As we look to our customers and partners and seek to understand the challenges organizations are facing today, it becomes very clear that the one over-riding challenge we see - irrespective of geography or industry - is the ever increasing pace of change in organizations and the resulting ability of organizations to cope with this change. In fact the only constant we see is that this pace of change will continue to accelerate and that it will continue to impact multiple parts of our organizations.
SAP BusinessObjects EPM Solutions
Enterprise Performance Management (ensuring optimized enterprise performance from strategic decision making through planning and consolidation, modeling and optimization) products highlighted are:
- SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius: a point-and-click data visualization tool specifically designed to create interactive analytics and dashboards.
- SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management (FIM) application helps reduce the risk, cost, and effort of collecting, mapping and loading data from SAP and non-SAP source systems directly into and between SAP BusinessObjects EPM applications.
- SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management (PCM): cost are inherently multidimensional. They occur in particular periods, versions, responsibility centers etc. and need to be assigned to activities that also occur in particular periods, versions, responsibility centers etc. Therefore if you want to model costs ACCURATELY it is best done in a multidimensional data structure as it allows you to model real life situations more realistically.
- SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation: budgeting, planning, legal consolidation and financial reporting.
Roadmap
BPC is already a very complete product in terms of functions and features. In the future SAP will enable new and existing customers with a jumpstart and SAP, partner and customer best practices, by providing pre-built components in the form of starterkits and best practice documentation.
The next release of EPM is currently released to restricted shipment under the ramp-up program in Q4 2010 with unrestricted shipment planned to following in 2011. SAP decided to unify all EPM and GRC (governance, risk and compliance) applications onto a common version number to reflect the growing convergence in the underlying applications themselves and to share common components between them.
This is a suite of releases which:
- Covers both Finance and Operations
- Delivers the next major revision of our solutions
- Updates our technology and platforms (like 64bit, database support, virtualization etc.)
- Introduces new solutions including those delivered by additional integration with BI, GRC, and the Business Suite
- Protects customers investments as all engines remain supported creating a smooth non-disruptive upgrade path
For more info we advise you to go to: www.sap.com/epm, in the upper right corner you will find the "EPM Statement of Direction".
By: Maarten Obels, Solution Principal, SAP Netherlands
