SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

5 Things You Can Do to Get the Best Performance from Your BPC MS 10/10.1 Server Environment, Part 1

Posted by Charles Dagaev on Tue, Apr 28, 2015 @ 10:04 AM

1. Landscape Design

I have been working with the BPC product since its inception in 2000. I am always surprised when clients have skipped or are not interested in what we refer to as a System Landscape Design. We take the functional design and/or what you are currently doing in the product to properly size the servers and client machines for the future use of BPC. If you skip this step, I believe there is no way you will get good performance!

Topics: Best Practices, Process Improvement, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Performance, Microsoft, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Ready For a Planning Cycle? 5 Actions BPC Owners Need To Do

Posted by David Den Boer on Tue, Oct 29, 2013 @ 08:10 AM

For many companies, its getting to be that time of year again. No, I am not talking about getting ready for Christmas decorating contests in the office...although that is not far off. I am talking about getting ready for the big annual plan.

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Project Management

I was reading the newspaper recently and came across a story about a Spanish submarine that was constructed 70 tons too heavy. Officials didn't discover the problem until the submarine was nearly complete. Now they fear if they launch the sub it would be too heavy to resurface! How did this happen? The problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place. Ouch! Something as simple as a keying error resulted in a $2.7 billion dollar paper weight. Fortunately, engineers think they can enhance the sub to make it seaworthy but this story illustrates how costly user errors can be. Segue to the world of finance where roughly 70% of companies rely solely on Excel for planning, budgeting and forecasting and the stories of user error and resulting time loss may not be as astounding as an overweight submarine but are just as prevalent.

Topics: Best Practices, Process Improvement, Roadmap

The question of how to perform change management for BPC NetWeaver comes up often from customers. With three ways to move items between landscapes this leaves customers with the question of what is the best method?  We’ll go over the pros and cons of each method.

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), NetWeaver, Performance, Microsoft, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Rolling Forecasts – Effecting EPM Techniques

Posted by Martin Lloyd on Wed, Jul 17, 2013 @ 11:07 AM

In a previous blog I examined the trend away from the traditional annual budget and periodic reforecasting regime and towards the rolling forecast. I’d now like to examine the particular factors which are driving companies towards rolling forecasts and the implications that this has on the required tools and methodologies.

Topics: Best Practices, Process Improvement, Excel, Thought Leadership, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Financial Information Management, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), Forecasting

Is Your Biggest Customer Your Best Customer?

Posted by Martin Lloyd on Tue, Jun 11, 2013 @ 12:06 PM

It’s natural to assume that your large customers, who unquestionably are the source of most of your revenue, also deliver the major part of your profit. The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers and assumes that the 20% are represented by the largest customers.

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Financial Information Management, Performance, Value

This is Part 2 of 2 dealing with EPM Integration and Financial Information Management. If you have not read Part 1 discussing Installation, please read it first. For me, there are two components to configuration.  First there are systematic configurations to bring the environment up and running.  And then there is usability configuration to setup user & groups (although it’s part of environment configuration...), but most importantly creating and configuring data store connections.

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Cloud, Financial Information Management, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)

Are you Ready for a BPC Upgrade?

Posted by David Meharry on Thu, Feb 28, 2013 @ 11:02 AM

At some point all software will be upgraded to take advantage of new features, new technology, and/or to keep in synchronization with other software which has been upgraded. I’ve assisted a number of companies with BPC software upgrades.  Some have been very quick and efficient while others were not as efficient as they could have been. 

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

A lot of people use the terms dashboard and scorecard interchangeably, believing that the two are really one and the same. The reality is that they are quite different and are used for different Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) purposes. When discussing the differences, it is easy to make an analogy with two things that we are very familiar with: the dashboards in our cars, and the scorecards or report cards we all received in school. Like the dashboard in your car--which monitors speed, fuel level, and distance traveled.   

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

Adding Value Through the Consolidation Process - Part One

Posted by Mike Sullivan on Wed, Feb 06, 2013 @ 09:02 AM

If you have recently evaluated replacing your consolidation system, you were undoubtedly faced with justifying the value of the solution. While a new solution will have a plenty of new features and performance benefits, at the end of the day, the accounting rules that need to be followed and the results being generated are the same. Today, we are seeing more consolidation system evaluations based not only on adding value, but more importantly their ability to integrate with and add value to the overall enterprise performance management (EPM) processes. Implementing SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) is one way of accomplishing that, particularly through the use of business process flows (BPFs).

Topics: Process Improvement, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Consolidation, Value, Data, BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation)