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SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

A Great Financial Consolidation Solution for Statutory and Regulatory Reporting in Complex Multinational Organisations

Posted by Paul Coleman on Tue, Feb 16, 2016 @ 09:02 AM

SAP has a portfolio of Consolidation solutions with their own unique positioning and the SAP Financial Consolidation (FC) software is an enterprise solution offered to companies looking to improve and speed up their financial close – without sacrificing quality control and compliance.

FC became part of the SAP EPM portfolio through the acquisition of BusinessObjects in 2007.  BusinessObjects itself acquired the French software vendor Cartesis who originally marketed Financial Consolidation as Cartesis Magnitude.  With a large and loyal customer base throughout Europe and Japan, FC has a particularly strong focus on statutory consolidation requirements within large multinational organisations that have complex and evolving corporate structures across multiple reporting standards (e.g. IFRS and local GAAP).

Topics: Best Practices, Analytics, Consolidation, Financial Close, Value

What’s the ROI of Your BPC Implementation?

Posted by Rick Bryant on Wed, Oct 22, 2014 @ 14:10 PM

“Is our BPC implementation working well?  How are competitors using the same software?  What are the best practices?  What is the ROI?”

Topics: Center of Excellence, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Financial Close, Value, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Using the Power of Visual Basic in EPM 10 Reporting

Posted by Michael Sheard on Wed, Aug 06, 2014 @ 07:08 AM

The Excel Add-In reporting tool of EPM 10 combines the features of Excel with EPM functionality.  A feature within Excel that is sometimes useful to meet more advanced reporting needs is macros programmed using Visual Basic (VBA).  This can achieve features that are not achievable through EPM 10 functionality.

Topics: Best Practices, Excel, Thought Leadership, Analytics, EPM 10, Value

7 Deadly Sins of a BPC Implementation

Posted by Jamison Chochrek on Thu, Jul 17, 2014 @ 14:07 PM

I have had the pleasure of being involved with at least 100 BPC (OLAP) deployments over the past two decades in some role or another. I wanted to share what I believe are the 7 Deadly Sins of a BPC Implementation.  Over the past 9 months I have been speaking with new clients to my organization who have had prior experience with another firm claiming to understand BPC.   Seventy-five percent (75%) of these discussions involved most, if not all of the aspects described below.

Topics: Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management, Performance, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Spreadsheets to BPC/EPM 10: A Quantum Leap

Posted by Keith Roberts on Tue, Jul 01, 2014 @ 07:07 AM
It’s the corporation’s latest planning/forecast/budget cycle, and you’re responsible for putting together the consolidated reports for the executive review meetings.  The analysts in Europe, Asia, North America and South America have sent you their Excel spreadsheets, which have been reviewed and revised according to their local management review meetings.  Their regional financial managers will be participating in the executive review meetings, and presenting their region’s forecast. 

The PowerPoint reporting package for the executive review meeting will consist of income statements, capital spending reports and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  Comments will be included, and there will be slides/reports at the region and total corporate level.  You have spent hours copying the Excel “reports” and pasting them into the PowerPoint slides.  Also, in order to produce the numbers for the region and total corporate reports, you had to combine the multiple Excel spreadsheets from the site analysts.  This included calculating the KPIs at the region and corporate levels.  You finally have everything ready for tomorrow’s first executive review meeting, although it’s 9:15 PM and you’re still at the office.

Topics: Center of Excellence, Excel, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), Forecasting

SAP BPC: What is the Right Amount of Time for a Design?

Posted by Will Leonard on Tue, Jun 17, 2014 @ 10:06 AM

The business blueprint is arguably the most important – and most complex – document that is delivered during an implementation.  But how much time should be allotted to this phase?

Topics: Center of Excellence, Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Business Intelligence: A Core Business Competency

Posted by David Den Boer on Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 15:03 PM
Economic challenges are all around today’s market. We hear about struggling companies that are suffering from poor performance. We know that companies don’t exactly come with manuals for the CEO to reference when things aren’t going well. In the past, conventional wisdom was to focus on the core money making operations of the enterprise. A car manufacturer that also dabbles in satellite technology, a TV manufacturer that also makes laptops, and newspaper that also owns real estate are examples of companies that, when times get difficult, have decided to dump ventures not aligned with the company’s core competencies. That’s what makes Gartner’s assessment ( Business Intelligence: A Core Business Competency) extremely important.

Topics: Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics, EPM ROI, Value, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Replace a Working Spreadsheet Based Forecasting Model with SAP BPC?

Posted by Michael Sheard on Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 14:03 PM
SAP BPC forecasting model implementations frequently replace existing spreadsheet forecasting models.  A key question to be asked when implementing SAP BPC is to consider how it will improve a forecasting process that works and therefore justify the disruption the change may involve and the expense, both internal and external.

Topics: Excel, Analytics, Value, Implementation, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), Forecasting

EPM Value Is Exclusively The Client's Definition

Posted by David Den Boer on Mon, Jan 13, 2014 @ 10:01 AM

This is an old story we see all the time. A policeman happens upon a drunk frantically searching for something at the base of a streetlight. “Hello there, looking for something?” The drunk looks up, “Yesh Offisher, I lost my keysh in the park.” “In the park? Then why are you looking on this street corner?” says the confused cop. “The light is better here!” says the drunk.

This is the problem with how EPM projects are governed today, and no, I am not implying drunks are prevalent in EPM! Too often prospects make decisions based solely on price, thinking that value is equivalent across service providers, and net ROI is maximized by selecting the lowest cost implementation proposal. I encourage customers to stop and think about what they get with the low cost provider. A team that doesn’t have the ability to offer the appropriate breadth services that are specifically designed to add value while reducing risk, leave only the lowest common denominator of value in their wake.

Topics: Best Practices, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), EPM ROI, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Adding Value through the BPC Consolidation Process – Part II

Posted by Mike Sullivan on Thu, Oct 10, 2013 @ 08:10 AM

In part one of this post we explored some of the areas where SAP Business Planning and Consolidation has added significant value to the Consolidation process through the use of Business Process Flows. The Business Process Flow not only aided in guiding a user through the steps in a process but served as a mechanism to allow once time consuming centralized tasks to be pushed upstream and distributed across the user base.  This post will dive into some key model considerations that need to be addressed in order to achieve this value.

Topics: Training, Value, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

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