From November 2015 to November 2016, with 9 months on site, Column5 worked at the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA), which acts as the central bank for the KSA, to implement a Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting system using SAP BPC 10.1 NW on BW 7.4. This is the story of that implementation and the key factors behind the success of the project.

Successful projects, delivering real results, are a must in today’s competitive environment.  Setting projects up for success can occur by following a proven methodology.   Optimally, organizational processes, behaviors, and results are directly correlated to, and as a result of, the creation and cascade of an overall organizational vision.  From the vision, a strategy is born.  However, your strategy may never become a star if it remains relative obscure to the larger organization.   One of the key challenges many companies face is operationalizing, or making the strategy a reality.  Projects are the vehicle to move strategy from the boardroom to the back offices and ultimately a core plank in delivering your overall strategy.

This past weekend, my daughter turned 5. Everyone knows how important daughters are to their fathers, and I couldn’t be happier with my daughter’s “mermaid & unicorn phase”. However, at her birthday party, dark clouds began to gather as she invited her “boyfriend” from school. She held hands with this little guy and even thinking about it now, it makes me slightly crazy. I can only imagine where I will be in 10 years. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers, please.

At Column5 our mission is to work closely with our clients to achieve excellence in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). A core business process embraced by EPM is financial consolidation and external regulatory reporting. Every listed company has to perform this process at least once a year and many perform it quarterly if local regulation requires or even monthly (assuming they have integrated their financial and management reporting, one of our key recommended best practices).

I was recently asked about reporting Bank Balances and Overdrafts in BPC, particularly when the status can vary from month to month. The initial discussion concerned reporting a Bank Account balance as a Short Term Asset - Cash balance or a Short Term Liability - Overdraft but it led on to some more complex scenarios.

If you are using BPC for financial reporting and consolidation this is an issue almost every client has so its worthy of considering the options.

As many of you know, a properly implemented EPM solution can help model changing market conditions. Such
conditions may be commodity prices, competitive pressure in certain product and geographical markets, interest rates, or currency exchange rates. The thinking is, the better the ability to understand the impact to your organization of such volatility drivers, the more time you will have to craft a strategy to react. However, this task is not very simple as you will have all of those influences (and likely many more) nudging your company’s performance indicators up and down simultaneously.

I was recently working at an organisation where the BPC implementation had developed over time with input
 from a number of third party sources. There were no problems with functionality but, like most clients, they would appreciate any changes which could produce an improvement in performance. Clearly, a variety of skillsets, approaches, and quality standards had produced a challenging situation for this client, and they asked our team to make suggestions.

In terms of EPM training, there is a broad range of offerings that a company can utilize.  Whether it be on-site, workshops, or customized training portals, EPM Academy has administered thousands of sessions in pretty much any format you can imagine.  At this point, with over 10 years of EPM training experience, it seems we’ve seen it all. But by far, the most effective format of BPC education is customized eLearning. EPM Academy’s customized BPC eLearning training is in a league of its own, and will greatly benefit any type of organization, regardless of size or number of BPC users.

Language customisation of SAP BPC for NetWeaver can be wrongly viewed as a challenge and an unnecessary effort. There are obvious advantages to presenting the software and the models in the user’s mother tongue. Although some customising needs to be done in the areas laid out below, the time spent is not excessive, and should be amply rewarded by improved accessibility for your international users.

Column5 is currently carrying out an implementation using SAP BPC 10.1 NW in Arabic for a major Middle Eastern bank. We believe this is the first full implementation in Arabic so we would like to share some of the insights regarding language localization.