SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced the general availability of SAP® Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) 11.0, version for SAP BW/4HANA. The application improves mission-critical business processes including planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation and reporting, all in one unified solution. Thus, it supports more strategic decision making through accelerated insight to action and serves as a basis for finance transformation and innovation. This announcement was made at SAPinsider Financials being held June 14–17 in Amsterdam.
“In our quest to make it easier for customers to plan, budget, forecast, consolidate and share a consistent view of financial information and key metrics throughout the organization, SAP BPC now leverages the streamlined simplicity achieved in SAP S/4HANA® and SAP BW/4HANA,” said Mala Anand, president of Analytics at SAP. “This simplified architecture eliminates data replication and reduces hardware and administration costs while allowing customers to perform real-time analysis and planning across entire ERP landscapes. Finance departments no longer require separate systems for transactions and analytics.”
Ingmar Christiaens, Partner Advisory Services, EY, said: “The SAP S/4HANA suite has made tremendous progress supporting the CFO’s agenda to build an agile finance function. SAP has now taken another big step forward in the planning and consolidation space with SAP BPC, version for SAP BW/4HANA. The modern user interface enables users to easily access enhanced analytic features and experience accelerated performance from the increased use of core SAP HANA functions.”
Cliff Eng, SAP finance transformation partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: “SAP BPC, version for SAP BW/4HANA, provides a flexible option for SAP customers seeking to enhance their finance capabilities on the SAP HANA technology. This solution is expected to unlock several performance improvement opportunities. SAP’s newest offering can provide finance organizations with the ability to rapidly develop more comprehensive planning models, which may lead to better insight and improved decision making.”
The latest release of SAP BPC provides:
Simplicity
- Simplified financial models in SAP BW/4HANA
- Streamlined data-loading processes with the ability to load sources from across the enterprise and beyond
- One product for planning and consolidation
High Performance
- Faster planning and close cycles with calculations pushed down to SAP HANA®
- More detailed planning with no restrictions on granularity or calculations
- Improved scalability and performance via SAP BW/4HANA
Connectivity
- Increased openess with the ability to incorporate data from cloud applications and other third-party data sources
- Improved decision making and a more complete view of the business
- Extended reporting and analysis, and hybrid planning scenarios thanks to integration with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution
The version of SAP BPC for SAP BW/4HANA additionally allows customers to extend planning beyond finance to other line-of-business planning scenarios. Customers using previous versions of SAP BPC, the integrated planning functionality in the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application, and the planning applications kit (an SAP BW–based planning solution) can maintain their current investment in SAP BW and gain further technical and functional benefits upon migration to SAP BW/4HANA.
Seamless Integration of SAP BPC and SAP Analytics Cloud Enables Deeper Analytics and Hybrid Planning
SAP Analytics Cloud allows users to plan, analyze and predict business outcomes all in one place. Users can seamlessly move their BPC data and models into the cloud for further planning, self-service visualization and predictive analytics. Finance departments can perform more in-depth analysis by using predictive functions on current data sets combined with potential business challenges and influences before running a budget or forecast. Additionally, the business process flows in SAP BPC provide full integration to extend a hybrid planning process between SAP BPC and SAP Analytics Cloud. This allows for full movement of data and dimensions in a bidirectional manner for broadening business planning scenarios on premise and in the cloud.
For additional information, please read the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 11.0, version for SAP BW/4HANAblog. For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.
