SAP solutions for financial planning

SAP solutions for financial planning

Financial planning is the calculation what will be the financial results of the company if the company fulfills its strategic goals and objectives. The financial planning is the financial measurement of the production, sales and marketing plan. The result is a plan profit and loss statement which provides information for the management if the business plan is profitable and should be accepted or changed.

As typical for SAP there are many solutions and technologies for the corporate financial planning. Which one should the company choose is a question of detailed analyses of the specific situation. Also it is not very easy to decide what technology to learn in order to be successful SAP planning consultant.

I hope  that this summary about the most used technologies for building financial planning applications with SAP can help you to be more oriented in the big SAP jungle of different solutions.

Before starting I should mention the first SAP planning solution, which is currently not offered anymore by SAP and this is BPS (Business planning and simulation). BPS delivered planning of different scenarios, versioning, input-layouts based on Excel, ready functions for copy, re-post, allocation and deletion of data. For complex functions FOX formula language was used. BPS was replaced by BW Integrated planning.

Here are the currently available SAP solutions for financial planning:

• BW-IP – BW Integrated planning – BW(Business warehouse) system is the place where usually the planning applications are stored as this system provides more possibilities and options for storing and modification of data as ERP (Enterprise resource planning) system. Integrated planning is the follower of the old BPS tool (Business planning and simulation). It offers standard functions for modification of data, options for planning and analyses of historical data, versioning and forecasting. It uses again FOX formulas as the old solution BPS. It offers also allocation and distribution standard functions. Queries created with BExQuery designer can be used as input-ready layouts for planning, if they are made on real-time inforcubes. More about integrated planning solution you can read here.
• Business planning and consolidation BPC – BPC was presented from SAP as the next planning solution after BW Integrated planning, but both solutions were supported in parallel, because the technology of BPC is different and a migration from Integrated planning to BPC is not so easy task.  BPC offers planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation capabilities. It uses one database and infocubes with star schema. The most popular front end for BPC is Excel with the EPM Add-in, but other interfaces are possible too. More about BPC you can read here.
  
• SAP Business Planning & Consolidation 10.1 (Embedded) – This solution is combination of both previous solutions for planning – IP and BPC. It should combine the advantages of both.
  
  
• Integrated business planning – This is a cloud solution. It starts with the demand planning, supply chain planning and offers also profitability evaluations to understand the potential impact of different decisions. Here is more information about this solution.
• Business Objects – SAP Business objects tools are  advertised as another option for financial analyses. BO Design studio can be used for front end web applications for Integrated planning functions.

See more general information about SAP here.