Planning & reporting
Decide What the Planning Solution Should Be, Before Building One.
A structured assessment for finance teams deciding whether SAP Analytics Cloud can carry their planning process — and, if so, what the target solution should actually look like.
Why this comes first
Most planning implementations automate the process they should have replaced.
A planning process that has grown over a decade contains real requirements and a great deal of accumulated habit. Automating both produces a faster version of the same frustration, at considerably greater cost.
The purpose of this assessment is to separate the two before anyone opens the tool — and to say honestly where SAC fits, where it fits with effort, and where it does not. That last answer is a legitimate outcome. We would rather give it at the start than have you discover it in month five.
What the assessment covers
Ten areas, in this order.
Current planning process and pain points
How the budget and forecast are actually produced today, including the spreadsheets that sit either side of the system.
Budget, forecast and long-range requirements
What each cycle needs to do, who contributes, and where the current process fails the people using it.
Granularity and dimensionality
The level at which each planning area needs to operate, and where a single grain would force everyone to the lowest common denominator.
Drivers, calculations and allocations
Which relationships genuinely drive the plan, which are habit, and where calculation logic belongs.
Actuals integration and data architecture
Where actuals come from, how they are seeded, and what happens when they restate after the forecast is locked.
Versions, scenarios, workflow and ownership
How many versions are live at once, who owns each, and how a submission is locked and reopened.
Currency and calendar
Local, transaction and group currency, planning rates and their ownership, and fiscal-calendar edge cases.
Reporting and management information
What the plan has to produce once it exists, and whether that reporting belongs in SAC at all.
SAC fit and gap
An honest read on where SAC fits the requirement, where it fits with effort, and where it does not fit.
Implementation complexity and roadmap
What a realistic delivery looks like, in what order, and what has to be decided before it starts.
What you get
A decision, with the reasoning attached.
- Current-state and pain-point summary
- Future-state planning requirements, agreed with finance
- SAC fit assessment — including where the fit is poor
- Target planning process
- High-level model and integration architecture
- Key design decisions and the risks attached to each
- Implementation roadmap and recommended next steps
- Typical duration
- 2–4 weeks
- A narrower single-process assessment may be shorter. Multi-process enterprise planning assessments need a longer discovery phase — we will say which yours is before we start.
Who it is for
Anyone who has to justify the choice afterwards.
- Finance teams deciding whether SAC should carry their planning process
- Organisations leaving BPC Planning who have not yet committed to a destination
- FP&A functions redesigning a planning process before automating it
- Programmes where SAC has been chosen but the target solution has not been defined
Related
Where this sits.
- SAP Analytics Cloud — design and delivery once the target is agreed
- SAC Health Check — if SAC is already live and the question is what to fix
- BPC Modernisation & Platform Assessment — if the platform decision covers consolidation as well as planning
Next step
Describe the planning process, not the tool.
How many contributors, how many cycles a year, where the spreadsheets sit, and what makes the current process painful. That is enough for us to scope an assessment.