Column5’s EMEA EPM Summit 2016, which took place on 30th June and 1st July 2016 at St James’s London, United Kingdom, promised to facilitate a platform to bring together customers, SAP product development and management teams (SAP BPC and BFC), and EPM Practitioners. The primary objective was to enable these participating groups to share their views, experiences, and future goals to take their EPM journey to the next level. As a first time participant and a presenter at the Column5 EMEA EPM summit, I was really thrilled to see the response from all these groups and as a result the final outcome. In this blog, I would like to share my views on the Summit and the key takeaways.

The Need for Change

The Finance function is central to the successful operation of any organization.   Finance organizations are not immune to today’s pressure faced by businesses to reduce costs of business transactions while improving processes in alignment with the overall strategy and direction for the organization.  Faced with the demand to increase their role in the EPM lifecycle, Finance functions are moving away from a transactional data management focus to becoming deliberate business partners by providing assistance to the CEO and the organization in the development of strategic direction and key business decisions.

Many of you will have heard that the EPM Add-In is being replaced with Analysis Office. This is not quite true: the EPM Add-In is being replaced by the EPM Plug-In which is a part of the new Analysis Office Add-In which also contains a Plug-In called Analysis. I hope that is clear.

If not, let me explain further.

This blog will present a comparison of BW-IP, BPC NW 10.1 Standard and BPC NW 10.1 Embedded. Each of these products is currently offered by SAP as planning solutions, but each has characteristics and functionality which will influence the decision to use one rather than another. This article aims to clarify the differences between each of the products and aid in the decision as to which of them to implement.  Each product will be better suited to a given company’s needs according to certain criteria, and this blog will set out to identify which product is best in each case.

For those who missed our 2016 blog posts! Here at Column5, we believe that user education is paramount. Because of this we provide our viewers and clients many free educational resources. If you love a post or want us to post something specific, throw us a comment below! 

Here in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, people are either “fair weather” campers or “all weather” campers. When I was a young Boy Scout, my Scoutmaster (a former Marine) could politely be described as an “all weather” camper. He had no regard for cold blowing horizontal rain or snow….we went camping anyway. The best part of the trip was roasting marshmallows and drying out around the campfire, weather permitting. To distract all of us cold campers from turning it into a complaint party, he would engage us in games and stories. His favorite was the age old game of one person telling a story to your neighbor, and that person tells it to his neighbor and so on. Of course the story that is told by the last person bears little resemblance to the original story.

SAP BPC is a tool that can be customised to facilitate planning, budgeting and forecasting processes for different
 functional areas such as Revenue, Human Capital Management, Operating Expenses, and Capital Expenditure. In this blog we will talk about how to integrate these functional areas into one unified BPC reporting model, for fully integrated planning.

The different functional areas require different data structures and consequently we  will need to use a separate BPC model for each area. To give some common examples:

The Revenue model may, depending on the modelling requirements, need to have Product dimensionality in order to plan the sales volumes and calculate planned revenue according to the price by product, and a Customer dimension to plan sales and analyse the outstanding payments by customer or channel.

The Labour planning, or HCM model may need to include a role dimension, in order to plan the salary by role or grade, or an Employee dimension to enable planning by employee or job grade.

The Operating Expenses or OPEX model should enable the user to plan the expense related General Ledger accounts at the required level of detail, for example, by collecting the number of flights and hotel nights and using forecast unit costs to calculate travel expenses.

The Capital Expenditure or CAPEX model should include an asset dimension which will include the company’s asset list and allow the user to plan new asset purchases and the corresponding depreciation for the planning period.

When comparing BPC to other products, a big factor to consider is the user interface experience. SaaS based
EPM solutions often have significant constraints to the available options when designing the experience users will 
interact with, due to the inherent design limitations of those solutions. BPC’s robust Excel interface has an unlimited ability to meet any user experience requirement. In addition to the significant numbers of Excel functions included in the EPM Add-in that can be applied creatively to meet any need, sometimes it is necessary to leverage Visual Basic to create highly specific behavior in the interface.

This is the second part of the original post of 11 Dirty Secrets of EPM Projects.

"I thought for Column5's 11th birthday, I'd give our more than 1000 blog readers a gift! I’ve wrapped it up and called in the 11 'dirty secrets' of EPM projects. I know this is heresy to disclose some of these EPM professional services insider secrets, but I care more about you being successful than I worry about the flak I will inevitably get by letting you in on these secrets."

Let’s continue:

Dirty Secret #6: Systems inadvertently create dependency on 3rd party 

Though the actual market size may vary, a reasonable estimation states that throughout the world more than $4 billion is spent annually on EPM consulting alone. Yet, EPM projects often fail to return positive value to those investing in them. Why is this outcome so prevalent with this technology solution in particular? I thought for Column5's 11th birthday, I'd give our more than 1000 blog readers a gift! I’ve wrapped it up and called in the 11 'dirty secrets' of EPM projects.

I know this is heresy to disclose some of these EPM professional services insider secrets, but I care more about you being successful than I worry about the flak I will inevitably get by letting you in on these secrets. Let’s begin: