Spilled Beer and the Key to EPM Value

Posted by David Den Boer on Wed, May 22, 2013 @ 12:05 PM

"They spill more beer than we make in a year!" That line was from a great beer commercial for a small brewery that claimed small, handmade batches (or microbrews) were superior to the huge commercial operations of the beer manufacturing kings. Consequently, sales of "microbrews" took off, with consumers deciding that selecting a personal favorite from a market rich with a variety of choices was superior to buying beer from the monolith that had "regular" and "light" to choose from.

Topics: Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Roadmap, Value, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

HANA: Improving SAP One Customer At A Time

Posted by Martin Lloyd on Mon, May 13, 2013 @ 12:05 PM

If you’ve read anything which has come from SAP in the last few months you will have heard of HANA. I understood that SAP thought it was very important but didn’t really understand what it was and how it was going to affect me. After some reading, attending a couple of courses and being involved in some discussions with SAP I know a little more and would like to share it with you.

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Consolidation, Cloud, Roadmap, Value, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

EPM Project Management Methodologies Untangled

Posted by Connie Folk on Tue, Apr 30, 2013 @ 08:04 AM

Do you ever wonder if you are keeping up with the plethora of project management methodologies? Waterfall, Scrum, Agile, Lean, ASAP,  Agile Waterfall and Sprints form just a handful of concepts. What is a project management methodology anyway and how do you choose the most appropriate one for your Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC) or Business Intelligence (BI) SAP project?

Topics: Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Business Intelligence (BI), Project Management, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Service Pack 9 for Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) 10, Netweaver version, has some notable enhancements that are worth discussing.  There are three that we are speaking of specifically:

• Support for Time Dependent Hierarchy
• Parallel execution framework is implemented
• MDX on HANA

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

This is Part 2 of 2 dealing with EPM Integration and Financial Information Management. If you have not read Part 1 discussing Installation, please read it first. For me, there are two components to configuration.  First there are systematic configurations to bring the environment up and running.  And then there is usability configuration to setup user & groups (although it’s part of environment configuration...), but most importantly creating and configuring data store connections.

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Cloud, Financial Information Management, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

SAP Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions span across various technology stacks.  Some are on NetWeaver, some are on Microsoft, some are leveraged utilizing the Business Intelligence platform, and some are standalone.

Topics: Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Financial Information Management, Roadmap, Data

In part one of this two part blog I reviewed the upcoming enhancements and new features coming to the Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) product. In this blog I will cover the remaining products in SAP’s EPM portfolio.

Topics: EPM Maturity, Roadmap

SAP released the latest update to the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) roadmap on March 19^th.  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. 

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Innovation, Roadmap, Value, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

EPM & BPC Training: Addressing the Needs of Adult Learners

Posted by Jennifer Harlan on Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 11:03 AM

No single model of training will be the best for all situations, and different learners have different learning styles. Many educators have only recently started to recognize using multiple learning styles when developing educational materials.

Topics: Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Training, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Are you Ready for a BPC Upgrade?

Posted by David Meharry on Thu, Feb 28, 2013 @ 11:02 AM

At some point all software will be upgraded to take advantage of new features, new technology, and/or to keep in synchronization with other software which has been upgraded. I’ve assisted a number of companies with BPC software upgrades.  Some have been very quick and efficient while others were not as efficient as they could have been. 

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Performance, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)