SAP Leveraging SAP BW/4HANA by simplifying Business Planning and Consolidation

The generic availability of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for SAP BW/4HANA was announced on June 14 2017 by SAP SE that is based out of Amsterdam.

The application mentioned greatly enhances critical business processes such as reporting and financial consolidation, forecasting, budgeting and planning, all this being packed into a single unified solution. This, in turn, will aid strategic decision making via the medium of speedy insights – forming the foundation for finance transformation and innovation in the truest sense. SAPInsider Financials held from June 14 to 17 saw this milestone announcement being made by SAP representatives.

The President of Analytics at SAP, Mala Anand said that Business Planning and Consolidation is capable of leveraging the streamlined simplicity that is the hallmark of SAP S/4 HANA and SAP BW/4 HANA. This is the result of their quest to make it convenient and easier for their customers to forecast, budget and plan along with consolidating and sharing a consistent view of key metrics and financial information across the enterprise. Anand also went on to say elimination of data replication and hardware and administration cost reduction is made possible through the simplified architecture while simultaneously enabling customers to execute real-time analysis and planning across comprehensive ERP Landscapes. This makes redundant the need for segregated systems for analytics and transactions.

A high ranking representative from Ernst and Young’s Partner Advisory Services has said that the SAP S/4HANA suite has made immense progress in aiding CFO Agenda to construct an agile finance function. This development represents another large step ahead in the consolidation and planning sphere – referring to the Business Planning and Consolidation version for SAP BW/4HANA.

The advanced and modern UI allows users to conveniently access improved Analytics aspects while experiencing accelerated execution times through the enhanced use of core SAP HANA functions.

The SAP finance transformation partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers named Cliff Eng has said that Business Planning and Consolidation offers a flexible choice for SAP customers that are looking to improve their existing finance capabilities on SAP HANA technology. This comprehensive solution is forecasted to unleash various performance enhancement opportunities, with this latest offering predicted to offer finance enterprises with the capability to develop highly holistic planning models at accelerated speeds, leading to enhanced insight and decision making capabilities.

This latest ground-breaking release of Business Planning and Consolidation offers:

• Simplicity – Simplified financial models in SAP BW/4HANA
• Streamlined data – Loading processes with the capability to load sources from across the organization and beyond a single product for both planning and consolidation
• High Performance – Accelerated planning and close cycles with calculations automatically delegated to SAP HANA. Highly detailed planning with zero restrictions on either granularity or calculations. Enhanced scalability and performance achieved through SAP BW/4HANA
• Connectivity – Enhanced openness with the inbuilt capability to incorporate data from both cloud applications and other third-party data sources as well. Enhanced decision making and a more comprehensive view of the enterprise.

Extended reporting and analysis, along with hybrid planning scenarios which are a result of integration and consolidation with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution

This version of Business Planning and Consolidation for SAP BW/4HANA also enables customers to stretch planning beyond Finance to other critical enterprise planning scenarios.

Existing SAP customers who have invested in earlier versions of Business Planning and Consolidation along with the planning applications kit which is a SAP BW based planning solution, and the integrated planning function in the SAP BW application can retain their existing investment in SAP BW and harness further advantages of both technical and functional in nature when migrating to SAP BW/4. Also noteworthy is the seamless integration of Business Planning and Consolidation and SAP Analytics Cloud which offers in depth analysis and even hybrid planning.

SAP Analytics Cloud also permits users in planning, analysis and prediction of business outcomes- all in a single application. Customers and end users alike can shift their Business Planning and Consolidation data and models into the cloud for extended planning, predictive analytics and even self-service visualization.

Finance departments can execute analysis of a more in depth nature utilizing predictive functions on existing data sets further integrated with potential business challenges and influences before executing a forecast or budget. It is also worth noting that business process flows within Business Planning and Consolidation will offer comprehensive integration to extension of hybrid planning processes between SAP Analytics Cloud and Business Planning and Consolidation. This will enable complete movement of data and dimensions in a bidirectional way for widening business planning scenarios both on premise and in the cloud.

Conclusion

The benefits of the latest version of Business Planning and Consolidation are multi-pronged in nature with backwards and forward compatibility interwoven into the product itself. This promotes customer confidence through preservation of initial investments from the consumer side.