SAP BPC customers face important decisions as the platform nears end of life—especially for those on the Microsoft version, which sunsets in June 2026. Whether you're running BPC NetWeaver or Microsoft, your organization may be considering what's next for your planning, consolidation, and analytics processes. 
At Column5 Consulting, we're working closely with Darwin Analytics and its partner ecosystem through the Darwin Marketplace to help BPC customers navigate the future with confidence. From evaluating SAP-recommended pathways to exploring non-SAP BPC alternatives, our experts provide the insights and hands-on support needed to make informed decisions. 

In a live webinar AWS and Column5 experts demonstrate how Virtual Client technology can help you maximize the value of your SAP BPC investment. Whether you’re experiencing Excel performance issues, support overload, or security risks, this is your opportunity to rethink how BPC should run. 

For years, SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) customers have dutifully paid their 20–22% annual maintenance fees—expecting updates, innovation, and support. In 2025, it’s time to ask a hard question: What are you really getting in return? 

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. 

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.

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.