Prophix vs. SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

Prophix is best suited if you have a very extensive budgeting process that currently relies on multiple Excel spreadsheets. It is also great if you have on-prem tools that may no longer be supported for reporting. It may not be appropriate if you require an unlimited number of mid-tier users, as it can be very expensive annually. It's definitely not a cheap tool, but the cost can at least be optimized based on users' use cases. In both organizations I've worked for that use it, cost has been mentioned.

Incentivized

For a large company trying to bring processes and functions together with one tool, SAP BPC is a great solution. It requires hours of effort to implement and configure, which would not be appropriate for smaller companies. SAP BPC also requires dedicated resources to maintain the system on a day to day basis, as well as an administrator type personnel who can troubleshoot slow performance or issues with the system. You also need users who are willing and exciting to use this system and actually trust that this is a solution.

Incentivized

• Reports are very customizable - once you learn how to create reports, it is really easy to design the final output you'd like.
• The tool is easy to use, especially for those that don't work in the finance function.
• It offers an excellent workflow capability to send out tasks to cost center owners all over the company.
• We love the ability to create and customize cubes.

• Allows for full integration of data to be analyzed in real time. Although we still load actuals on a delayed basis (2 business days after month end), when developing the budget, we not longer have to do a full loading process from a different application into BPC prior to being able to report and analyze the current budget status to prior budget versions or actuals.
• It is easy to learn basic report building. The hardest part is learning the available dimensions and the different possible combinations and their results, but that will also vary from company to company depending on the complexity of the industry.

Incentivized

• Ability to filter report views for report binder without creating duplicate reports.
• More extensive documentation and examples in the ProCalc library.
• More ProCalc functions that deal with the time dimension and allow functions that can utilize the system date. So if it is day 8 of the month.
• Ability to save company color scheme for use in reporting.
• Would like to create a link between the account dimension and another dimension so I can easily report on account properties. For example, an account property could be columns in a report.
• Would like to see the ability to have a report view on a dashboard. The tables are poorly formatted, and I’d like more formatting ability.

Incentivized

• When a change is needed in the EPM reports it is not very flexible and needs IT intervention
• Performance sometimes is an issue when consolidating more then 20 entities specially at quarter end
• Script logic complex to handle and always needs BPC consultant when changes are requiered even if minimal - has very high costs

Incentivized

The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments

I don't rate anybody a 10 because I believe there's always room for improvement, so I'll go with an 8. And I'm giving 8 because it has helped us do more than we were doing before, and I believe there's still room for improvement.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.

Incentivized

Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.

Incentivized

We’ve gotten moved around a lot and so we don’t always know our pod people. Also when we book sessions with a random person it seems like we have to take the first 15-20 minutes explaining our system and process.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We worked with a consultant provided by the vendor for implementation. Training involved online and in person. The in person training was done throughout the implementation. It was very hands on training. As we worked through sections of the set-up, we were training on how to use various features within the product. It made learning the system very easy.

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

We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.

Incentivized

SAP Training contents are very good, informative and exhaustive.

Incentivized

Since company's IT department was not part of the implementation and it was done only by an executive assistant who did not have extensive knowledge about finance and accounting it was done VERY Poorly and haphazardly. Nothing was done properly and it was not planned correctly. It worked for short term but after 2 years we had to re-do all the cubes and it was very hard to fix and correct things

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

Prophix is so much easier to use that other platforms or products. It can be customized so much easier than other larger, more expensive products. I work for a small university where we have a small finance team and Prophix allows us to tailor reporting to emerging needs in real time without having to reconfigure clunky systems with expensive modifications

Incentivized

Sage BPC is very much ahead of Dimensions in multiple areas. The speed and ease of reporting with Sage is very good when compared (although the bank reconciliation task is one thing that i feel is much more effort on Sage and takes more time than previous). We selected SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) as we have multiple foreign entities and a team in India producing reports so needed one package that could reliably provide information in one currency and show it clearly.

Incentivized

I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users

Incentivized

• Reduced time to produce reports and compile budget leaving the team with more time to analyse the data, rather than concentrating on just compiling reports or budgets.
• Improved visibility and variance reporting capability providing actionable insights to stakeholder.
• The above points lead to greater buy-in into reporting and planning processes.

Incentivized

• When originally implemented (as the predecessor product Outlooksoft) BPC took ASU from trying to budget and forecast for a 2B enterprise out of spreadsheets and into a far more consolidated tool. It has saved us considerable time over the years and paid for itself several times over.
• BPC also allows us to present our budget in multiple different views to support management, board and departmental reporting.

Incentivized