SAP’s BI Integrated Planning has been providing businesses and experts with a sophisticated planning and operating infrastructure. One can use it to cover a wide range of use cases, starting from data entry to complex planning and projection scenarios. Unlike the Business Warehouse – Business Planning and Simulation
solution, the IP and BI solutions are completely integrated.
Now with the SAC, S/4 or BW/4 projects are bringing about changes in the planning system landscape, in this blog, we at VIZIO would like to address possible questions on how the ideal planning strategy would look like.
With three projects involved, we’ll bring you three different approaches to planning and analytics and how the architecture should look like.
Approaching Planning Portfolios
The three approaches are as follows:
- Business Warehouse Based Approach
- SAC Native Approach
- S/4 HANA Based Approach
What approach to choose solely depends on the need. If you’ve heavily invested in the SAP IP solution in the past and want to keep using the investments, the first approach might suit you. While approach 2 would benefit all users irrespective of their usage history, S/4 customers might find the third approach suitable. There are cases where more than one solution needs to be used, and it’s totally up to the user to zero in on the right type of solutions for their planning and simulation needs. Vizio can help you with it, but let’s now look at how each of these models work.
1. Approach one creates a live connection between the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and the Business Warehouse. The BW has a BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) embedded model, and helps in the delivers forecasting, planning, financial consolidation, and budgeting capabilities.
2. Approach two allows imports and exports between the SAC infrastructure and data tables from ERP or other systems. This helps harness the power of SAC and it’s planning model using data tables stored in third party systems.
3. S/4 HANA based approach connects the application from end with BPC models, but instead of the BW setup, used the S/4 systems.
What’s best for you?
If you’re to compare the approaches, it will be impossible to do so without a real-world application. Each of these approaches have their own pros, and what suits you would solely depend on what you’re going to use it for.
At VIZIO, we’ll use the following criterion to assess the right approach for you:
- Source Data Synchronization
- Reference Data Integration
- Flexibility and Scalability
- Disaggregation and Logic
- Usability
- Application performance
- License
- Authorization Management and Generation
- Ease of debugging
- User experience
- Integration
- Automatic Loads
Is it Worth the Hassle?
We understand that investing time and money on a new approach to planning is bound to rise queries within organization. Is it worth the hassle? SAP solutions are far superior and malleable that any other data modelling solutions and if your developing applications that play with data and complex functionalities, the SAC and S/4
are two best options that serve as ADEs (Application Development Environment) and as a simple data base.
The possibilities of automation and integration are limitless, and the ability to handle even unstructured data is commendable in case of these SAP solutions. So, yes, it is worth the hassle of setting things up, given how smooth things are going to run after the setup. Here’s good news – you don’t have to go through the hassle, we’ll do it for you.
Let Us Ease Planning Integration for You
With SAP BI – IP, while there are a plenty of things your business can achieve, without expertise and a few changes in orgs adopting the changes at the SAP planning portfolio, your organization can keep it kicking and let applications and devs have an easy everyday life. Especially with tools like SAC that are versatile and easy
to implement, it’s only going to be easy, efficient, and custom made for you!
We’ll help you arrive at the right solution for you, one that’s customized and serves you best. Write to us at info@vizioconsulting.com and out team will get in touch with you to understand your planning and integration requirements.