Financial Planning & SAP Analytics Cloud.

By Matt Penston, Senior Consultant, NTT DATA Business Solutions UK.

In preparing for #itelli2019, the title of my presentation is “Financial Planning & SAP Analytics Cloud”.  As the title suggest the focus is on SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) with specific interest in the financial planning capabilities.  As the tool develops with more and more functionality being added there are a number of areas that could be discussed and focused on.  The three areas that I’ve decided upon will, I hope, set out a number of use cases of how you can make the most of SAC for planning.

The first area of focus is the context where SAC for Planning can be used.  A number of our customers have investment in SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC).  We will walk through the benefits of creating a hybrid planning system combining the strengths of the two software’s to aid in the corporate planning process.

Combining SAC for Planning with S/4HANA allows for seamless integration of structure and data.  We highlight, using the pre-built SAP content, how actual data can be presented in SAC direct from S/4HANA with planning captured and calculated in SAC before being saved back in to S/4HANA.  SAP Accelerators include pre-built content as well integration jobs and best practice integration methodologies.

SAC integrates with an ever increasing number of source systems, though a focus on SAP systems, non-SAP systems also feature.  This allows for SAC to be fed actual information from any number of SAP and non-SAP systems in to specific models used to capture and report on specific data sets.  In most organisations any number of planning process are carried out that are combined and feed in to the financial planning process.  The flexibility of creating a number of models allows for integration and the creation of collaborative enterprise planning.  We will show an example of how feeds from a number of systems create one of our customer’s financial budget and re-forecasts.

The second area of focus is some of the key planning functionality in SAC. There are a number of items that could be covered but I’ve tried to call out those that I feel offer more options than first meet the eye.

The third, is the SAC for Planning community.  SAP, more than ever, are releasing useful content on a regular basis across a number of mediums.  We call out the key players in the community to follow showing examples of the great information out there.

If any of the subjects covered above interest, you please join me in the Shelley room on the fourth floor at 1:15pm.