SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

Column5 Through the Years

Posted by David Den Boer on Wed, Apr 15, 2015 @ 09:04 AM

This month marks Column5’s 10^th anniversary, and we are excited to be celebrating so many years of providing top-notch consulting services to our customers.  In the end, there are two groups who enable Column5 to have such a rich history of success.

Topics: OutlookSoft, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Training, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Performance Tuning for SAP BPC 10.0 for NetWeaver

Posted by Vishal Goradia on Wed, Jan 21, 2015 @ 16:01 PM

Performance of a system is crucial to every implementation. System monitoring and administration help towards efficiently running a SAP system. Performing some proactive monitoring and configuration can help in avoiding SAP system issues. Let’s talk about a few approaches to troubleshoot performance issues while working on SAP BPC 10.0 for NetWeaver system.

Topics: Best Practices, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), NetWeaver, Performance, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Introduction to SAP HANA

Posted by Darko Kavazovic on Tue, Jan 13, 2015 @ 09:01 AM

As an IT professional, I was very interested in HANA when the product first came out to the market two plus years ago.  Initially getting started on HAHA involved buying all physical hardware, which put smaller companies on the sidelines due to high start-up cost.  Over time, HANA has truly transformed by getting more and more features added with the new service packs.  It was not just the features, but also the support expansion that enables you to run HANA on the various vendor’s hardware and the ability to run it on virtualized hardware such as VMWare and AWS (Amazon Web Service).  The best part from an IT perspective, is that while it used to take weeks or even months to setup HANA, now you can be up and running in matter of hours if you utilize providers such as AWS. 

I have worked with HANA on physical, virtualized, and cloud platforms, and they all offer a wide range of performance and memory levels.  HANA can currently be installed as standalone or scale-out (aka multi-server configuration).  When it comes to HANA memory size capacity, you can scale up to 6TB of the memory for a single system, and the scale-out cluster can have up to 112TB+.  When it comes to cloud offerings, they are not currently available with such a large memory capacity, but their offerings change for the better all the time.  In my opinion, the fastest way to test HANA in your own environment would be to utilize virtualized hardware that most organizations already have in place.  I know that some shops are mostly Microsoft, and since HANA runs on Linux they are hesitant about having to support a different operating system; but, to put this in perspective, more than 70% of all websites in the world run on some Unix operating system, and that is due to their flexibility and high reliability.  Having to support multiple operating systems is inevitable.  HANA was initially only offered on SUSE aka SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and due to demand it is now also offered on Red Hat Linux.  In my opinion, unlike Windows, Linux requires a lot less maintenance. 

Topics: HANA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Cloud, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

“What is your BPC upgrade strategy?” or “what is the best plan to migrate BPC?” are the most common questions I am asked by clients looking to upgrade to the latest version of SAP BPC.  Even though clients' landscapes come in all shapes and sizes, the overall strategy for a BPC upgrade is not very different from one client to the next.  

Topics: Best Practices, Thought Leadership, NetWeaver, Performance, Microsoft, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Get the Most Out of Your BPC Training with Column5’s EPM Academy

Posted by Adam Hess on Tue, Dec 02, 2014 @ 13:12 PM

As the world’s leading-edge consulting firm, Column5 Consulting is helping our customers leverage SAP’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite, including SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), through cutting edge and world-class training with Column5’s EPM Academy. 

With any size implementation of BPC, having relevant and engaging training ensures that you get the most out of your staff and technology.  Here at Column5’s EPM Academy, our goal is to guarantee that all users – no matter their role – are confident and comfortable with their knowledge and skills with BPC.

Topics: Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Training, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

“Is our BPC implementation working well?  How are competitors using the same software?  What are the best practices?  What is the ROI?”

Topics: Center of Excellence, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Financial Close, Value, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

EPM stands for Enterprise Performance Management.  In a nutshell, it is at least a 4^th generation moniker describing an underlying use of OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) technology.  Why should you care?  Well, it really is the current “end game” of computing for most organizations.  If you are an executive or in a leadership role in say, Finance or FP&A, you should really care!  One cannot manage that which they do not measure. Those who can achieve EPM and leverage OLAP technology will outperform their peer groups across the board.  How in the world can you track your EPS or monthly profit if you do not capture and report the information to do so?  How can you take action to get back on plan, or stay ahead of plan, if you have no tools to do so?  This is what EPM is for, and what OLAP has been solving for nearly 40 years.  The path to effective leadership and success is not simply about delivering results; it is about consistently delivering results.  In order to do this one must be able to both monitor their business, and be able to take actions to control the business. 

Topics: Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

If you're like a lot of people out there, you probably had to read the title of this blog twice. Over the last several years there has been a plethora of speculation, confusion, frustration and exasperation about the future of BPC for the Microsoft Platform.  From the very first announcement that SAP would port BPC to the NetWeaver platform, people have forecasted the end of the Microsoft version. The lack of roadmap beyond extensions of platform support for the latest versions and some new content (i.e. IFRS Starter Kit) does make one wonder about the future of BPC for the Microsoft Platform.  Here's the good news: SAP recently released the latest roadmap for the EPM portfolio and there are several meaningful planned enhancements to BPC for the Microsoft Platform; from here on out referred to as BPCMS.

Topics: Center of Excellence, Roadmap, Microsoft, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Topics: Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management, Performance, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

It’s the corporation’s latest planning/forecast/budget cycle, and you’re responsible for putting together the consolidated reports for the executive review meetings.  The analysts in Europe, Asia, North America and South America have sent you their Excel spreadsheets, which have been reviewed and revised according to their local management review meetings.  Their regional financial managers will be participating in the executive review meetings, and presenting their region’s forecast. 

The PowerPoint reporting package for the executive review meeting will consist of income statements, capital spending reports and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  Comments will be included, and there will be slides/reports at the region and total corporate level.  You have spent hours copying the Excel “reports” and pasting them into the PowerPoint slides.  Also, in order to produce the numbers for the region and total corporate reports, you had to combine the multiple Excel spreadsheets from the site analysts.  This included calculating the KPIs at the region and corporate levels.  You finally have everything ready for tomorrow’s first executive review meeting, although it’s 9:15 PM and you’re still at the office.

Topics: Center of Excellence, Excel, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), Forecasting