Item: SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Rating: 10
Author: Atul Rao, PMP

Ease of Integration

Integration with non SAP data sources is efficient and sustainable but there is always scope for improvement.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At the World Bank Group (WBG), SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) is used as a corporate performance management system to enable financial planning and management and to support the budget processes across IBRD, IFC, and MIGA.

Pros and Cons

BPC acts as the single source for all budget, revenues, expenses, forecast plans and eliminates the need for budget monitoring staff to maintain their own spreadsheets and legacy systems.
Results in substantial time and cost savings due to the reduction of manual errors and data redundancy, enhanced data quality, and data governance, and an expedited planning and monitoring cycle for unit level and corporate planners.

EPM Menu can be simplified.
Compatibility issues with MS Office 365 need to be resolved.
Single sign on needs to be implemented.

Return on Investment

BPC now acts as the single source for all budget, revenues, expenses, forecast plans and eliminates the need for budget monitoring staff to maintain their own spreadsheets and legacy systems. This has resulted in substantial time and cost savings due to reduction of manual errors and data redundancy, enhanced data quality and data governance, and an expedited planning and monitoring cycle for unit level and corporate planners.

Alternatives Considered

Ease of use

More integrated with SAP

Excel is loved by Finance Analysts

Other Software Used

Oracle PeopleSoft HCM, SAP ERP, SAP Business Warehouse, Collibra, MS SharePoint

Likelihood to Recommend

At The World Bank Group, the implementation of BPC has enabled resource managers, budget planners, HR business partners, and activity planners across the institution to plan for budgets and expenses related to staffing/fixed costs, revenues and expenses across all sources of funds, work program allocations, capital investments, and project-based activity costing, etc.

The BPC system allows senior management to communicate budget ceilings and thresholds for top-down planning while automating real-time aggregation and consolidation of bottom-up plans for consumption by corporate budget units to perform variance analysis.

BPC Story - Baby Steps to Success

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)