SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) tool helps to automate and streamline business forecasts, planning, and consolidation activities in an organization. It is used to support all financial and operational activities in an organization. Using SAP BPC, it becomes easier to use reporting tools. This blog explains the key concepts of SAP BPC.
In this Tutorial, you will learn-
Introduction to SAP BPC
SAP BPC Overview
SAP BPC Features and Functionality
SAP BPC Architecture
BPC Administration
BPC Reporting
BPC Security
Introduction to SAP BPC
SAP BPC stands for Business Planning and Consolidation. It provides you with a single view of financial and operational data and a unified solution that supports Performance Management processes. It delivers built-in functionalities for
- Strategic Planning
- Budgeting
- Reporting
- Forecasting
There are two platforms in SAP BPC. About 80% of its functionality is the same except the difference in the back-end. In each platform, there are two versions.
- SAP BPC Microsoft Platform (MS) – SAP BPC 7.5 MS and SAP EPM 10
- SAP BPC Net Weaver Platform (NW) – SAP BPC 7.5 NW and SAP BPC 10 NW.
Like any other SAP module, the BPC module too holds master and transaction data. SAP BPC is divided into two components those are “Administration” and “Reporting”.
SAP BPC Overview
SAP BPC tool is used to support all operational and financial activities in an organization. SAP BPC helps in automating and streamlining business forecasts, planning, and consolidation activities in your organization.
SAP BPC supports two types of migration – SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft Excel. BPC with Microsoft version enables you to perform modeling, maintenance, importing data and applying transformations, creating scripts, etc. It leverages the power of MS Excel and provides the user with an Enterprise Power Management (EPM) solution, the collaborative tool with a robust, readily accepted environment.
SAP BPC provides support for existing Microsoft functionality and various enhancement features like drag and drops report builder, etc.
Below are the Following key benefits provided by SAP BPC −
- It allows the user to make better business decisions by supporting What-If analysis and allows you to perform scenario-based planning.
- It allows you to, collaborate data and thus increase accuracy in business planning and accountability.
- It helps in aligning your plans with strategic goals and hence decrease the cycle time.
- You have an option to choose the version of Microsoft Platform or SAP NetWeaver
- Following are the key benefits that can be achieved by using BPC
- Business Forecasting
- Analytical Reporting and Analysis
- Budget Planning
- Predictive Analysis and Recommendations
- Improve Compliance
- Consolidation
- Business Process Flows and Smooth Collaboration
EPM in SAP
The EPM solution used for widening over the financial divisions. It is similar to CPM (Corporate Performance Management), BPM ( Business Performance Management) and FPM (Finance Performance Management). EPM is used as a unique repository to manage relevant information.
SAP BPC Features and Functionality
SAP BPC has various features and functionality that will meet a vast range of business needs. In this eBook, we will focus on the features most used for financial consolidations. This will give you the reader a better-focused perspective on how BPC fits into the financial processes associated with a close.
- Currency Translation
- Account Reclass
- Consolidations Logic
- Journals
- Consolidation Monitor
- Microsoft Office Add-Ins
- Ownership Structures
- Interfaces
SAP BPC Architecture
SAP BPC Architecture It uses various business rules and script logic for doing the planning. The key components in BPC architecture are shown in the image below.
BPC Administration
BPC Administration allows administrators to perform maintenance and setup tasks for BPC client applications.
How to start BPC administration
It has two interfaces; a client application and a web
interface. The administration action pane lists the available tasks for both
interfaces
Creating a new dimension
Dimensions represent the entities of a business (e.g., accounts, codes, and categories). They represent the master, text, and hierarchy data for each of the business entities.
It is possible to create new dimensions in a BPC application set. There is no restriction to create several dimensions in SAP BPC. These dimensions then become shared dimensions that are available for use in any application within the app settings.
Some dimensions are required. It must exist in all the applications within an application set. While the dimension type determines the default properties to be included in the dimension. It is possible to add additional properties as needed.
Dimension types
Required in each application
- A = Account type dimension
- C = Category type dimension
- E = Entity type dimension
- T = Time type dimension
Required in each application set
- R = Currency type dimension
Needed to validate currencies that are input in an Entity type dimension. This may not be part of any applications within the application set
Required for Intercompany Eliminations
- I = Intercompany
It is also possible to create additional dimensions as a requirement
Un = User defined dimension type. For each user-defined dimension, the number ‘n’ will be incremented. Forex; U1, U2, U3 and so on
BPC Reporting
BPC for Office combines the power of BPC with the rich functionality of Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. With BPC for Office, we have all of the Microsoft functionality to use. On top of its documents, worksheets, and slideshows can be linked directly to the BPC database that has Company’s reporting data.
BPC for Office allows us to collect data, build reports, perform real-time analysis and publish reports in a variety of formats. You can save your reports so that you can use them disconnected from the database. You can take reports completely offline and you can distribute them based on user access rights
BPC Security
BPC security is managed in the Administration Console. There are four components in BPC security?
Users: It is used to add users to the environment and manages their access rights
Teams: You can define a group of users with the same access rights
Data Access Profiles: It enables setting up profiles for tasks to be performed.
Task Profiles: It is used to set up profiles and enable access to data in models.
