Planning, budgeting, and forecasting – these are the three aspects vital to every company. Simultaneously, these are the three areas which SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application works the best within. Thank to many more or less significant facilitations, business users benefit from boosts of efficiency. They need noticeably less time for developing well prepared plans and budgets which are tuned up to meet the company strategic goals as accurately as possible. Once the business conditions are changing faster and faster, SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application allows to react almost immediately on the situation and – then – re-forecast. If followed with complex corporate and departmental planning integration and business scenarios modeling, all these features together make SAP BusinessObjects' solution truly a universal choice for companies of all sizes.

Basically, the two versions of SAP BusinessOBjects Planning and Consolidation are being provided. One – designed especially for the Microsoft platform users – offers unified planning, consolidation, and budgeting, while another one – dedicated to SAP NetWeaver clients – provides planning and consolidation capabilities based directly on the technology of SAP NetWeaver.

SAP BusinessObjects developers point out that Planning and Consolidation platform is "designed for users, built for business". In practice, it means that the interface was simplified to the maximum and most of platform's options are accessible with proverbial one click only. No matter what we're trying to do – whether it's bottom-up or top-down planning, consolidating, or reporting operation – it's all accessible simply and quickly.

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation features and benefits

• enhanced agility results in reduction of the time needed for modeling new business scenarios the same as other actions leading to so called value creation (in opposite to collateral tasks needed for the platform itself maintaining)
• cycle time reduction is a result of providing managers of different departments with a common environment supporting their cooperation
• enhanced integration – thank to transparency and data warehousing motto "a single version of the truth" - results in compliance and business risk reduction
• improved user productivity is a result of the fact they can focus on what truly is important instead of learning how to "do a thing" within the platform. Moreover, the platform work well with the popular tools from Microsoft Office suite
• end users' self dependency coming out of the fact there is no necessity of involving IT departments to introduce any change into the system's construction

SAP Business Objects Enterprise Planning and Consolidation (BPC)

Business Objects provides applications for planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation.

Planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation challenges

Common challenges organizations face when realizing the planning process:

• Unpredictable business environment - organizations nowadays need to be ready to expect the unexpected and keep in mind that today extraordinary is ordinary. Unpredictable and fast changing market conditions make it impossible to manage the business only on the basis of a traditional annual plan and budget
• Inconsistent, incorrect, obsolete or missing data and there is typically no single source of data or data has quality issues
• Inefficient business processes (manual) and workflow (manual, excel-based, email-based). In most organizations there are many types of plans used by the business which are typically created in spreadsheets by different people, not linked to each other at different times and with different assumptions.
• Not sufficient effort in enforcing controls, policies and regulatory compliance

SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation

With SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation users can use tools like Excel as a frontend to centralized data with the aid of a context sensitive action panes which intelligently guide users through the planning process.
The application provides scheduling, workflow and notification functionality and users can use the pre-configured processes or create new customized processes specific to the organization. The analytics module helps forecast future conditions and model scenarios help address problems or identify opportunities.

SAP BusinessObjects Planning fully implements the "setup by IT own and manage by business users" concept.

The IT setup of BPC typically includes:
• Hardware
• Security and Authentication - users, roles and privileges
• Data and application infrastructure
• Configure database and application server (only two versions are available - for Netweaver and Microsoft Platforms)
• Model OLAP Structure

Business Users are responsible for:
• Application Security - Users, roles and privileges
• Hierarchies and Roll-ups
• Business Process Flows - creation and modification
• Manage Report Templates and MS Office Templates (Excel, Word, PowerPoint). SAP BO Planning provides out-of-the box templates for sales and revenue planning, CAPEx planning, workforce planning, budgeted financial statement reports and forecasting.
• Create and modify Metrics and Measures

SAP BPC provides tools for preparing the following plans:
• Business planning - Budgeting, Sales/revenue planning, Capital expenditure planning, Headcount/staffing, Expense planning, Cash flow planning
• Consolidation - Intercompany matching/reconciliation, intercompany eliminations, management roll-ups, legal consolidation
• Forecasting and consensus building - Rolling forecasts, Continuous planning, Collaboration
• Financial reporting and analysis - ad-hoc reporting, automated variance analysis, driver analysis (industry, growth, capacity, etc.)

Main outcome after implementing an advanced planning application like SAP BO Planning and Consolidation:

• Improvements in the planning and consolidation processes, automation
• Increased visibility and insight
• Increased alignment and collaboration via bottom-up and top-down budgeting processes
• Increased accountability and control
• Lower total cost of ownership
• Reduces maintenance, improves data integrity and simplifies deployment
• Integration with SAP ERP (automated flow of general ledger data from SAP NetWeaver BI into BusinessObjects Planning) and SAP BO Strategy Management applications which makes it possible to share actuals information developed in BPC to update scorecards.

SAP BO Planning and Consolidation resources

http://www.slideshare.net/ToddWilmsSAP/sap-business-objects-planning-and-consolidation - very interesting presentation prepared by the SAP BO Planning and Consolidation developers describes almost all the crucial aspects of the solution. However, it's not just a list of the highlights - all the aspects are detailed, what makes each of 51 slides truly interesting for someone who wants to know how he can benefit from Planning and Consolidation, but the Business Intelligence questions aren't a black magic for him.

http://www.performanceanalytics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/sap-businessobjects-edge-planning-and-consolidation.pdf - the brochure should be called the story about SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation tool rather instead of a regular guide. Thereupon, one shouldn't expect too many details, there. The what brochure's authors focus on are general aspects of the solutions with irregular dives into the technical depth, making it quite a good source of knowledge for the beginning.

http://www.sap-press.de/download/dateien/2230/sappress_businessobjects_planning_consolidation.pdf - here is the whole overview of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation tool. Even though only the second chapter of the book about the solution is accessible as a reading sample, it's enough to meet the details.