Integrated Business Planning with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC)

How often do business plans fail to deliver because they overlook some apparently insignificant piece of information that turns out later to be really important?

Effective business planning is about capturing every piece of data that could impact planning calculations, applying intelligence to that data to create actionable insights, and using those insights to drive business processes. In today’s complex, fast-moving, and data-driven commercial environment, the ability to derive insights from a wide range of data and plug these insights into the systems that drive the business is a key success factor. 

Integrated Business Planning with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) enables data-driven, intelligent corporate resource planning that integrates seamlessly with different SAP modules so that data-driven planning insights are fed back directly into operational processes and systems without system breaks.

This blog article explores the capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud and the value that Arvato Systems adds for our customers in maximizing its benefits. Future articles in this series will cover using SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Datasphere in a hybrid scenario and how SAP Data Intelligence can transform planning in the logistics sector.

SAP Analytics Cloud draws actual and real-time data from SAP S/4HANA and a diverse range of other SAP applications and sources, using the power and intelligence of SAP Analytics Cloud to enable very complex analytics across hybrid systems architectures. 

Different scenarios can be modeled and visualized to optimize plans that can be fed directly into SAP S/4HANA and other operational applications. SAP Analytics Cloud not only provides support in modeling and visualizing planning processes, but can also control and monitor the planning process using the integrated workflow engine.

Different sources suggest the proportion of businesses still using spreadsheets as a basis for planning could be 50% or higher. In just one example, a 2021 Fintech Finance News survey found 45% of businesses surveyed were using spreadsheets to drive their pandemic recovery planning.

With SAP's integrated business planning, companies can extend and transform their normal planning capabilities far beyond what can be achieved with spreadsheets.

SAP Analytics Cloud offers:

• Deep integration of actual and budget data
• Direct application of different SAP modules to the planning process
• Seamless extraction of actuals data and feedback of plan data directly into SAP S/4HANA
• The performance and scalability that comes with a cloud implementation
• Powerful and flexible data visualization
• The power of SAP Analytics Cloud to apply Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to the planning process, enabling the modeling of complex scenarios based on the widest possible range of data

As another article in this series will explore in detail, using SAP BW/4HANA and SAP BW bridge enables SAP integrated planning to deliver effectively in a hybrid scenario, integrating cloud and on-premise so that organizations do not need to replace or reinvent existing data structures to reap its benefits.