The Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team at a global technology company faced data multiplied across several planning systems and tools—resulting in a complex, administratively burdensome, and fragmented planning and budgeting process for their teams. To simplify the forecasting process, increase functionality, and extend their on-premise planning solution, SAP Analytics Cloud was implemented. In a short period, their planning landscape was transformed —all with SAP Analytics Cloud.
How a Global Technology Company Streamlines their Planning Landscape with SAP Analytics Cloud
The Challenge
With multiple financial planning and analysis solutions distributed across different systems consisting of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, a third-party cloud planning solution, other third-party sources, and spreadsheets, the company’s FP&A analysts and managers spent tedious hours compiling and comparing various datasets—constantly switching between systems—to organize meaningful reports and analysis. This manual process increased turnaround times, reduced data granularity, and diminished the ability to create timely, actionable financial plans and reports.
The FP&A team needed a way to alleviate their tedious tasks by consolidating finance data from across their systems into one, end-to-end planning solution.
The Solution
To solve their problem, FP&A first turned to a third-party cloud-based enterprise planning solution, which did not scale to meet a landscape of complex Accounting, FP&A, and Business needs without dramatic loss of details, financial history, reporting, and core FP&A functionalities. After rigorously reviewing the Gartner Magic Quadrant of Cloud Financial Planning & Analysis solutions to evaluate the comprehensive landscape of vendors and product offerings, including a full rebuild of their existing system, SAP Analytics Cloud was selected.
To maintain continuity of their financial history and reporting functionalities, SAP Analytics Cloud—a cloud planning solution that empowers users to make inputs, analyze, plan, budget, and predict, all in one place, fulfilled both short term and long-term requirements. To support the integration and adoption of SAP Analytics Cloud, the company worked with SAP’s customer innovation team to build comfort and establish a basic design. Afterwards, the FP&A team was able to implement SAP Analytics Cloud without external services.
We were able to implement SAP Analytics Cloud internally with full HR and Opex planning capabilities and transactional details, and utilized the commentary functionality for financial reviews without any outside consulting resources.
Finance Systems Manager