Hybrid Planning with BPC S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud

Businesses have leveraged Business Planning and Consolidations (BPC) for a year now and are now challenged by working with several new products at the same time, including SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) 7.4/7.5, the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) add-in, version 10.0 SP30 (frontend for standard SAP BPC), and SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office (frontend for embedded SAP BPC) and they need to decide if they need to go to BPC Embedded, Cloud or BPC S/4 HANA Standard.

“A recent survey by the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) revealed 56% of respondents are planning a move from SAP ERP ECC to S/4HANA, but haven’t taken any concrete steps to get there. Another 32% of respondents have either started to make the move or are already live on S/4HANA. Still, 12% said they have no plans to move to S/4HANA at all”.

Based on above Survey and the fact that SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) continuing to be a key part of SAP’S Analytics portfolio, SAP presented the latest innovations, positioning of SAP products and the latest strategic roadmaps by introducing a hybrid planning solution integrating SAP BPC and SAP Analytics Cloud.

Why a hybrid solution?

- SAP BPC standard on-premise is a mature, fully functional planning and consolidation application utilized by thousands of customers.

- SAP has fully optimized the connection between SAP BPC and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) so that a real-time connection is possible.

- Two-way integration means that the planning data and master data from SAP BPC can be imported into SAC and that the same data can be exported from SAC to SAP BPC.

- Automatically create a planning model based on the model in standard SAP BPC

- Populate the dimensions and dimension members based on master data in SAP BPC

- Load transactional data from the standard SAP BPC model

- Schedule the refresh of the master and transactional data from SAP BPC at any frequency

How the SAP BPC hybrid solution works

SAC provides the capabilities, infrastructure, and integration to on-premise and cloud data. Since SAC can potentially be used as the web front end for SAP BPC 11.0, version for SAP BW/4HANA, all the Standard SAP BPC planning scenarios that require users to perform planning on the web can be the use for the hybrid planning applications. You can do planning directly on the public version and save to Standard SAP BPC directly. You can also import a model from SAP BPC including all master data and transaction data. The simplicity of the interface means that the two-way integration can be activated by a simple ‘data-refresh’ button. With the data importing planning data into SAP Analytics Cloud, update of the data is made available in Standard SAP BPC on-premise. You have the option to immediately apply SAP BPC logic when data is saved. This option ensures that the same logic is applied, independent of the tool in which the planning is entered in the Standard SAP BPC on-premise or SAC.

 Benefits

• Core planning on mature and proven BPC solution on-premise
• Many companies are using SAP BPC for years. SAP BPC is a proven product: it is extremely robust (mature) and it contains a strong core of functionalities with which it distinguishes itself from competition software.
• SAP BPC in combination with SAC provides a complete real-time planning solution, covering all aspects of planning.
• Provide continuous innovation through integration with SAC
• Write-back support allows SAC to act as a primary contribution interface with BPC solution
• Web-based reporting and visualizations.
• Web-based data input.
• Predictive Analytics functions.
• Simple data modeling (what-if scenarios, allocations).

SAP Analytics Cloud Data Connectivity Enhancements available:

BPC customers can leverage these enhancements via “hybrid” integration with Analytics Cloud* ensuring a path of continuous innovation. In addition, BPC will receive incremental enhancements based on customer feedback, and be maintained to ensure compatibility with underlying technology components and legal compliance.