What exactly is SAP EPM? It’s much more than a few random letters to be sure. Let’s first understand what the second set of letters is before we understand all of them as a whole.
What exactly is SAP EPM? It’s much more than a few random letters to be sure. Let’s first understand what the second set of letters is before we understand all of them as a whole.
Topics: Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Performance
Winston Churchill’s friend once said of him, “Winston is a man of simple tastes, he is always prepared to put up with the best of everything.” The desire for the best is something everyone covets, but this aspiration becomes problematic when “best” cannot readily be defined. So how would you know if you received the best?
Topics: Best Practices, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Training, Performance
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)
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)
The nature of projects and project management is change. Often times, the change brought about by commissioning a project is overlooked, as the focus is placed on the technology. Just as frequently, the need to assess and address the people-side of the project is initiated separately and often too late in the project lifecycle. Most projects are managed using a methodology based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which focuses on management of scope change and the potential impact to budget, timeline, or resource allocation. However, PMBOK does not address the human aspects delivered through the project, or how to successfully identify, plan for, and mitigate resistance to the change.
Topics: Best Practices, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management
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 4th 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)
I have had the pleasure of being involved with at least 100 BPC (OLAP) deployments over the past two decades in some role or another. I wanted to share what I believe are the 7 Deadly Sins of a BPC Implementation. Over the past 9 months I have been speaking with new clients to my organization who have had prior experience with another firm claiming to understand BPC. Seventy-five percent (75%) of these discussions involved most, if not all of the aspects described below.
Topics: Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management, Performance, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)
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
1.Get Your Ultimate Guide to Improving SAP EPM Performance
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3. Get Your EPM Assessment
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