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In today's dynamic market economy, a company's ability to adapt is crucial to its economic success. Planning, budgeting and forecasting are fundamental components of business management processes. However, effective implementation of these processes is often hampered by a lack of IT support. SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) offers a proven solution here: based on the robust BW-IP/PAK planning model, it provides a large number of predefined planning functions and at the same time enables the mapping of individual company-specific logics. With SAP BPC, companies can flexibly map different planning processes and thus react efficiently to new requirements in their business environment.
With the current version of SAP BPC 2021, the product builds on the innovations introduced with BPC 11. These include the use of the HANA database as a planning engine and the implementation of an HTML5-based web client for the administration of the planning process. The current version also supports both model types - standard and embedded. However, it is recommended to only use the embedded model. The Standard model, also known as SAP BPC, Version for SAP NetWeaver, will only be part of SAP's mainstream maintenance until 2027. The SAP BPC Embedded model is linked to SAP's maintenance commitment until at least 2040, which ensures long-term planning security. The maintenance windows for the current product versions of BW/4HANA are shown below:
Since the start of the SAP BW/4HANA product family, planning functions have no longer been part of the SAP BW/4HANA software component. However, this has changed with SAP BPC 2021 for SAP BW/4HANA 2021. With BPC 2021, it is now once again possible to use the SAP BW IP/PAK planning model without an SAP BPC add-on installation. However, an SAP BPC license is still required for all planning models (SAP BW-IP/PAK, SAP BPC Embedded Model and SAP BPC Standard Model).
Thanks to the full integration into SAP BW, you have access to predefined business functions of Integrated Planning, which make it easier to set up planning applications. You can also use the characteristic relationships as usual to ensure the consistency of planning data. In addition, the data slices protect your planned values from unauthorized changes.
With the help of business process flows, which can be configured in an HTML5-based web client, you are able to provide the user with a guide through the planning application. The work status allows the user to control the input for specific data areas. In addition, you can use data access profiles to flexibly adjust read and write access to the transaction data and track the changes via a data audit.
SAP Analysis for Office (AfO) is often used to create input masks for planning. Business Process Flows offer the option of accessing the relevant planning workbooks in AfO directly from the planning activities and using the respective planning context as a filter. In addition, the BPC work status can be set directly in AfO.
With PAK (Planning Application Kit), even complex operations such as breaking down planning data run extremely quickly thanks to native HANA technology. This enables you to cope with constantly growing data volumes in the future.
As part of SAP's cloud-first strategy, the focus on innovation is exclusively on the SAP Analytics Cloud planning solution. This underlines the strategic importance of SAC as a central platform for future-oriented corporate planning and analysis. At the same time, SAP BPC remains the preferred planning solution for on-premise scenarios and is actively supported and maintained.
Companies that already rely on SAP BPC have the option of seamlessly integrating their existing planning solution into the SAP Analytics Cloud. This allows them to benefit from modern visual user interfaces and extended SAC functions while protecting their investment in SAP BPC.
The direct integration of input-ready BW queries and BPC planning sequences into the SAC user interfaces ensures efficient data input and analysis. It is important to emphasize that no data is stored in the SAC. Instead, the data is stored directly in the SAP BPC planning model via the live model, which guarantees the integrity and security of the data. Furthermore, BW analysis authorizations are fully supported, which means that users can also use the authorizations and restrictions assigned to them within the BW environment in SAC.
This seamless integration creates an effective working environment for planning and analyzing business processes by optimally combining the strengths of SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BPC.
The integration also makes it possible to use new SAC features that are normally only available in the cloud-based SAC planning solution. In addition to the use of the new Stories 2.0 with an extensive scripting API for BPC and the convenient SAC functions for table-based changes to key figure values, this also includes the use of collaboration functions for commenting and integration into the SAC calendar as an alternative to BPC Business Process Flows.
The SAP Analytics Cloud roadmap in the Enterprise Planning area also includes improvements for BPC, such as the recent activation of 'Fluid Data Entry' mode for BPC planning models, which was introduced with the Q1 2024 release and optimizes responsiveness during data entry.
Until now, a planning user usually needed a license for both BPC and SAC in order to integrate their BPC planning into their SAC tenant. With the introduction of the BPC runtime license for SAC planning, also known as BPC Embedded Access Rights, this double licensing is no longer necessary. Customers therefore incur no additional costs if they wish to use BPC for planning in SAC.
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