SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation (BPC)

Many organizations struggle with integrating processes and technologies that support budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting activities. Column5 enables organizations to integrate these processes to significantly reduce cycle time, improve accuracy, eliminate the proliferation of off-line spreadsheets and ensure one version of the truth. The result is the ability to plan and monitor the business more effectively, enable better decision making and free your skilled resources to carry out higher-value work than crunching the numbers.

BPC enables organizations to:

• Reduce cycle times for planning, budgeting, and forecasting;
• Strengthen decision-making and respond to dynamic business environments;
• Eliminate information and resource silos and enable cross-organization collaboration;
• Minimize training and IT investments with an intuitive, business user-focused solution that integrates with Microsoft Office products;
• Increase transparency and expedite financials filing with the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) add-on; and
• Support strategic initiatives with key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect strategic goals and are fuelled by accurate, up-to-date source data.

An example of processes one can execute in BPC is listed below. This is by no means a full list. Our clients go on to implement further processes, often with minimal external help, to analyze greater parts of their business over time.

• Top down and bottom up financial planning and budgeting
• HR, capital, project, marketing, sales, procurement and FX analysis, reporting and forecasting
• Management Reporting
• Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)
• Statutory Consolidation including complex eliminations and compliance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), International Accounting Standards (IAS), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
• Forecasting, rolling or periodic
• Cashflow reporting, budgeting and forecasting
• KPI and performance tracking
• What-if scenarios

Technology: A single platform for business processes

Column5 offers a number of starter kits and utilities to speed the implementation of BPC. BPC is a single platform for financial and operational process planning, forecasting and reporting. This is a key differentiator. There is no need to join together separate modules or several proprietary applications. This significantly simplifies the technology, data and meta-data management, the cost of ownership, and the user experience. It is easy to navigate, easy to use and leverages Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer as the window upon the database. Users feel secure in having the full, rich functionality of Microsoft Office at their disposal, while ensuring that users work in a controlled environment with one version of the truth.

BPC can be implemented on a Microsoft or NetWeaver technology platform.

Online Demos

Planning and Consolidation. This session provides an overview of the Planning and Consolidation solution from a Planning and Forecasting perspective.

Analyzer. This session provides and overview of SAP BusinessObjects Extended Analytics, known as Analyzer, in combination with Planning and Consolidation. This demo scenario will show how business users can create dynamic reports in an intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop environment.

Column5's Integrated Detail. This session involves Planning and Consolidation, focusing on drill-through and Column5’s Integrated Detail Solution. Column5’s Integrated Detail is a solution that extends the out-of-the-box features of drill-through and allows users to analyze additional detail using a Business Intelligence interface. A user can navigate seamlessly from a Planning and Consolidation report and access more detail in graphical BI environment.

Column5's Microsoft SharePoint Integration. This session is focused on SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation integration with Microsoft SharePoint. The demo scenario will show :

• SharePoint Workflow and Template management for Planning and Consolidation
• SharePoint dashboards and analysis integrated with Planning and Consolidation data
• Excel PowerPivot and Excel Services ad hoc analysis and reporting with integrated Planning and Consolidation data

Column5's Auto-Dimension Builder. This session provides and overview of how end-users can add new dimension members to an application from the Planning and Consolidation Interface for Excel.

Are you a member of ASUG ? If so, Column5 has a special Integrated Detail Offer! Click here for more information