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.

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.