Why SEM BPS?

January 19th, 2006dkaps
in

Here is a piece that I got from a vendor site.. which I found very useful for

folks who have to sell SEM BPS in front of the client CFO's and CIOs!  Do you

currently have a budgeting process that takes six months to run, usually drifts into the next financial year, and seems

disconnected from the strategic targets of your company? Do you have a forecasting process that involves an inordinate

amount of time arguing about the accuracy of the underlying numbers, rather than discussing the business issues that the

forecast should be addressing? Do you have difficulty aligning your sales plan with your planned P&L, cashflow and

balance sheet figures? Do you want bottom-up and top-down to meet happily in the middle? Are you considering implementing

a “Beyond Budgeting” approach? Do you like the flexibility of MS Excel, but hate managing and merging local files

in different versions, with no audit trail? If so, you’re not alone!SAP

have a suite of products that address all of these issues, and chief among them is BPS. Bluefin have implemented BPS

solutions for major organisations, and understand the business and IT challenges that you are likely to face.

What is BPS?BPS – Business Planning and Simulation – is a product from SAP that

uses BW functionality to provide an integrated environment for all your business planning, including

budgeting and forecasting. Moreover, it is seamlessly linked into the reporting functionality that BW offers, giving

you one place to report on plan vs. actuals and allowing you to instantly see the effects of changes in the

plan, in a controlled way. BPS started life as SEM-BPS, but as of BW

version 3.5, it is now included with BW as BW-BPS. All development of BPS functionality will continue within

BW – including the evolution to BI-IP (Integrated Planning).   Evolution of BPS (© SAP 2005)   The product itself contains a

number of features to help you create an optimal planning environment:

  • Planning areas, levels and packages. These are the structures that hold the planning

    data, and are set up to allow many people to work on the plan at the same time, while maintaining data

    integrity and greatly improving visibility of the data within the process. You can also link in the BW structures

    that hold actual data, so these can, for example, be used to form the basis of next year’s budget.

    All the data within BPS is stored centrally, but accessible from distributed locations, which means that plan data

    can be reported on instantly, as soon as each planner saves their data

  • Planning functions. These range from pre-delivered functions to allow you to

    manipulate data (such as copy actuals to form the basis of a budget, or add x%, or allocate out charges across

    a range of cost centres based on activity), to freely customisable formula-based functions or ABAP code. These

    functions allow you to build in business logic to the planning process, to automate it, and then apply it

    consistently across all the data in the process. The same functions can be made available across the whole

    business, removing the issues associated with managing different local versions of planning

    applications

  • Excel planning layouts and Web interface

    builder. Excel functionality can be used within planning folders to access and manipulate the data,

    thereby allowing you to best use the flexibility that Excel offers, and leveraging the familiarity with Excel that

    the your organisation has. Alternatively, planning applications can be rolled out via the web, which

    removes the desktop support issues that come with workstation applications

  • BW reporting. Because BPS uses BW, you have access to all the reporting

    excellence that BW delivers, including integrated plan / actual reporting

  • Status and Tracking Monitor. To control the planning process, the Status and

    Tracking Monitor allows you to represent your hierarchy of people involved in the planning process, and track the

    flow of data during the process against this hierarchy. This gives you a centralised, up-to-the-minute view

    of how you’re performing against deadlines, and includes functionality to lock the data once a planning

    step has been completed.

What does BPS mean for me?Using BPS it is possible to create a fully integrated plan for

your whole business, which integrates, for example, sales, financial and production plans. BPS functionality

is very good for spanning the range of strategic planning and tactical planning. Occasionally it is used for

operational planning, e.g. detailed monthly product planning if you don’t have a product such as APO.

However, very detailed operational planning – in particular MRP – remains “close to the

transactions”, i.e. it stays within your ERP system.