Overall Satisfaction with SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
BPC is being used as the system in which we develop our yearly budgets, collect quarterly forecast, and do an analysis of the spending and revenues throughout the organization. The FP&A organization is the heaviest user, with extensive reporting and analysis being done on a daily basis. Over 300 users across campus access it during budget season in order to enter their budgets and half that many enter it quarterly to update forecasts.
- Dimensional model allows for slicing and dicing of the data in a variety of ways
- This is a custom tool - it provides an environment but you define what the structures look like, which offers flexibility
- Updates are not backward compatible - on the server side they require complete reinstalls.
- While they suggest the tool is unlimited, in practice, there are substantial performance limitations on the Microsoft Platform if you let the cube get too large
- The Microsoft platform is legacy from the original tool (Outlooksoft) that SAP purchased. The result is that it gets the least effort in development
- If you aren't using SAP Business Warehouse, the load process is considerably more complex than it otherwise might be.
- 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.
We plan to move to a web-based tool within the next two years. Workday is building a planning model within their finance tool, which we are evaluating, and we are looking at other tools such as Adaptive and Tidemark as alternative platforms. We expect to need some replacement, but we want to get off this product before SAP dumps the Microsoft version.