SAP BPC for SAP Netweaver

Unified Corporate Performance Management

The SAP BusinessObjects Planning and consolidation application (SAP BPC), version for SAP NetWeaver, is the only unified planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation application that is designed specifically for the SAP software user. The application supports every function for planning and consolidation, including:

  • Business planning - Budgeting, sales and revenue planning, capital expenditure planning, headcount and staffing, expense planning, and cash flow planning
  • Forecasting - Rolling forecasts, continuous planning, and collaboration
  • Consolidation - Intercompany matching and reconciliation, intercompany eliminations, currency translation, allocations, management roll-ups, and legal consolidation
  • Financial reporting and analysis - Ad hoc reporting and driver analysis (for example, industry, growth, and capacity)

Key Features

Key features of the application include:

  • Use of familiar Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft PowerPoint, to accelerate user adoption
  • Intelligent action panes to guide users through the application, driving user productivity, efficiency, and effective ness
  • An automated consolidation process integrated with planning, which facilitates compliance with all statutory, regulatory, and financial reporting requirements - including the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), International Accounting Standards (IAS), and Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
  • Harmonized charts of accounts, automation of manual processes, and a Microsoft Excel interface to enable you to work with greater accuracy and close the books faster
  • A complete audit trail to reduce costs

Comprehensive CPM Solution

SAP BPC is part of the SAP BusinessObjects corporate performance management solutions - a comprehensive set of solutions that help your company capitalize on the value of your existing data assets. Your organization becomes more agile and achieves organizational alignment and visibility that give you greater confidence, optimal control, and competitive advantage. These solutions can be integrated with the SAP Business Suite software and with the SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance solutions. As a result, you can maximize business profitability; manage risk and compliance; and optimize corporate systems, people, and processes.

Architecture

With SAP BPC 7.0 SAP has made significant investments in building a solution that is user centric while upholding the SAP IT value proposition. The application is tightly integrated with the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component and the SAP ERP application. It takes advantage of the same application and database servers your current infrastructure runs on to significantly reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) over any competing solution. In addition, SAP has made an effort to standardize SAP software components to further lower TCO as additional SAP software is deployed.

Because the application is built directly on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, SAP BPC can leverage SAP NetWeaver BW to read and write data. This is a great advantage over third-party planning and consolidation applications that treat SAP NetWeaver BW solely as a data source. And thanks to tight integration with SAP NetWeaver, the application can exploit SAP software integrations between SAP BusinessObjects Corporate Performance Management solutions and SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BW, the SAP Solution Manager application management solution, and the change-and-transport system, to name a few.

Because SAP BPC is built on SAP NetWeaver BW and the SAP NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaver AS) component within SAP NetWeaver, you can use this single platform for both your enterprise data warehouse and localized planning data marts. This will leverage your existing investments and skill sets to further reduce your cost of ownership.

Technical Advantages and Benefits

SAP BPC utilizes the following platform components:

  • An online analytical processing (OLAP) engine delivered in SAP NetWeaver BW
  • A data dictionary for the ABAP programming language and the data warehousing workbench
  • Process chains
  • The change-and-transport system
  • SAP NetWeaver AS
  • The SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator software - an optional component that must be purchased separately

SAP BPC delivers:

  • A client for "zero footprint" collaboration, data collection, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and report distribution
  • A patented interface to Microsoft Excel, the de facto standard for Corporate Performance Management users, as well as to Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint
  • A relational reporting solution for creating, managing, and delivering realtime financial and operational reports
  • A robust tool that automates routines for extracting, transforming, and loading data from SAP software and other data sources
 

Tools

SAP BPC