Have you ever wondered if there’s a straightforward way to make your SAP BPC system perform better? The Darwin Calculation Engine (DarCE) might be just the trick you need!

It’s obvious.  We are constantly bombarded with alerts, texts, emails, and ads every single day.  In fact, you probably received an e-mail or two as you read that last sentence.  We have grown used to accessing information whenever and wherever we need to – from the moment we wake up and start scrolling through new emails and checking the weather while brushing our teeth to reading the latest headlines while standing in line at Starbucks (and then quickly refreshing our Instagram feed to see how many new likes we got on our latest post.)  We are all used to interacting with and consuming information in a shorter timeframe. Believe it or not, the same is true for how we want to learn.  Whether that’s Googling how to cook a hard-boiled egg, or watching a quick YouTube on publishing a set of books in BPC – we want to learn it, and we want to learn it NOW! 

Two things are certain in life: death and taxes. An EPM user might add “struggling with EPM software” to the list of unavoidable challenges. In the case of taxes, one could (and absolutely should) hire an experienced tax services provider to craft a tax minimizing strategy. You will still pay taxes, but the difference between paying a lot, or a little, lies in the expertise of who you hire.

We all encounter game-changing challenges, so here’s my story of how a simple task we do every day has taught me that things are not always as easy as they seem. 

Consolidations in SAP BPC are all the same out of the box, right? That may be a customer’s initial perspective when considering a BPC solution for consolidations, however, this is far from the case.  Consolidation approaches are customizable to meet needs ranging from simple to very complex.  The consolidation approach is a crucial decision in the BPC solution design that can be either beneficial or detrimental to your project.

In June,  Column5 Consulting and our EPM International partners hosted the EMEA EPM Leadership Summit at the Royal Overseas League in London.

This key event in our calendar brought together SAP EPM users from across the region to think, participate and network on all topics relating to EPM.

Among the many discussions and sessions that covered the entire SAP EPM portfolio were some specifically on the topic of SAP Financial Consolidation (SAP FC previously named SAP BFC). SAP FC (formerly Cartesis) is a well proven standalone consolidation solution, designed for large and complex corporates where control and auditability are essential. FC is especially relevant across UK and Europe, where IFRS and statutory reporting are key requirements.

One of the key features for the SAP BPC EPM Add-in for Excel has been the ability to write VBA to extend and customize the capabilities of the Add-in. The new EPM Plug-in for Analysis for Office (AO), which replaces the EPM Add-in, offers similar and in most cases compatible VBA support as the original EPM Add-in. However, there are some important distinctions between the two which this article covers.

The new EPM Plug-in for Analysis for Office (AO) requires a different method of declaring the specific API class used to access the library of VBA methods that SAP BPC supports.  The latest version as of this writing, AO 2.4 SP1, made some but not all the old FPMXL Client methods compatible with the EPM Plug-in.  To be safe, it’s recommended to start coding using the new standards for AO, as there’s no clear indication of whether all methods will be made compatible using the old object declaration standards.

To illustrate, here is a direct comparison of the differences between the two declaration methods.

Google “EPM Performance or Memory issues” and you will receive millions of hits from your search results.  When it comes to performance and especially memory consumption, not only is the “magic bullet” fix rare but the resolution is potentially complex and multifaceted in nature.  On a recent project, we started to see symptoms that became issues including long refresh times.  For one user, we saw an Input Schedule consume so much memory it resulted in the “White Screen of Death (WSoD) and Excel crashing.  In this article, I wanted to look at the challenges we faced and strategies employed to resolve the issues.

The number of SAP BPC users evaluating SAP BPC Embedded and SAP BPC Optimized is growing. In many ways SAP BPC Embedded is an exciting option because it is fast performing and highly integrated with core SAP financials (S/4HANA Finance). We think Embedded is an option well worth exploring for all SAP BPC users, but we also want those users to be well informed, particularly if they don’t have a strong SAP BW and SAP BW-IP background. This article is the first in a series of blogs where we take our experiences of all flavours of SAP BPC and apply the learnings for those looking at Embedded.

The ability to drill through from BPC to more detailed information is a high value exercise for a relatively low investment - yet it continues to be one of BPC’s most overlooked features. 

The typical use cases are as follows:

• Lower level connection with details
  • Exact, accurate actuals for run rates, deconstructing numbersDetails necessary to calculate drivers that drive the accurate plan
  • Ability to link to transactional systems at the lowest level of detail for drill through
  • Time definition is the frequent axis for alignment
• Automate time to explain variances & identify anomalies
  • Understand exactly what transaction drives variance (if applicable)
  • For close, audits, and other reconciliation exercises, spot suspect numbers
• Convenience builds user adoption Adds functionality like drill through to details, even possibly images
  • “One stop shopping” user experience
  • No need to switch tools wholesale as data gets lower in details