning.

The different functional areas require different data structures and consequently we  will need to use a separate BPC model for each area. To give some common examples:

The Revenue model may, depending on the modelling requirements, need to have Product dimensionality in order to plan the sales volumes and calculate planned revenue according to the price by product, and a Customer dimension to plan sales and analyse the outstanding payments by customer or channel.

The Labour planning, or HCM model may need to include a role dimension, in order to plan the salary by role or grade, or an Employee dimension to enable planning by employee or job grade.

The Operating Expenses or OPEX model should enable the user to plan the expense related General Ledger accounts at the required level of detail, for example, by collecting the number of flights and hotel nights and using forecast unit costs to calculate travel expenses.

The Capital Expenditure or CAPEX model should include an asset dimension which will include the company’s asset list and allow the user to plan new asset purchases and the corresponding depreciation for the planning period.