Axiom Software by Syntellis Performance Solutions vs. SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

Axiom is extremely well suited to optimize the Budget process. Using Axiom, we have cut our overall budget cycle time in half and have a much higher level of accuracy in all facets of the Budget including Fee Income, Expense, and Margin. Axiom is also well suited for advanced data users as you have the ability to create your own custom database tables which allows you to join to the existing Axiom tables and has allowed us to create custom reporting that we could not even think about on our previous system. The other big benefit of Axiom is that it sits on top of Microsoft Excel and inherits all of its functionality, which most people have experience with.

Incentivized

SAP BPC is well suited for complex planning and consolidations needs where the underlying transactional system is SAP ECC. It suits well if the organization has separate teams with BPC, ABAP, BW, Basis, Hana skillset. SAP BPC is less appropriate for organizations using Agile methodology. It is not suitable for organizations in a hyper-growth cycle as the installation and implementation is time-consuming. It will not work for organizations where the planning and budgeting needs keep changing frequently. The UI of SAP BPC is not very intuitive and very difficult to set up a dynamic dashboard for senior executives and officials of CxO.

Incentivized

• Compared to a previous EPM we used, Axiom's template load and saving performance has been much better even for large plan files.
• Axiom consultants can create completely customized reports for any of the collected data. Super users within your organization can then fairly easily modify their work to create additional reports without Axiom's help (and invoices)
• Setting up user security is a fairly easy one-time task and very easy to maintain when people change departments, leave the organization, etc. I would recommend you use role-based security settings.
• Compared to our previous EPM, Axiom allows more customization and possibilities for templates. There's very few "the product can't do that" statements.

Incentivized

• SAP BPC is real time data. You can send information into the system and see it reflected in your reports immediately. Other systems may require a manual push into a reporting system.
• SAP BPC is a shared reporting tool, so multiple users can be working in a model/environment at the same time, real time. This is especially helpful if your workbooks incorporated multiple processes requiring multiple users to get into the same model.
• SAP BPC is a powerful tool designed to help all facets of the company, from cash flow to capital expenditures to headcount management to financial planning to consolidation.

Incentivized

• Implementation is quite Complex and requires both IT and Financial buy-in
• Reporting solution has some learning curve for end users
• Calculation methods within reporting can be opaque and hard to trace

Incentivized

• Being from a law firm, the system needed a lot of custom tailoring in order to fit our full needs (although many companies could say the same thing). Although the ability to highly customize the system to the company's needs is a positive, it frequently results in the system responding in unexplainable and unrepeatable ways which negatively impacts and slows the budget process. Because of the sporadic nature and variety of the issues, we are unable to repeat them on cue and therefore cannot nail down a solution.

Incentivized

Unlike other SAP traditional products, SAP BPC was meant to be simple and familiar to financial users

Incentivized

For the scale of our implementation, Axiom only assigned two consultants who were both completely new to the company. It felt like we were all learning about the product together, when you would expect them to already be experts at their own product. The team also made a good bit of mistakes throughout production and go-live, which then caused more work internally for us. The team lead for our project also just left the company, so we'll see how next year's planning goes

Incentivized

We need a big support team with various skillset like BPC, ABAP, BW, HANA, FICO etc

Incentivized

SAP BPC training content and trainers are very good. The training is structured and provides a very good understanding of the product features and functionalities. I attended 6 separate training sessions of week-long or more. I had very good experience in all the sessions. The training is organized very well.

Incentivized

SAP Training contents are very good, informative and exhaustive.

Incentivized

The implementation was carried out in two phases spread over a period of 4 years with 2 upgrades in between. We also had multiple upgrades to HANA.

Incentivized

Axiom was selected based on the impression of ease of use and integration. It is capable of holding all of our entities data while giving us an easier more accessible way to deliver monthly Financials and reports to managers. Then in costing we signed up because the impression of budgeting.

Incentivized

With Hyperion we struggled as it didn’t have integrated planning and consolidation, whereas BPC does have it. BPC is easier for reporting as it is Excel-based. Also BPC has prepackaged business process flows that helped a lot. Hyperion on the other hand has a faster response time for user queries or report generation.

Incentivized

• Forecasting has improved
• Complexity of analysis has improved as well
• Our main data has been confused as we started using Axiom

• Office administrators are able to enter data directly, freeing up accounting staff.
• Dependent expenses such as taxes and benefits are automatically calculated, saving time for accounting staff.
• Single source of data for budget information ensures consistency of information when reporting to senior management.

Incentivized