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?
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?
Topics: HANA, Analytics, Cloud, BPC, SAP HANA, Analytics Cloud, SaaS, SAC, BPC Lifeline
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.
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.
Topics: EPM, Darwin EPM, CPM
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.
Topics: BPC, sap bpc, group reporting
With the current state of the economy, there can be little debate about the importance of having effective enterprise performance management (EPM) systems to nimbly react and plan for the future. There are three components to having an effective EPM capability:
Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Implementation
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!
Topics: Performance, Microsoft, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), Technical, User Experience
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.
Topics: NetWeaver, Performance, sap bpc, Performance Tuning
How do you ensure your Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC) or Business Intelligence (BI) project will start out positioned for success? You've gone through the RFP process, completed the vendor evaluation, and have decided on the technology. But before diving into requirements and design, you also need to spend time in the project initiation phase--ensuring the project's critical success factors (CSFs) are defined and socialized, and that a plan for implementation is developed. Be sure there is a common understanding of the importance of the CSFs and how they differ from project objectives and success criteria.
Topics: Best Practices, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management, Performance, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)
As with most specialized software programs, it is usually not suggested to implement SAP BPC without the assistance of a consulting partner. Many projects require expertise that most EPM administrators do not have, and so it is recommended to find a partner that can ensure success. Choosing this partner is an important decision. Here are a few of the top things a company should look at when deciding on an appropriate organization.
Topics: Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management, Training, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)
1.Get Your Ultimate Guide to Improving SAP EPM Performance
Learn what could be contributing to your poor performance and how to diagnose common problems. Get tips that will empower you and your team to improve the performance of your system in order to get the most out of your SAP EPM Investment.
2. Test Your BPC Performance
Get a BPC performance report card and custom report to identify performance issues you may not even know you have.
3. Get Your EPM Assessment
Our assessment delivers a complete, best practice roadmap for you to follow. We’ll work together to assess what you need to pivot your financial forecasting, planning, reporting and analysis to handle the compressed requirements from the volatile COVID-19 environment.
