10 Compelling Reasons to Upgrade to SAP EPM BPC 10

SAPs Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC) version 10 is a major release that completes a three-year effort by SAP to merge four core applications, one each acquired from Outlooksoft, Pilot Software, Cartesis, and ALG. EPM BPC 10 effectively integrates planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, strategy-management, and profitability-and-cost management. Version 10 is unified, comprehensive and transformational. It delivers significant customer-centric improvements, brings new and unique solutions to market, and leverages new technologies to transform the way people work. 10 further pushes performance improvements within the enterprise, helping companies often exceed 60% faster reporting cycle time, 65% less time to forecast monthly revenue, and 55% reduction in time to allocated product costs. While version 10s improved performance and function represents a major upgrade on its own, its greatest accomplishment will likely be increased user adoption among front-line managers and executives who have a stake in accurate planning and budgeting. Version 10s redesigned, common interface and improved workflows are intuitive and user friendly, reducing the learning curve and helping even non-finance employees contribute to the business planning and consolidation process. With the release of EPM BPC 10, SAP is extending its vision and dominant leadership position over Oracle and IBM. Among many reasons to upgrade to version 10, here are ten of the more compelling ones: 1. Streamlined, Unified, and Harmonized User Experience. One of the more obvious improvements of version 10 is its new and improved look and feel. 10s new user console pulls functionality into one central user interface offering users more intuitive, streamlined control. The more visually appealing, browser-driven user interface is unified with SAPs other EPM products, creating a common interface and seamless user experience throughout the EPM suite. The improved user experience will increase adoption by front-line managers, increasing the speed of planning and consolidations by increasing the numbers of people contributing. Engaging more front-line managers also produces more accurate work as those closest to the information are contributing more.

2. Enhanced Manageability. 10 enhances manageability and reduces cost of ownership by improving integration with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, ERP software, and other business analytics applications. 3. Improved Reporting. 10 enables users to create seamless links to other reporting applications improving the function of drilling down to detailed information outside of BPC applications, and even the SAP environment. 10 also improves reporting drag and drop functionality. 4. Improved System Performance, Integrity and Maintenance. 10 now uses the in-memory database to make applications run faster. It increases data handling and business intelligence (BI) capabilities. Now, objects and information stored and aggregated in one BusinessObjects application can be shared more widely with another. 10 also eliminates the .NET server on the NetWeaver platform, streamlining the hardware architecture and better integrating security with the NetWeaver backend. 10s transformational architecture changes eliminate manual reporting efforts, and reduce risk of moving data between applications. Backend system improvements yield industry-leading validation and monitoring of data integrity. SAP effectively re-developed the entire BPC solution to better fit into the SAP landscape. 5. Simplified Disclosure Compliance. 10 makes it easier to comply with regulatory and financial standards, supporting the last mile of finance. 10s enhanced disclosure management functions include the ability to assign disclosure responsibilities to distributed teams, accelerate the generation of disclosure statements, integrate data for a single view across the organization, optimize the close from source to digital disclosure, and create XBRL-based statements. 6. Expanded Mobile Delivery Options. Version 10 offers expanded mobile device support for the Apple iPAD and RIM BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, helping transform the way people work. 7. Enhanced Journal Management. Journals are now entered via a new, intuitive, web-based frontend with an improved query manager that allows users to better investigate entries. 8. Simplified Hierarchy Maintenance. New functionality in 10 allows simple, drag and drop hierarchy builds. 9. Specific Industry or Line of Business Packaged Solutions. Version 10 now offers packaged solutions for specific lines of business and industry areas. 10 now comes with starter kits for various initiatives and specific industries, such as banking. 10. Improved Variance Analysis. The Microsoft version of EPM 10 automates variance analysis, which compares favorable to most companies that have to

gather information together from scattered sources and calculate manually. In EPM BPC 10, users can launch and calculate from a single portal. SAP BusinessObjects 10 harmonizes, streamlines and simplifies while bolstering functionality, performance, and security. Upgrading to 10 delivers an improved user experience that drives all-important user adoption and facilitates efficient performance management throughout the enterprise. One of the keys to capturing the true benefits of 10 is engaging the right BPC consulting team to perform the upgrade. Your ideal team will be laser focused just on BPC, and not so big that you dont receive direct access to the highest experts and authority at the company. Your team will have an outstanding track record supported by a long list of loyal customers. Additionally, your team should offer a methodical and comprehensive approach to upgrading BPC. The upgrade process should start with a thorough investigation of your current BPC environment to understand and gauge the needs, key user groups, process enhancements, and goals of the upgrade. Following discovery, your dedicated upgrade team needs to be expert in custom designing and implementing the upgrade solution in the most efficient, timely fashion. And to ensure full leverage of the upgrade, your consulting team should follow the implementation with customized training and ongoing industry-leading support. SandPoints expert team of BPC consultants offers a free consultation to discuss the process of upgrading your company to version 10. SandPoints extensive BPC experience in upgrades and migrations assures an optimal and seamless transition to the latest version of SAP EPM BPC. To learn more about upgrading to 10, please contact SandPoint Consulting.