SAP Business Planning & Consolidation for S/4HANA – In a Nutshell
S/4HANA takes working with actual data to the next level. But did you know that it also offers an innovative solution for plan data? This solution is called SAP Business Planning & Consolidation for S/4HANA (SAP BPC for S/4HANA). In the product assistance for S/4HANA 1610 FPS01, you find an introduction to this product which gives you a short & sweet overview. It is called…
Why Yet Another Planning Solution?
If you are an experienced SAP Expert, you may wonder why we have decided to develop another planning solution. Aren’t there enough already?
Planning Solutions in SAP ERP
SAP ERP provides many planning solutions, such as for Cost Centers (CO-OM-CCA), Internal Orders (CO-OM-OPA), Enterprise Controlling (EC-BP), Product Costs (CO-PC-PCP), Profitability Analysis (CO-PA), General Ledger Accounting (FI-GL), or Asset Accounting (FI-AA).
These planning solutions are very powerful and well-established among our customers. However, they each store their plan data in different tables, creating independent plan data silos. You have to reconcile these plan data silos to get a full view on the planning data.
Planning Solutions in SAP BW
To overcome the drawbacks of independent plan data silos, SAP offers SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (SAP BPC). This solution uses a standalone SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) as a single data store for all plan data.
The advantages compared to the planning solutions in SAP ERP are the following:
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No need to reconcile separate planning solutions with each other
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Shorter planning cycles
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You can navigate though all planning dimensions to get a holistic view.
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You can simultaneously enhance all planning applications with additional fields by adding the new fields to the single data store.
However, in SAP BPC the plan data is decoupled from the SAP ERP system since it is located on separate hardware. If you want to refer to actual data and master data in the planning process, you have to replicate this data from the SAP ERP system to the SAP BPC system. No real-time access to SAP ERP master data is possible and consequently no real-time plan/actual analyses can be performed.
Introducing SAP BPC for S/4HANA
As one component in S/4HANA we present a totally new financials solution. Due to the enormous aggregation and computing power of SAP HANA, financial transactions and analytics can be performed based directly on line items. Furthermore, S/4HANA combines all data which formerly was stored in different line item tables (such as BSEG, COEP, CE4*) into a new table called ACDOCA
. This table no longer makes a distinction between G/L accounts and cost elements. Cost elements are just G/L accounts of a special type.
These and other changes dramatically simplify the architecture for actual data and makes it more flexible. To reflect this also for plan data, a new planning solution has become necessary.
We developed SAP BPC for S/4HANA, which uses the SAP BW system that is part of the SAP NetWeaver belonging to the operational S/4HANA system. A standalone system is no longer required. The advantages are significant.
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No need to replicate data between the ERP system and SAP BPC.
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You can perform real-time analysis on plan data and actual data.
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You can plan based on real-time ERP master data.
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The simplified system landscape reduces hardware and administration costs.
Running on SAP HANA enables us to offer additional advantages as well: By using the Planning Application Kit (PAK), planning functions such as disaggregation are run completely in-memory directly on SAP HANA. No ABAP processing is required. This provides much faster performance, especially if you have a lot of planning data, and makes simulations and predictions possible.
SAP BPC for S/4HANA offers various features (All Features in a Nutshell) to enable you to build different types of planning processes (Planning – a la Carte).
More Information
You’ll find the complete documentation set on the product page for SAP S/4HANA in the SAP Help Portal. Scroll down to the Product Assistance (formerly known as Application Help) and open it in the language you prefer, for example English. In the product assistance, follow the path Enterprise Business Applications ==> Finance ==> Financial Planning and Analysis ==> SAP Business Planning & Consolidation for S/4HANA.
For English, you can just click on this link.
What I dont understand the need to combine Transactional systems with Analytical systems . BPC is after all an analytic solution . SAP HANA as an enterprise data warehouse is not stable enough yet - most clients require a couple of restarts a month due to index server crashing due to runaway queries or some other reason.
And honestly who needs real time data while planning for next month or years in advance . A near real time solution would suffice . And SAP BPC system separate from transactional system Data via SLT or SDI real time would work equally well .
SAP seems to completely neglect stand-alone BPC systems . BPC optimized for HANA or BPC for S4HANA seems to lean to only s4HANA systems where BPC and ECC co exist in one box .
Embedded BPC inherently means using the Embedded BW system that exist in any Netweaver box. but in reality its the only stand alone product.
At least in pure analytics / data warehousing , the direction is clear . Use CDS views for operational analytics where the data volume is small . Else use separate BW on HANA box or separate pure Enterprise HANA box for datawarehousing.
I believe that Embedded BPC is a superb solution where we can harness the power of BW directly (unlike classical BPC) . They just need to give a clear direction that if in future stand alone BPC will exist that is based on based Embedded BPC that will have both planning and consolidation available
Hi David,
Thanks for the nice and clear blogs. About BPC optimized for S/4 HANA - is it possible to have BPC + BW S/4 HANA in separate server and have S/4 SF in separate server that way we can share BW. I mean would BPC still work as is as out-of-the-box.
Thanks
In BPC for S4/HANA can we create our own BPC Dimension Infoobjects and use it for our own custom Planning solutions. We have a model for Expense planning with a lot of custom dimensions which have no relevance to S4 HANA ERP system like management region. Can we create an Infoobject in BW Embedded in S4/HANA and use it to build our own BPC models ? Please suggest.
So what is the method if we just want to use simple cost centre or GL based planning? Because it seems we need a license for anything that is associated with BOBJ.
Hi David
Just two technical questions. BPC is installed over the embedded BW of S/4HANA that means BW on HANA and "BPC 10.1 for NW " that is not the last release. (last is BPC 11 for SAP BW4Hana).
Moreover regarding the integration for embedded BW on S/4HANA take care that it's also recommended to have a dedicate client for the BW separated from ERP. If so what are the true advantages of embedded ?
Last but not lease,what is really best to use ? the older release embedded in S/4HANA or the latest in a separated (and integrated) BW4HANA ?
Thank you and best regards
Is this BPC within the S4HANA system called as "Embedded BPC" ?