Planning / Budgeting / Forecasting
Ultimate performance management requires an approach that incorporates your organization’s business model – for example, allowing for cash flow–based planning at the business unit, division, regional, and even branch or loan center level. Far too often organizations develop their annual budget, strategic plan or monthly reforecast via Excel spreadsheet or a disparate applications. These solutions tend to be labor intensive, inflexible, and difficult to maintain.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) solution allows organizations to align financial, strategic, and operational plans. The budget/plan processes can be transformed from centralized to decentralized so that disparate users can take more ownership of the data and the process.
User Centric
The BPC application itself delivers an intuitive user experience using the following features:
• Familiar interface – The native interface to familiar tools such as Microsoft Office applications – as well as a thin-client Web interface. This familiarity allows users to be productive from the outset.
• Intelligent action panes – Context-sensitive selections presented in the right-hand window of BPC and enables users to understand what their next administrative tasks are ready to do; all with minimal training.
• Self-service reporting – Standare report wizards as well as drag-and-drop web interfaces let users easily define a standard set of reports templates to be reviewed
Process Focused
Finance Organizations must ensure that Cost Center or Department managers follow consistent processes across the organization. Two examples would be to perform the annual budgeting or quarterly forecasting processes. In the BPC application, the Business Process Flows functionality allows a set of self-service business processes to follow. Users are walked through each step in the process you have defined.
Unified
The centralized data repository contains up-to-date actuals from your operational systems in addition to planning data. This combination provides you with a complete picture of past business performance
and expectations for the future. Should you need to drill into the specifics – to compare specific marketing expenditures from last year to the budget this year, for example – you can do that from one application. As a result, you can produce reports that foster confidence. With a greater understanding of company performance, combined with insight into risk probabilities, your executives can make better decisions that help manage risk and contribute to improved financial outcomes.
An Integrated Data Model
The application is built on an integrated data model that supports both balance sheet and income statement planning, sourced from the general ledger (GL) and other relevant applications systems. Because the GL is often too summarized to support accurate projections of payroll planning, the integrated data model enables you to import data from additional sources, such as HR and payroll systems.
Department-Level Planning
BPC helps you engage department managers in the planning process by providing specific models or templates for each department type. These models include data for departmental balance sheets, noninterest items, payroll, and capital expenditures. Because end users find these models to be intuitive and the calculation methods easy to understand, they are more willing to use the software to support the planning process. Having the buy-in of department-level planners promotes greater accuracy, enhanced accountability, and increased ownership – while reducing the time to complete the planning process.
Balance Sheet Planning
To support effective balance sheet planning and modeling, you can use the application to intuitively understand the relationship of current volumes and their associated runoffs to any new volumes and their behavior. When you import cash flows (at the user-defined account level) from an asset and liability management environment or other source systems, the application keeps track of variables needed for projections. This lets you accurately project the balance sheet, interest income, and resulting yields. In addition, the application highlights the new business originations that are needed to meet overall portfolio targets. It also helps you model the impact of changing interest rates. This functionality enhances planning accuracy without generating additional work for your end users. The application can also help you include funds transfer pricing logic in your planning process.
Salary Expenses
SAP BPC is very flexible on how it tracks Salary expenses. Cost Center Managers are encouraged to use service-level requirements to refine their labor plans by employee and job class. Moreover, they can project non-labor expenses using common planning methodologies that efficiently and accurately model costs by account and across fiscal periods.
What-If Modeling
To respond to rapid changes in your business economic environment, management needs the ability to quickly model changes through key drivers. These changes are applied at the appropriate layer of granularity and pushed back to detail to see the ultimate / rolled up results. This ability to develop, save, and remodel scenarios provides organizations with a tool that can be used test assumptions and manage to potential changes virtually on the fly.
Budget Administration and Management Reporting
BPC also produces finanand Management Reporting cial and operational reporting and analysis. Users can perform production and management reporting (such as exception reports), financial and operational analysis, and multidimensional analysis. The software also provides a “park-and-go” feature, which captures currently displayed data so users can work remotely offline when performing analysis.