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SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

Organizational Change Management for SAP EPM and BPC Implementations

Posted by Connie Folk on Tue, Sep 16, 2014 @ 12:09 PM

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Successful delivery and adoption of any project requires a partnership between the business, IT, value chain partners and end-users to ensure the solution delivered meets business objectives and return on investment.  Collaboration is required to make certain:

Topics: Best Practices, Project Management, Implementation

How EPM Caught The Pizza Bandit!

Posted by Jamison Chochrek on Tue, Aug 12, 2014 @ 09:08 AM

This is a 100% true story.  The names have been altered to protect the innocent (and the guilty)!

Everyone likes a great story.  What makes a story great is a plot, a villain, and a hero.  What makes this particular story more interesting is that it is a business story. It also one that clients keep asking me to repeat to their teams, peers and even their executive staff.

Topics: Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Analytics, EPM ROI, Microsoft, Implementation

7 Deadly Sins of a BPC Implementation

Posted by Jamison Chochrek on Thu, Jul 17, 2014 @ 14:07 PM

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)

Spreadsheets to BPC/EPM 10: A Quantum Leap

Posted by Keith Roberts on Tue, Jul 01, 2014 @ 07:07 AM
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

Considerations in Upgrading to SAP BPC v10

Posted by Jamison Chochrek on Tue, Jun 24, 2014 @ 09:06 AM

This week has been somewhat of a client reunion week in that three of our clients from the “OutlookSoft” days are looking at upgrading to BPC v10.  Enough to where I had three meetings that felt like one topic three times over. That makes me believe there are other SAP BPC clients out there who could benefit from this information. This article is for any existing SAP BPC client who is not currently on v10.

Topics: HANA, Thought Leadership, OutlookSoft, NetWeaver, Roadmap, Microsoft, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

SAP BPC: What is the Right Amount of Time for a Design?

Posted by Will Leonard on Tue, Jun 17, 2014 @ 10:06 AM

The business blueprint is arguably the most important – and most complex – document that is delivered during an implementation.  But how much time should be allotted to this phase?

Topics: Center of Excellence, Best Practices, Thought Leadership, Value, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Where Do You Go to Find Answers to Your BPC Questions?

Posted by Rick Bryant on Wed, Apr 30, 2014 @ 12:04 PM

I was on a sales call recently with a current BPC customer who is about to embark on an upgrade to BPC 10.0 for the NetWeaver platform. The customer had recently implemented BPC v7.5 and was expressing their frustration with having to move to v10.0 and learn the new way to write reports after just spending a lot of time and money on implementing v7.5. Had they known that v10.0 was coming so soon they might have done things differently. This got me thinking about how many times I’ve encountered customers in similar situations. The situation being that you don’t know what you don’t know. Whether it is not knowing about the BPC roadmap or the vast community of BPC users exchanging ideas and supporting each other on the SAP forums, there is ton of information and resources available to a BPC customer.  A great starting point is Column5’s own website (I have to plug my own company) where you can find info on BPC via our blogs, demos, webcasts, case studies and more at www.Column5.com. In addition to Column5’s website, BPC information is available from SAP. The challenge is finding it as it as the information is spread across several different sites and portals. A friend and former colleague of mine at SAP, Jens Koerner, wrote a very useful blog that outlines all of the information available from SAP with links directly to the content so rather than recreate what he’s already done I will simply share a link to his original blog here

Topics: Center of Excellence, Best Practices, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Roadmap, Implementation

Project Tracking Percent Complete vs Time Remaining

Posted by Tal Ovadia on Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 13:04 PM

Recall your last few project status meetings. The project manager reviews the open tasks and asks for progress. The technical team reviews and responds with answers such as 50% complete, 90% complete, 34.7% complete, etc, etc, etc……. but what does it all mean?

Topics: Thought Leadership, Project Management, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Replace a Working Spreadsheet Based Forecasting Model with SAP BPC?

Posted by Michael Sheard on Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 14:03 PM
SAP BPC forecasting model implementations frequently replace existing spreadsheet forecasting models.  A key question to be asked when implementing SAP BPC is to consider how it will improve a forecasting process that works and therefore justify the disruption the change may involve and the expense, both internal and external.

Topics: Excel, Analytics, Value, Implementation, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), Forecasting

BPC Heaven vs. Excel Hell

Posted by Rick Bryant on Fri, Jan 24, 2014 @ 09:01 AM

Way back in 2009 while I was working in the EPM practice at SAP I routinely cited a Gartner survey stating that 70% of organizations still relied on spreadsheets for their budgeting, planning and forecasting processes when speaking with customers or at events. Fast forward four years to 2013 and amazingly a new Aberdeen study found that a whopping 89% of organizations use spreadsheets for these processes! What gives? We've all heard over and over about the pitfalls of using spreadsheets for these processes, often referred to as “Excel Hell”.  The bottom line is that business users love spreadsheets for their ease of use and flexibility.  So how do we let business users continue to use their tool of choice AND have the qualities of a planning system such as security, workflow, common formulas and logic, a single source of data, multi-dimensional analysis, etc.?

Topics: Center of Excellence, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Analytics, Financial Close, Implementation, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

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