SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

New SAP BPC customers often have a plethora of questions – and that’s what we’re here for! Consultants at Column5 answer a variety of questions every day, constantly taking note of which ones come up repeatedly over time.

Whether you’re considering a BPC implementation or are already using BPC, we’ve compiled a list of the most frequent questions asked by inexperienced users to help you better understand the software and its available benefits.

1.  “How long will my project take?”

Project timing is dependent on many factors, including the project’s functionality scope, its impact on change management and the organization’s size. A correlation also seems to exist between organizational size, complexity and project duration. That said, here are some general rules of thumb when it comes to timing:

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.

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.

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:

If you follow best practices for SAP implementation and use, whether it be BPC, Disclosure Management, ECC,
HANA, ABAP, or many others, you will be successful in quantifying the benefits from the suite of products you choose.  Our perspective is that there are no inherently “bad” SAP products, just poor implementation that can make your product use more stressful than it needs to be.