absoft PLANNING AND CONSOLIDATION WITH SAP
Planning, budgeting and forecasting, along with consolidation and reporting, should be some of the most valuable activities in the management of business performance. They should help to create viable strategies and plans of action, allocate and align resources to critical activities, and provide early warning and insight into the drivers that impact business performance.
Frustratingly however, existing processes and systems don’t always provide the support the business needs. Planning cycles can be lengthy, error prone and effort intensive, and produce plans and forecasts that have questionable value for running the business. The business regards such plans with caution (or ignores them altogether) and finance can be restricted to number crunching and report generating activities.
Even if you have already concluded that this needs to change, and you have decided that SAP is your systems partner, there remains the question of what mix of SAP solutions are most appropriate for your current and future needs. Depending on your organisation’s specific requirements, any of the following SAP solutions may contribute to solving your issues:
- SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation
- SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation
- SAP BusinessObjects Intercompany
- SAP BusinessObjects Sales and Operations Planning
- SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management
- SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management
- SAP BI Integrated Planning
Absoft’s Business Analytics and Technology team works with clients to pinpoint where, and how, existing systems, processes and organisational capabilities can be improved. We combine our technical expertise with business understanding, to tease out which improvements will benefit you the most, all in the specific context of:
- Your current and future business and technical requirements
- Your existing investment and SAP technologies
- How your current and envisioned planning and budgeting processes integrate into your wider management disciplines, such as strategy management, scorecarding and Business Intelligence
Our Planning Maturity Model (a subset of our performance management maturity model), acts as a guide to highlight the improvement path. Improving your planning capability provides many benefits:
- Plans are updated as events occur, with contributors guided through the process to ensure accuracy and speed of the planning process
- Goals and targets can be set at any level of the organisation, with operational constraints factored into plans
- Accuracy and buy-in are improved through high participation Financial and operational plans are in sync, rather than in conflict
- Cash flow predictions are increasingly reliable, allowing better management of working capital
By following this path, the business model can be refined as the drivers of performance become better understood. With this refinement comes increasingly accurate forecasts, allowing decision makers to choose confidently between several possible courses of action.
For more information please download our brochure to the right or contact us.