The following blog is written by Tim Soper – Senior Education Consultant in the North America SAP Education Delivery Organization. Tim specializes in the areas of SAP BW and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and is a course owner as well as curriculum architect. He has more than 15 years of SAP Education consulting experience. Tim is certified in BW and Planning and Consolidation and holds an MBA degree from the University of Rochester NY. You can contact Tim (first name Charles) via email at Charles.Soper@SAP.com.
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As a Senior Education Consultant in the area of Planning and Consolidation, I receive a lot of questions about the value proposition of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation version 10.0.
First of all, the new release is generally available in mid-December, 2011 for both the Microsoft and NetWeaver platforms. All of the administration and user interfaces are new and improved and there are also significant feature enhancements as we will outline below. Note: the comments below only pertain to the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for the NetWeaver platform.
Administration is now performed more efficiently in a modern web client using Adobe Flex screens which feature easier, quicker, and more intuitive navigation steps.
The web client’s Start Page is an attractive launchpad for users to access their Activities, Library of reports and input forms as well as personalized Workspaces.
The Start Page also includes the Consolidation Central’s all in one components such as the Consolidation Monitor, data validation Controls Monitor, the Ownership Manager which replaces the dynamic hierarchy editor and the Journal Landing area. Executing consolidation now takes less time with Incremental Consolidation which only processes the changed data records. Journals are administered from the web client exclusively and can now handle multiple period postings for example. Consolidation Business Rules can be configured much faster via automatic drop down lists and copy and paste.
The Excel Interface of the EPM add-in features a dynamic excel interface that can access data from both Planning and Consolidation platforms as well as BW and SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. The EPM Report Editor replaces the EVDRE builder, and features drag and drop report creation as well as automatic member recognition that allows users to start a report by merely typing members into a cell. The EPM Report Editor also features a robust style sheet, and easy to use sorting and filtering options.
EVDRE templates can still be used in the new release and they can also be migrated.
Precalculated Books are now available for both printing as well as pdf output and can be viewed as single pdf’s or the easy to use Book Viewer to do flash reporting on static data.
Transports are now be performed via the BW Transport Collector and support granular transports by Model (Application) or Dimension for example rather than for the entire Environment (Appset).
You can learn more about the exciting new release in the following ways:
