SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

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.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen a lot of our clients experience stubborn errors and issues that have surfaced in BPC for Microsoft environments. It’s important to understand that these issues are mostly related to user errors or updates not being performed correctly.

The Technical Team at Column5 has performed in-depth troubleshooting and continues to provide various technical solutions for our customers. Today, we have compiled a list of the top 10 issues including root cause and a simple solution. Continue reading to discover how you can tackle these issues and improve your performance!

Bad performance can make even a well-designed EPM system unusable, and if you’ve got more aggressive expectations like those required for an xP&A solution...even suboptimal performance can be a total block to realizing your goals. Performance issues have got to be attacked quickly and decisively.

Many users feel a poorly performing system is a fatal condition and they blame the software, as if the system is working as expected when the user experience is slowed. This is not only a false belief, but it can also be a very costly one. If there’s nothing that can be done to improve an unworkable software product, then replacing it is the only option. However, poor performance is an indicator of your solution working, but it must not be tolerated. That’s right, more users adding more data to an expanding EPM or xP&A solution will eventually create poor performance. The trouble begins when you don’t know what to do about this eventuality. Don’t react rashly, instead follow the practical steps below to get a grip on the root cause of the degraded performance...in this case, for SAP BPC for NetWeaver.

If you're a support team member or power user of SAP BPC for NetWeaver, you probably know there are many standard SAP BW layer housekeeping jobs that are provided by SAP.  Most of these generate system information required for analyzing SAP BPC performance, system/error logs retention, completed job logs, etc. and are run at their default frequency. These can be scheduled in SM36, though you can't stop here. 

Keep reading to find out how to avoid poor performance by following the 6 steps below.