As companies need to decide and act with increasing speed, now more than ever they need to ensure that all decision-makers are guided by the same game plan and have a full understanding of potential risks involved. The 10.0 release of SAP® BusinessObjects™ EPM solutions fills this need by allowing users across the company to contribute to managing enterprise performance. The new release can also take advantage of SAP® In-Memory Computing technology, enabling more detailed and agile planning scenarios that can dramatically increase people’s ability to sense and respond to changes as they occur — on any kind of device.
“The new release of our EPM solutions and analytic applications in India reinforces our market leadership and brings SAP’s vision for business analytics to a full circle,” said Maneesh Sharma, Head-Business Analytics and Technology, SAP India. “Business Intelligence is becoming relevant to the Indian organization. With this launch, SAP will deliver solutions that will help individuals, teams and entire business networks unlock valuable knowledge to uncover new opportunities, anticipate change and make better decisions as a whole to achieve remarkable results.”
The EPM solutions open the next chapter of SAP’s business analytics vision, which is to enable people to make timely decisions that are well-informed and guided by corporate strategy, the current state of the market and the company itself. SAP has been releasing a set of tools to power this shift in the way people work:
· In February, SAP launched the culmination of three years’ development in business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) software to help ensure people can base their decisions on information that is reliable, easy to consume and apply, and available on any device and at any time.
· In March, SAP launched solutions to help organizations move governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices out of the hands of a few so everyone in the organization can participate in mitigating risk and increasing corporate compliance.
· Beginning in fall 2010, SAP introduced its family of SAP® BusinessObjects™ analytic applications and has continued to build out the portfolio for specific industries and lines of business.
The 10.0 release of EPM complements these tools by helping organizations ensure that central corporate strategy and an understanding of risk guide all decisions and actions. This enables companies to achieve goals with greater speed and fewer resources.
Companies Move Beyond Traditional Utilization of EPM Applications
With new, shared user interfaces that offer a seamless experience across many applications, learning curves are reduced and people can quickly become productive with the tools. New features include:
· BI workspaces with embedded EPM content to more easily track key performance indicators (KPIs).
· Delivery to mobile devices and the platforms they run on so that even people on-the-go can gain visibility into how their organizations are performing, analyze different scenarios, update plans and collaborate with colleagues. Using mobile devices untethers workers and provides them more interactive ways to explore data and plan for the future with gesture-driven actions for scenario planning.
· New bill of materials (BoM) costing to link EPM activities down to the production level.
· Business area scorecards for areas such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resources (HR) for better alignment across the organization.
· Automated variance analysis, saving time in determining root causes between plan and actuals, and predicting possible future scenarios.
· Deeper integration between EPM and GRC applications delivers risk-adjusted planning capabilities.
· Extended capabilities for financial consolidation, including consolidation monitoring, enhanced control and validation capabilities, incremental consolidation and new journal features.
· Deeper integration with the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, the SAP® ERP application and SAP BusinessObjects solutions — as well as support for non-SAP environments — help improve manageability, reduce total cost of ownership and empower people to better support the business.
Faster Financial Close
In addition, the 10.0 release encompasses the new SAP® BusinessObjects™ Disclosure Management application, designed to establish a collaborative, flexible and compliant process for filing financial and non-financial statements and regulatory disclosures, as well as corresponding extensible business reporting language (XBRL) submissions. It helps organizations ensure a timely, accurate financial close process with decreased risk. Collaboration capabilities and integrated workflows let customers work quickly across organizational hierarchies, geographies and systems to manage approvals and deliver statements to stakeholders in required output formats.
EPM For the Whole Company
SAP BusinessObjects EPM solutions are recognized by leading industry analysts as delivering one of the most complete and mature sets of solutions for the office of finance, spanning strategy management; planning, budgeting and forecasting; financial consolidation; and profitability and cost management. The 10.0 release, however, extends these leading EPM capabilities to new groups of users beyond the office of finance. In fact, many features of the new EPM release already power a number of newly launched SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications designed for role-specific users in diverse industries and lines of business.
Building on the previous release of the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Spend Performance Management and SAP® BusinessObjects™ Supply Chain Performance Management applications as well as a number of industry-specific planning applications from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, the 10.0 release encompasses new offerings such as the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Sales and Operations Planning rapid-deployment solution, which helps sales and operations teams establish a single, unified plan to drive their businesses forward. Using the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application, it provides an easy-to-implement tool for consolidating data, supplying predefined analytics and managing sales and operations planning processes.
About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 170,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com
