Add a new planning process to your BPC implementation using SAC Planning

In the last blog we talked about how you can complement your BPC implementation with SAC and start the journey towards moving to SAC without any disruption. In this blog we will talk about the second option of Extend Planning  – to add a new planning process to your existing BPC implementation using SAC Planning. The ‘complement’ option mentioned in the earlier blog involved doing planning in SAP Analytics Cloud and exporting the plan data back to SAP BPC to be incorporated in the planning in SAP BPC. In this section we will talk about business scenarios where customer may simply add a new planning process in SAP Analytics Cloud without touching anything in SAP BPC. The synchronization of plan data from SAP Analytics Cloud with plan data in SAP BPC is completely optional in this option and in this regard depending upon the comfort level of the customers to do planning in public cloud, this option may be the first step for some customers who are exploring planning with SAP Analytics Cloud.

For those customers who might have been hesitant to make any changes or enhancements to their well-set on-premise business planning applications or who may be uncertain about doing any business planning with public cloud system, this may be the easiest way to get started. For these customers, without disturbing any of the current planning processes in SAP BPC, adding new planning process with SAC may present a good opportunity to get familiar with SAP Analytics Cloud on public cloud.

For example, if a new planning process is to be added for say headcount planning or capital expenditure planning then the customer can use SAP Analytics Cloud for that purpose and leverage many advantages that SAP Analytics Cloud presents as described below:

• They can leverage the delivered business content which, in this example, is for headcount planning and capital expenditure planning. This will get them a head start in implementing the new planning process with delivered models, stories, KPIs etc.
• They can use the delivered connectors available in SAP Analytics Cloud which, in this example may be for Success Factors for headcount planning data and S/4 Hana or SAP ERP for finance and controlling related data such as accounts, cost centers, assets etc.
• Optionally, they can also generate their planning models based on any specific models in SAP BPC using the connectors to SAP BPC. They can source their master and transactional data as well from any master data object in SAP BPC or any data region for planning related transactional data from SAP BPC.

This is illustrated in the figure below.

New functional plans with SAP Analytics Cloud

The following two points make this option of adding new planning process using SAC different than the option to complement BPC.

When you are complementing SAP BPC with SAP Analytics Cloud, you may be using a hybrid planning solution as a combination of SAP BPC and SAP Analytics Cloud; whereas when you add new planning processes in SAP Analytics Cloud, though you may generate your planning models from SAP BPC, you may not be passing the plan data back to SAP BPC and choose to keep it in SAP Analytics Cloud

Secondly, you may choose to add new planning processes in SAP Analytics Cloud to check out how the business planning on public cloud may work in your business scenario and whether the users like it or to assess the change management issues if any. Once you gain experience with adding the new planning process in SAP Analytics Cloud then gradually may shift to the option of complementing SAP BPC with SAP Analytics Cloud and from there gradually shift to the option of moving completely to SAP Analytics Cloud as your users gain confidence and are familiar with and maybe even get used to the advanced augmented analytics features in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Thus you can add new planning process in your existing BPC implementation with SAC Planning. In our next blog we will talk about more technical details about achieving this integration between BPC and SAC.