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:
No need to reconcile separate planning solutions with each other
Shorter planning cycles
You can navigate though all planning dimensions to get a holistic view.
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.
No need to replicate data between the ERP system and SAP BPC.
You can perform real-time analysis on plan data and actual data.
You can plan based on real-time ERP master data.
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.
