SAP BPC Business Planning and Consolidation Software
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation helps organisations improve their ability to achieve targets. You can get timely management reports that reveal key performance data like finances. SAP BPC contains capabilities that you can use to create and administer reports. You can also collect, transform, report, and analyse data to improve your business.
Key Benefits of SAP BPC
Here are 13 key benefits you will enjoy by integrating SAP BPC in your organisation. It can:
- Make it easy for employees and teams to work with resources.
- Allow you to control how the solution consolidates your data.
- Ensure that all reconciliations are complete and accurate.
- Offer a robust and reliable nature allows business owners to operate it with ease.
- Remove the need to involve IT specialists in improving business capabilities.
- Create reports in different formats to standardise quality.
- Analyse data by leveraging word processing solutions and other business intelligence tools.
- Simulate and test many scenarios to produce alternative reports.
- Provide a clear audit trail that allows organisations to track data and reports.
- Maintain productivity by shortening reporting and forecasting cycles to enable quick response.
- Remove human errors through reporting automation by immediately identifying and resolving issues.
- Generate management reports to improve compliance with regulatory agencies.
- Save reports offlines by disconnecting from the database and implementing role-based access.
What is SAP BPC used for?
SAP BPC allows organisations to plan, budget, forecast, and consolidate their finances. It provides a single view of operational and financial data that you can use to adjust goals. You can support a performance management system and improve your financial cycles.
The BPC solution contains built-in functionalities for:
- Forecasting and Budgeting
The BPC solution can enable you to create a spending plan that uses real-time financial data. You can visualize how your organisation will consume the budget during the year. The solution can make adjustments by considering variables that can impact your performance. For instance, the SAP solution can use market trends to ensure your budget is accurate. - Reporting
You can create functional reports that summarise and analyse financial data. This helps in keeping teammates and stakeholders updated with your organisation’s performance. You can customise SAP’s easy-to-use reporting templates to meet your business needs. - Compliance
You can improve your regulatory compliance by conducting audits with detailed financial records. The BPC solution also assists in managing and consolidating legal obligations through reporting. - Strategic planning
Organisations can also make strategic plans to make goal-oriented decisions. You can also build yearly action plans through financial and operational planning.
Who uses SAP BPC?
Different departments of an organisation use SAP BPC for their daily activities. Here are some typical departments:
- Financial Planning and Analysis
Your organisation’s FPA department may use SAP BPC for its daily activities. These may include planning and forecasting, management reporting, and gathering information. - Controlling and Accounting
The controlling and accounting department may use BPC to create legal financial statements. You can use these statements to make actionable steps to increase your business. - Tax
Employees in the tax department might find a BPC solution helpful in calculating tax. Organisations combine information from FPA and control departments to calculate tax.
What is an SAP BPC model?
BPC models are often referred to as BPC applications. Organisations use these applications to fulfil their business requirements. There are two types of models that you can build with SAP BPC:
1. Standard model
The standard model provides a protected area to users who want to plan their budgets. These users don’t want to rely on resources obtained by other departments.
2. Embedded model
The embedded model also includes data access to other resources. Master and transactional data from the host EDW environment are accessible from the application. Even if your organisation uses an older BPC version, you can easily migrate to the latest model.
What is an ERP?
Organisations use Enterprise Resource planning to manage and integrate essential departments. ERP software makes planning, purchasing inventory, and estimating sales easy. Different departments communicate with each other through central software to enhance productivity.
With ERP software, an organisation can improve their self-awareness by combining information. Organisations can also remove the possibility of costly duplicate entries. ERP solutions have evolved and now offer remote web-based applications.
Is BPC an ERP?
SAP BPC is not an ERP solution, but organisations can integrate it with other ERP and non-ERP options by SAP. You can get real-time consolidations that provide robust management capabilities.
What is EPM?
Enterprise Performance management solutions help organisations link their strategies to their plans. Managers must be clear on the goals and objectives they need to reflect in their budgets and plans.
An EPM solution leverages the cloud to access financial and operational data. It allows organisations to make confident decisions and respond to disruptions. You can use data analytics from your EPM solution to create ad hoc simulations. This allows you to maximise your organisation’s profitability and performance.
Is BPC an EPM?
SAP BPC offers a robust database with higher scalability and compatibility. Therefore, these business processes and logic capabilities make it a true EPM platform. SAP has placed its BPC model as a unified solution that can perform business functions and tasks.
Will SAP BPC be shutdown soon?
BPC is among SAP’s most preferred planning solutions, with thousands of global users. However, SAP will end BPC 10.1 support for Microsoft in 2024. The newer BPC version will include SAP Analytics for planning, forecasting, and budgeting. It will also use SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting and consolidation.
SAP wants to deliver planning enhancements through hybrid integration. The latest BPC solution will receive incremental enhancements through customer feedback. SAP aims to improve BPC’s compatibility with the underlying technology to meet regulations.
Interested in incorporating SAP BPC into your existing framework?
Organisations rely on SAP to improve their workflows and productivity. If you haven’t integrated an SAP BPC solution with your framework already, it’s time to innovate. Get in touch with us to start your BPC journey and boost your performance and profitability.