SAP released the latest update to the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) roadmap on March 19th. Although I won’t go into great detail on the roadmap or discuss every new feature, I will provide high level overview of the highlights as I see them.
If you are looking for information on EPM 10.5 or 11.0 you won’t find it in this latest update to the roadmap. Why? Because SAP has taken a different approach to releasing new functionality since the release of EPM 10.0. Are the days of major and minor releases gone forever? Only SAP can say for sure but as of right now, SAP is delivering enhancements and new functionality via support packs. This makes it more important than ever to stay up-to-date with everything included in each support pack. Even if you don’t plan to install a support pack immediately, it is important to know what new features/enhancements you might want to take advantage of.
This latest roadmap is broken into two sections: Planned Innovations and Future Direction. Planned Innovations are usually in the 3-9 month timeframe whereas Future Direction is usually 12-24 months out. I will focus on the Planned Innovations in this blog.
Business Planning and Consolidation – As you are probably aware, there are two versions of BPC available, a version for SAP NetWeaver and a version for Microsoft.
Enhancements for both BPC NetWeaver and BPC Microsoft are:
Additional enhancements for BPC NetWeaver are:
Additional enhancements planned for BPC Microsoft are:
If someone walked up to me on the street and asked me to summarize what’s new with BPC I’d say Mobility, HANA and Integrated Planning are the major themes. There is a new mobile interface is coming which will extend the reach of BPC within many organizations. HANA continues to be at the center of everything SAP does and BPC is no exception. We will see HANA optimizations for BPC that will speed up processing and remove bottlenecks. Integrated planning (Financial, Demand, Operational) will be further enabled with the integration of BPC and the Planning Application Kit.
In part two of this blog series I will review the rest of the EPM portfolio roadmap. Register in the box at the top right of this page to get Part II delivered right to your inbox.
If you would like to see the full roadmap you can access it at www.service.sap.com/roadmap. You will need your S-user id to access the service marketplace.
Webcast: Latest SAP EPM Roadmap
Interested in learning more about the planned innovations and future direction that SAP have up their sleeves? Join Column5 and SAP’s Pras Chatterjee for an informative discussion on the updated roadmap for BPC and EPM including BusinessObjects Cloud.
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