As an IT professional, I was very interested in HANA when the product first came out to the market two plus years ago.  Initially getting started on HAHA involved buying all physical hardware, which put smaller companies on the sidelines due to high start-up cost.  Over time, HANA has truly transformed by getting more and more features added with the new service packs.  It was not just the features, but also the support expansion that enables you to run HANA on the various vendor’s hardware and the ability to run it on virtualized hardware such as VMWare and AWS (Amazon Web Service).  The best part from an IT perspective, is that while it used to take weeks or even months to setup HANA, now you can be up and running in matter of hours if you utilize providers such as AWS. 

I have worked with HANA on physical, virtualized, and cloud platforms, and they all offer a wide range of performance and memory levels.  HANA can currently be installed as standalone or scale-out (aka multi-server configuration).  When it comes to HANA memory size capacity, you can scale up to 6TB of the memory for a single system, and the scale-out cluster can have up to 112TB+.  When it comes to cloud offerings, they are not currently available with such a large memory capacity, but their offerings change for the better all the time.  In my opinion, the fastest way to test HANA in your own environment would be to utilize virtualized hardware that most organizations already have in place.  I know that some shops are mostly Microsoft, and since HANA runs on Linux they are hesitant about having to support a different operating system; but, to put this in perspective, more than 70% of all websites in the world run on some Unix operating system, and that is due to their flexibility and high reliability.  Having to support multiple operating systems is inevitable.  HANA was initially only offered on SUSE aka SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and due to demand it is now also offered on Red Hat Linux.  In my opinion, unlike Windows, Linux requires a lot less maintenance. 

The nature of projects and project management is change.  Often times, the change brought about by commissioning a project is overlooked, as the focus is placed on the technology.  Just as frequently, the need to assess and address the people-side of the project is initiated separately and often too late in the project lifecycle.  Most projects are managed using a methodology based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which focuses on management of scope change and the potential impact to budget, timeline, or resource allocation. However, PMBOK does not address the human aspects delivered through the project, or how to successfully identify, plan for, and mitigate resistance to the change. 

“What is your BPC upgrade strategy?” or “what is the best plan to migrate BPC?” are the most common questions I am asked by clients looking to upgrade to the latest version of SAP BPC.  Even though clients' landscapes come in all shapes and sizes, the overall strategy for a BPC upgrade is not very different from one client to the next.  

As the world’s leading-edge consulting firm, Column5 Consulting is helping our customers leverage SAP’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite, including SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), through cutting edge and world-class training with Column5’s EPM Academy. 

With any size implementation of BPC, having relevant and engaging training ensures that you get the most out of your staff and technology.  Here at Column5’s EPM Academy, our goal is to guarantee that all users – no matter their role – are confident and comfortable with their knowledge and skills with BPC.

For those of you working EPM 10 and contemplating using EVDREs, this blog should be of help to you and ideally save you time!

This exact list is, of course, debatable from one BPC Deployment Expert to the next.  In fact, I am curious to see what other experts think.  Here are my top 5 features that are often overlooked in SAP’s Business Planning and Consolidation & EPM offerings.

 #1: Business Process Flows

Also known as BPFs.  This is a free feature embedded within BPC that requires minimal consulting expense if the user takes the appropriate training.  How to achieve this:

“Is our BPC implementation working well?  How are competitors using the same software?  What are the best practices?  What is the ROI?”

Remember the great 1996 classic flick, Jerry Maguire? Do you recall that moment early in the movie when Tom Cruise’s character writes his memo before he got whacked? His coworkers clapped and cheered. They did so because they believed in what he said. Then corporate reality set in and they had to get back to work… back to business as usual!  So did Bob “Business as Usual” Sugar win in the end?

Throughout the movie many characters call the memo a “Mission Statement”.  Well, folks, after 20 years I have had it!  I am writing my “memo” in this blog.  While I am not staying up late and photocopying my “memo” to be hand placed on my colleague’s seats, I hope this has a (somewhat) similar effect. 

The landscape of an EPM project is literally changing right before our eyes. In fact, we posted a blog on this topic not long ago and realized that there were several updates that needed to be made. Not because the post was incorrect but because the practice in the field had changed in a few short years.

Successful delivery and adoption of any project requires a partnership between the business, IT, value chain partners and end-users to ensure the solution delivered meets business objectives and return on investment.  Collaboration is required to make certain: