By Edwin van Geel and Jaclyn Zube-Cryle
Large organizations use integrated enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions for critical business functions such as planning, budgeting, and forecasting. SAP has many EPM offerings, including the SAP Cloud for Planning solution, which offers flexibility, collaboration, and simplicity for SAP customers or any organization looking for an agile planning tool.
Agility, collaboration, and analysis – all in one
SAP Cloud for Planning is a next-generation planning tool that can help you simplify complex processes with a consumer app-like user experience that doesn’t require a high level of IT knowledge or involvement. It’s an ideal solution for your finance or other line-of-business professionals, such as those in marketing, human resources, customer service, and sales, who want an easy-to-use planning and analytics solution.
Built natively on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Cloud for Planning can quickly help you integrate corporate and divisional plans to drive better results with fact-based decision making. It also embeds social collaboration and advanced analytics directly within the context of the planning process, so you and your team can plan, analyze, and discuss in context rather than jump to another application.
Plus, the modern look and feel and natural flow between planning and analysis enables you to plan and simulate at multiple levels of detail while collaborating with multiple numbers of users.
Helping you adopt a simpler approach to planning
The adaptation of a cloud-based solution like SAP Cloud for Planning often requires a new approach to everyday business processes for several reasons, including these driving factors:
- Cloud solutions originate more from a prescriptive and industry best-practices perspective unlike most planning processes in place today that are typically home grown and inflexible.
- Forecasting and planning are frequently managed by business owners that require an approach that allows business acumen and technology to meet in such a way that these tasks are much easier to manage.
With these factors in mind, consultants from the SAP Services organization can help you simplify your planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes to make them cloud-ready and easier than ever before. For instance, SAP consultants can look at existing business processes – ones that have often been in place for years – and suggest how they can easily be modeled into SAP Cloud for Planning for greater flexibility.
In addition, SAP consultants can help you with another key challenge, which is integration, as not all your data sources and target systems are cloud-ready today. We can help you integrate data from existing enterprise applications and address any other issues that arise during a move to the cloud. This will allow you to take advantage of all the cloud offers by optimally integrating enterprise planning information in ways that make planning and forecasting simpler as well as more agile, efficient, and effective.
Consultants from SAP can also work with you to ensure the most effective use of the comprehensive collaborative capabilities that come with SAP Cloud for Planning. We can explore new ways of working that make planning easier, better, and more effective so you are fully benefiting from this cloud offering.
We’ll get you up and running faster
With SAP consultants, you can maximize the value of SAP Cloud for Planning and realize faster adoption and a broader deployment. In fact, with SAP services, you can get up and running rapidly with quick-start packages that can be tailored to your specific needs.
SAP Cloud for Planning is ideal for both existing SAP customers or companies that are new to SAP solutions for EPM and want a more flexible, collaborative, and simpler approach to planning and forecasting.
To learn more about how SAP Services can help your organization take advantage of the simplicity and agility of SAP Cloud for Planning, visit http://www.sap.com/services-support/svc/business-analytics/consulting/performance-management/index.h....