How SAP Business Planning and Consolidation Benefits Companies Like Haworth

SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) allows organizations to improve the ability to plan, budget, forecast, and perform financial consolidation capabilities. It’s a powerful tool companies can use to shorten budgeting and closing cycles, ensure compliance, and easily adjust plans and forecasts. All of this can really move the needle for a company.

But what does this look like in real-life implementation? 

Recently we gleaned insights on lessons learned while implementing and using BPC from Dawn Solomon, of Haworth, a furniture and home furnishings manufacturer in Holland, Mich. Dawn’s varied background from starting in accounts payable to now being part of the Center of Excellence at Haworth has allowed her to see it from both a business and IT perspective.

The benefits of SAP’s BPC

 In this latest episode of “Tech-Driven Business,” Dawn touches on many of the benefits of BPC.  Here are some highlights:

• It allows a functional person to manage without needing to depend on a developer.
• BPC can generate consolidated reporting, management reporting, and legal reporting all within one tool.
• Even more importantly, it allows enterprises with a global presence to achieve their goals of simplifying their planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation while meeting individual government requirements.

Part of the power of BPC for organizations using Microsoft Power BI is the ability to leverage BPC data to create dashboards within Power BI. However, with all its benefits, there are certain lessons learned by teams such as Dawn’s. For instance, it is feasible to do weekly reporting with Power BI. However, all legal reporting will come out of BPC.

As Dawn shared, it is convenient to get legal reporting from BPC as it makes it easier for finance teams to manage journal entries, it’s traceable, and it meets requirements.

In addition, Power BI with BPC requires that security needs be meticulously addressed because security is integrated with BPC but not Power BI. Finally, the implementation team must be aware of the finance team’s reporting requirements.  Otherwise, the team may find finance seeks queries and spreadsheets that would be a challenge for the database to handle. Performance and security are two major concerns when using Power BI with BPC.

 How can you ensure success with BPC? With all of the power of BPC, it is only natural that enterprises look for viable partners to assist in the designing, implementing, and even maintaining the system. 

However, not all partners are created equal. They must understand the client’s needs and expectations, the current system, and – if it is an upgrade situation – the nuances between different versions. 

It also is important to collaborate internally between the business or functional side of a company and its IT team. For example, it is imperative to look at how a model is to be transported, or how MDX parameters work. If this is not examined, the enterprise will be faced with even more challenges.

 Many resources are available for those interested in learning how to implement, upgrade, and leverage BPC (See below podcast).