SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is revolutionizing the business planning landscape. With its two versions - version for Microsoft and version for Netweaver - it has become the Gold standard for doing business planning - especially with its wide variety of planning content. In this blog, we will discuss the available planning and consolidation content.
To begin with, a natural question would be: Is there a place where I can get a list of all the planning and consolidation content currently available? The next question would be: How do I get some more details about a specific content that I am interested in? To provide the answers to these questions, now we have a content marketplace for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation here on SDN. You can access it at: https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/SAP%20BusinessObjects%20Planning%20and%20Consolidation%20C...
Content marketplace - why and what:
This content marketplace serves many purposes. Firstly, it gives you a list of all the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content solutions at one place. If you want to know if content for any industry or any line of business is currently available for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, this is the place where you should go. Secondly, it also gives you links and contacts to get further information about the content. Thirdly, it gives you a broad classification of the available content solutions, which we will discuss further here. Finally, it also tells you what version of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation each of the content solution will work with.
This content marketplace lists the content developed by both SAP and partners. The intent is to provide the list of all available content - not just the content specifically developed by SAP. SAP partners are at the forefront of many SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation implementations. In the process, they develop content (reports, input schedules, logic, calculations etc.) for the project and/or customer. Some partners then take that content and develop it further to incorporate the best business practices, take the project specific or confidential part out of the equation and make the application more suitable for a specific industry, line of business or point solution. This can be done sometimes with or without help from SAP. A very good example would be the accelerator for capital planning. Our partner, Aster Group, developed this solution as a point solution for meeting the demands of organizations needing a user friendly, user driven solution to do capital expenditure planning. This helps all the constituents of the community. It helps business users who are looking for a solution to a specific business problem (ex. improve capital expenditure planning). It helps SAP better meet the needs of customers looking to implement functional specific solutions faster. It helps partners to publish their achievements and promote themselves in the community. When we list the partner solution here, directly or indirectly, the prospective user of that content may consider that partner to do the implementation. So if you are a partner, who has developed a SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content solution, please consider posting the details of the solution in this wiki.
Classification of content solutions:
Let us talk about the classification of the content here on the content marketplace. There are various types of content; however, for the sake of simplicity, let us consider three broad categories:
- Priced content supported by SAP
- Non-priced content supported by SAP and
- Non-priced content supported by channels other than SAP
The first category is that of the priced SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content. This can be either a Business Analytic Solution (BAS) or a Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS). For example, consider the product ‘SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for Healthcare'. This is a Business Analytic Solution. These solutions are priced analytic applications and have SAP support. (Having SAP support means that you can log an OSS message if there are any issues with the product and support persons from SAP can redress them.)
The second category is that of the non-priced content supported by SAP - like the IFRS starter kit. The content in this category does not have an additional license charge for customers of the respective version of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation. For example, for the customers of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for the Microsoft platform, the IFRS starter kit for Microsoft version is available at no additional license charge and can be downloaded from service marketplace. Similarly for the customers of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP Netweaver, the IFRS starter kit available for the version for SAP NetWeaver is non-priced content and can be downloaded from service marketplace at no additional charge.
The third category is that of the non-priced content supported by channels other than SAP. This includes a variety of non-priced content such as best practice documents, service offerings, consulting accelerators etc. These content solutions may be supported by channels other than SAP. For example, the accelerator for liquidity planning may be supported by Deloitte and not SAP though SAP may have the intellectual property for that solution.
Thus, we now have the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation content marketplace to go to, to refer to, to talk about and after all, to contribute to.
