Being lucky enough to be part of couple of Ramp Up projects on EPM10, here I am giving some serious Business reasons and Value add on moving to EPM10 solution. These reasons are based on my work with various Customers in South East Asia (SEA)
(Value here is what Customer sees as Value to their Planning, Consolidation & reporting processes)
Here we go:
1. Performance
In general EPM10 provides far better performance on the Input templates and reports as compared to legacy EVDRE versions. I would highly recommend moving the existing migrated EVDRE templates and reports to EPM10 native functionality. There are enough statistics to prove it.
It is going to only get better with BPC on HANA (In memory Database), which is due to release in 2nd half of this year (2012)
2. Security
As we are moving to BW based security – there is lot of flexibility in the maintenance of Users, as Users are now created on the native BW system instead of Active Directory. If we stretch our thoughts, we could achieve de-centralized Security model although nothing out of box is available from SAP at the moment. The decentralization of security has been a common requirement for a Planning or Consolidation System
3. User Interface
The big leap of EPM10 version is the front End & User Interface. The legacy admin client is now by replaced by a Web client, which provides new and revolutionized User Experience. We now have state of Art of Excel Interface with simplified reporting. There is Web reporting component which could be used for basic reporting and data submission processes
4. Journaling ability & Reports
We have Web based Journal template accessed via Admin Web Client. There is an additional validation to have a balanced entry by entity and Currency which is extremely useful feature. The ability to support journal with multiple headers where Users are able to copy and paste an entry for all periods in one go makes it very friendly for Budgeting & Consolidation process view point.
5. Ease of moving from 7.5 NW to EPM10
It has been fairly easy to migrate the existing 7.5NW Version set up to EPM10 version. There is a program’ UJT_MIGRATE_75_TO_10 available to assist existing 7.5 Configurations to move to EPM10. I am aware of a ramp up Customer, who has been able to move its existing 7.5 Application Set to EPM10 Environment very easily.
6. Consolidation Monitor & Controls
The Consolidation Monitor giving visibility into the Group/Subgroup level Consolidation processes, ability to run Currency Translation and Consolidation functions from the monitor itself, hence brings together the visibility of SEM-BCS Monitor along with flexibility of BPC. It would also indicate the status of Controls and at what stage an entity or subgroup is in terms of the overall consolidation process using work status
7. Audit Reports
There are formatted Audit Reports available for various Audit Activities. I have seen Customers interested in Data Audit reports to know about the last few amendments which have been made to their Budgets. There are functions available to filter the report, adjust the no. of columns displayed on the Audit reports etc.
These reports are available on the Web- could easily be downloaded to Excel for further analysis.
Field Experience: You may need to change following parameters in Global Parameters in SPRO
- MAXSYSTEMREPORTQUERYSIZE
- MAXWEBREPORTQUERYSIZE
These are few delta values which I have seen Customers seem to Appreciate. With the BPC10 Version moving to General Availability (GA) very soon, there are ample reasons in moving from legacy Planning Systems to new EPM10 platform.
From a Business Perspective - EPM 10 is the strong foundation for the “Predictive EPM”; which is the next generation EPM capability, being developed by CPM Consulting Pte. Ltd. and along with some of leading CFOs. This capability will give CFOs/CEOs the capability to perform scenario planning and volatility metering, which are key competitive advantage over the competition, another APPS which works on EPM 10.
In the subsequent series of this blog we will look at some more examples from Field on EPM10 implementation, so stay tuned folks.
