Helen Keller once said, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much” and this is the mantra behind which SAP and the customers we work with in the world of planning and analysis who come together to bring a collective view of plans. Traditional views of planning often involved the financial planning & analysis (FP&A) department working alone to bring together plans in a planning tool or MS Excel via input sheets, e-mail statements, or team meetings. Plans were neither connected across the enterprise to bring a confident and unified view of planning nor collaborative involving everyone across the business.
At SAP, we’re helping customers embrace
extended planning and analysis (xP&A), which is the process of linking and aligning all plans across your organization. It breaks down silos and brings your teams together—finance, HR, sales, marketing, IT, and supply chain—to collaborate on plans and drive better business outcomes.
Tailor Your Approach to Your Business Needs
Different departments have very different planning requirements, and to say one size fits all does not assist in appreciating the nuances of unique plans. Time and time again in discussions with customers we’ve witnessed our valued customers try the round hole/square peg tactic of using the wrong products to work with the wrong planning process. At SAP, we’ve highlighted the intricacies of such processes in describing in detail how
xP&A works with our
SAP Analytics Cloud and
SAP Integrated Business Planning solutions (SAP IBP).
For customers looking to use planning, BI, and augmented analytics in one solution, SAP Analytics Cloud allows as much. With this solution, customers can bring in siloed plans from across the enterprise, maintaining the integrity of each function and yet having a holistic and singular view to be able to drive decisions.
To support this even further, manufacturing organizations looking for supply chain planning capabilities especially for complex sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes, are encouraged to work with SAP IBP, which is purpose built to provide the best planning features and functions in this area. SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP IBP provide bi-directional integration so that the consensus plans from SAP IBP can be viewed in SAP Analytics Cloud to support the singular view of plans while maintaining the integrity of the complexities in each process.
Extended Planning and Analysis in the world of the Intelligent Enterprise allows organizations to make confident decisions based on past, present, and future expected outcomes. Further, this enables those managing plans and budgets to be true leaders in their respective organizations.
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