SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

At Column5, we’ve spent decades helping SAP customers improve planning, reporting, and analytics processes by implementing solutions such as SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), all versions of SAP BPC, and associated SAP products. As a founding partner of Darwin Analytics and a proud member of the Darwin Marketplace, we are excited about SAP’s recent announcement of Business Data Cloud and its potential to drive greater data unification, AI-driven insights, and enterprise-wide planning enhancements. 

A Strategic Roadmap for Your EPM Future

SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) has been a trusted financial planning and consolidation solution for years, but the landscape is shifting. With SAP’s end-of-maintenance timelines approaching and cloud-based EPM solutions gaining traction, many BPC customers are facing a critical decision: 

At Column5, our mission has always been to empower organizations to achieve extraordinary outcomes by optimizing their Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) processes. Over the years, we've partnered with leading providers and innovators in the EPM ecosystem to deliver advanced, high-impact solutions to our clients. Today, we’re proud to highlight our strategic partnership with Darwin Analytics, a game-changing orchestration platform that is reshaping how EPM is executed and advancing the field to new heights. 

Choosing the right Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) tool is crucial for organizations aiming to optimize their planning, reporting, and analytics processes. SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) are two leading solutions from SAP, each offering unique capabilities tailored to different business needs. Let's examine some key considerations and comparisons regarding how well SAC can meet the evolving needs of businesses accustomed to BPC. We will focus on four key areas: Technical, Administration, User Interface, and AI capabilities. 

The EPM Add-in client is a hot topic among our customers and a subject we receive plenty of questions about. Questions usually arise during migration from the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC) 7.x version for the Microsoft platform to SAP BPC 10.0 or 10.1, version for the Microsoft platform. This blog will cover questions about the EPM Add-in client during system upgrades. 

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.  SAC combines multiple EPM, BI and Analytics features/benefits into one product.  This allows users to plan with robust collaboration features while using Predictive Analytics as well as Business Intelligence, and robust, state of the art Analytics. Currently, SAP BPC remains the default approach for Enterprise-wide Planning, Forecasting and Consolidations, while SAP Analytics Cloud fulfills relatively straightforward requirements from a planning and forecasting perspective.  

In 2007, OutlookSoft bought BPC and ten years later, SAP group reporting was released. Several versions of BPC have been released since its first debut in May 2017 including: Standard, Embedded, Optimized, and a Microsoft version. This article will compare the functionalities of BPC Standard (the most frequently used version) to the 2022 version of Group Reporting on-premise and will discuss some of the main aspects of the consolidation process.

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.