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Why SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver on SAP HANA is the right choice over BWA

TChelednik
Advisor
Advisor
‎04-24-2013 4:13 PM


SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver is part of the Enterprise Performance Management suite and  provides everything you need to meet your bottom-up and top-down financial and operational planning requirements, as well as a complete consolidation and reporting solution
through a single application and user interface.

 

As of April 2013, there are roughly 4200 customers across multiple industries using SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for Business Planning (Budgeting, Sales/revenue planning, Expense planning), Consolidations (Intercompany matching/reconciliation/ eliminations, legal consolidations), Forecasting and consensus building and Financial reporting and analysis. A small percentage of these customers use SAP Business Planning and Consolidation with BWA and in some cases it has significantly improved read performance in reporting.

 

A common question I receive from customers, partners, and prospects is the following: What are the benefits of deploying SAP Business Planning and
Consolidation powered by HANA versus SAP Business Planning and Consolidation with BWA? My answer is a more simplified infrastructure, less down time for maintenance, faster analysis and administration, and future innovation.

 

 

Let’s break down each benefit in more detail specific to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation.

 

 

More simplified Infrastructure

 



 

 

What does this look like with SAP Business Planning and Consolidation powered by HANA?

 



 

 

SAP HANA provides as a full in-memory data management platform for a comprehensive, sophisticated data center infrastructure.  The complexity of a system landscape is increased with BWA and data replication is required. BWA is no database and is obsolete after migration to HANA.

 

 

Less down time for maintenance

 

 

Optimizations - In order to keep SAP Business Planning and Consolidation InfoCubes performing optimally and all data available for reporting with BWA, you must perform lite optimizations in the BPC admin module which can take hours due to the rollup task below (step 3). The delivered Process Chain
“/CPMB/LIGHT_OPTIMIZE” includes the following main task items:

 

 

  1. Changing Real Time InfoCube to Load mode then to Plan mode(/CPMB/SWITCH_TO_LOAD OR /CPMB/SWITCH_TO_PLAN)

  2. Deleting & Creating the Index (/CPMB/DELETE_INDEX or /CPMB/GENERATE_INDEX)

  3. Roll-Up of Filled Aggregates / BIA Index (/CPMB/ROLL_UP)

  4. Compression of the Cube (/CPMB/LIGHT_COMPRESS)

  5. Construct DB Statistics (/CPMB/CREATE_STATISTICS)


 

 

Lite optimizations in BPC on HANA do not require the index and roll up steps, only compression. I recently completed a BPC 10 on HANA proof of
concept for a BPC 7.5 w/ BWA customer using SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for corporate budgeting, headcount planning, consolidations, and financial reporting. The customer’s optimization process in production takes 30 minutes but took less than a minute in our internal BPC 10 SP9 on HANA system. Same metadata, master data, and transactional data – better technology!

 

 

 

Master data maintenance – One of the customers models is used to document 3 year plans, budgets and forecasts as well as month-end reporting. It
contains a cost center dimension with 43k members and it takes 18 minutes to add and process 1 new member in production. The process took 3 minutes in our internal BPC 10 SP9 on HANA system.

 

 

Consolidations – The customer’s consolidation package including intercompany eliminations is run in batch mode via BPC’s Data Manager and takes 7 minutes to run for 100k records. This process took a minute less when producing 2.5 million across all hierarchies of the entity type dimension in our internal BPC 10 SP9 on HANA system.

 

 

Data Copy – The customer would like to copy all actuals from one version to another but this process currently times out with BPC 7.5 w/ BWA. Instead, they copy 6 months of data or 800K records in 8 minutes. It took 9 minutes to copy all 27 months or3.6 million records in our internal BPC 10 SP9 on HANA system. The requirement is now met in less than 10 minutes.

 

 

 

Faster analysis and administration

 

 

Custom packages calling script logic – I was asked to run two custom Data Manager Packages that call custom logic to perform various financial calculations. Please see the results below.

 



 

Reporting and Write back – As already stated, BWA’s ‘sweet spot’ is read performance in reporting when used with SAP Business Planning and Consolidation and I was anxious to see how fast the customers reports would run on our internal BPC 10 SP9 on HANA system. Please see the results below.

 



 

WOW! Proof that SAP’s statement regarding HANA 1.0 being equal if not better than BWA’s read performance is indeed true.

 

 

 

Future innovation

 

 

  • Planning applications kit (PAK) capabilities introduced into SAP Business Planning and Consolidation powered by SAP HANA for
    planning directly on existing data warehouse InfoObjects used with SAP NetWeaver BW leveraging a new HTML 5 Web user interface and the EPM10 Add-in

  • Accelerated dimension member formulas that utilize the HANAMDX engine

  • Disaggregation rules optimized for SAP HANA to support top down planning

  • Optimize allocations using SAP HANA in a manner that is non-disruptive to current implementations


 

 

NOTE: The above forward-looking statements are subject to change. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these statements.

 

 

As the saying goes, seeing is believing! I hope these examples offer clear insight of how the combination of SAP Business Planning and
Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA is changing the way our customers run their business. For the customer referenced in this blog, the results of this proof of concept mean upgrading to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation powered by HANA this year.

 

 

BPC on HANA Resources

 

 

  1. Who's running better with SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver on SAP HANA? - http://scn.sap.com/community/epm/blog/2013/03/07/whowhat-customers-are-running-better-with-sap-busin...

  2. BPC on HANA Inside the Numbers Blog - tom.chelednik/blog/2012/09/27/sap-business-planning-and-consolidation-powered-by-sap-hana-inside-the-numbers

  3. BPC on HANA Mission Critical Blog - http://scn.sap.com/community/epm/blog/2012/12/31/bpc-on-hana-is-mission-critical-no-more-a-high-leve...

  4. Technical Considerations for Migrating to BPC 10 on HANA - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-34745

  5. Migration to BPC on HANA considerations  - http://scn.sap.com/community/epm/planning-and-consolidation-for-netweaver/blog/2012/12/31/migration-...

  6. How To Migrate to BPC 10 on HANA (This How To Guide covers migrating your BPC 7.5 NW
    application set to a BPC 10 NW environment powered by HANA) - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-33863

  7. EPM Add-in Academy for reporting in BPC on HANA using the EPM 10 Add-in - http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-in+Academy


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