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ChrisGrundy
Advisor
Advisor

Just over one month ago the SAP community of customers, partners and colleagues converged on the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando for SAP’s flagship event of the year, SAPPHIRE NOW.

From my perspective SAPPHIRE NOW is a special event because almost all of the main-stage content delivered in the various campus areas is presented by customers. Their stories, in their own words. This differs from many other shows I have attended and to my mind speaks greatly to the incredible relationships and goodwill that exist between SAP and its customers. Without doubt, the customer presentations about their experiences implementing and using SAP solutions are the highlight of the show, and I particularly love to hear stories where the solutions that customers are using have proven to be roaring successes.

From an SAP solutions for EPM perspective we were pleased to have had a number of valued customers and business partners present their stories on a range of topics including planning, consolidations, profitability and strategy management.

The beauty of SAPPHIRE NOW as an event is that it doesn’t just run for the 3-days that it says on the invitation – because presentation sessions are recorded and available on-demand all of the content is available for viewing long after the physical event has been packed up and shipped home. So, with this in mind I wanted to take the opportunity here to highlight some SAP solutions for EPM customer presentations at SAPPHIRE to review at your leisure. Links to presentations are detailed below, along with some session highlights to whet your appetite.

Acxiom - Discover Best Practices for Integrated Planning and Profitability:

  • SAP Business Planning and Consolidation based planning process linked to SAP Profitability and Cost Management profitability analytics, also integrating CRM data for enhanced revenue planning
  • Decreased cycle time, improved speed, accuracy and transparency of profitability data
  • Achieved insight to business line profitability & customer profitability for budgeting and forecasting

Colgate - Power-up Your Planning and Budgeting Processes with In-Memory Computing:

  • Upgraded from v7.5 application to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0, version for SAP NetWeaver, powered by SAP HANA
  • V10 improvements to administration procedures, reporting capabilities and functionality
  • SAP HANA performance improvements - cited 20-25% improvement in reporting speeds and 50% improvement in calculation time

CenturyLink - Provide Profitability Insight Across Multiple Dimensions of Big Data:

  • SAP Profitability and Cost Management for analysing profitability across multiple dimensions including Customer, Product and Geography for feeding business decisions
  • Data integration important: SAP NetWeaver BW, SAP BPC and SAP BusinessObjects BI, additionally operational Drivers from Network ticket systems, Circuit, Call and CPE cost system, Billing Data Warehouses, etc
  • 100 to 150 Billion data records every month in profitability modelling

Citrix - Streamline and Enhance Your Financial Close & Consolidation Process:

  • SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for Consolidations requirement – integrating with core SAP systems, consolidating 120 entities, with 200 users
  • Improved consolidation process and accelerating the close-to-disclose process, saving hundreds of man-hours
  • Automated earnings schedules and financial statement production, reducing manual effort saving 250 hrs/quarter

City of Boston - Close the Gap Between Strategy and Successful Execution:

  • SAP Strategy Management for the ""Boston About Results (BAR)"" initiative which tracks 2000 performance measures across 45 departments
  • Performance reporting is available to all department managers through SSM scorecard
  • "Citizen Insight" delivers information to Boston’s citizens - via web-based system or via iPad app

City of Nanaimo - Improving Planning Processes at City Hall:

  • SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver - 80 planning users
  • Originally implemented BPC to automate existing excel-based and highly manual process, then upgraded to v10 from v7.5 for enhanced performance and additional functionality
  • Smooth implementation of budgeting system standardized for all users as well as leveraging existing SAP investments

   

Hewlett Packard - In-memory technology powers enhanced business planning:

  • SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver, powered by SAP HANA used for expense planning, replacing myriad of disparate tools
  • Impact of BPC is to reduce manual effort, eliminate spreadsheet use, improving speed and accuracy in expense planning
  • Huge amounts of data calculated, with significant speed improvements. Organization dimension has 1 million members and 14 properties, indicating size of data sets involved

I do hope that you’ll find these presentations to be both interesting and stimulating, and maybe event give you some food for thought in terms of how your own organizations manage performance.

And if you like these then why not also have a look at more at the SAPPHIRE NOW website or even some of the many SAP solutions for EPM customer video testimonials available at the SAP.com website.

Happy viewing!