Item: SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Rating: 8
Author: William O'Brien

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our entire organization uses it for budgeting. Departments and offices enter annual expenses. Practice groups use it to track employees with annual billable hours and billable rates. Th finance and accounting department uses it for reporting as well as analyzing variances during the fiscal year. The system also is used for creating and updating revenue and expense forecasts during the year.

Pros and Cons

Allows for tracking of actual vs budgeted expenses. Can have multiple budgets or forecasts for comparison.
Can create reports that can be modified to show either department or office views of the data.
Allows for budgeting of production hours, billed hours and collections by individual timekeeper.

Data is not easily moved between modules. Several steps necessary to accomplish this.
Users often overwrite data entered by others. Need better controls for this.
Better reporting of changes between versions of a budget. In particular, the user who made the changes and what those changes were.

Return on Investment

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.

Ease of Integration

The need to manually update the system for new accounts/offices/departments slows the monthly reporting process until all new values have been entered into the system at the appropriate point of the hierarchy. Employee data for a budget is difficult to keep consistent with an HR system, as loading data directly into BPC would over-write any attribute changes already made. This requires users to manually enter any HR changes into both the personnel system and BPC.

Alternatives Considered

DFTech

BPC was chosen primarily due to the revenue calculations it was capable of. The other factor in BPC's favor was the seamlessness of the multi-currency capabilities.

Other Software Used

Chrome River EXPENSE, Fixed Assets Tracking, SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

SAP BPC is helpful when an office, department or combination has multiple measurements to be reported on. The same layout can be leveraged to report on several different statistics. SAP BPC works well on ad-hoc reporting as the data is already summarized and totaled in the model and can be retrieved quickly as the summations are already complete. Reports that require multiple sections with different layouts are difficult to accomplish.

SAP BPC Review

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)