"Unified Planning and Consolidation"

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"The SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application unifies and streamlines the planning, budgeting, and forecasting process and can enable a faster close. Finance-owned and maintained, the application unifies planning, financial consolidation and management reporting for the enterprise - improving budget cycle times, driving compliance with regulatory and financial standards, helping reduce external audit costs, instilling confidence, and reducing business risk."
Source: SAP

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Unified Planning and Consolidation

To manage performance effectively, you need a unified planning and consolidation solution that is intuitive and agile yet adheres to standard business processes. This helps streamline the planning process and produces statutory and management reports that instill confidence while reducing business risk.

CFOs and executive teams are under great pressure to maximize profitability, reduce costs, minimize risk, and improve stakeholder confidence. To be effective, you need reliable, up-to-date financial and operational data for planning purposes as well as budgeting, forecasting, analysis, and statutory and management reporting. You need to integrate corporate and departmental planning, model cost scenarios, and perform sensitivity analysis to create budgets based on strategic plans and assumptions. Finally, you need to enable a fully documented audit trail and compliance with regulatory mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for consolidating and reporting company information, both externally and internally.

But gaining a true picture of your organization's current health - let alone future performance - can be almost impossible to achieve. Critical operational and financial information is typically scattered across multiple applications and databases, trapped as unstructured data in e-mail attachments and spreadsheets. In many cases, financial data is difficult to audit or unreliable due to ineffective controls.

Business planning is often a chaotic and ineffective process. Budgeting can quickly deteriorate into "spreadsheet hell" as operations managers submit unrealistic budgets, executives change the figures, and version control problems cause confusion. Consolidations can be equally problematic when data is distributed across different departments, systems, and countries. That's why leading companies turn to enterprise performance management solutions like the SAP® BusinessObjects^TM Planning and Consolidation application, version for the Microsoft platform.

Designed for Users, Built for Business

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation gives you access to reliable corporate data and streamlines planning and consolidation processes. It lets you align operational plans with corporate goals, initiatives, and metrics defined using the SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management application. You execute to plan, understand risk factors, and have the financial resources budgeted to support all initiatives.

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is designed for all business users, providing personalized, role-based access to functionality that is:

• User focused
• Process centric
• Unified

User Focused

The software offers an unparalleled experience to business users. Designed for intuitive use, it features familiar Microsoft Office application interfaces, intelligent action panes, and self-service reporting.

Native Interface to Microsoft Office Applications
Familiar Microsoft Office applications including Excel, as well as an intuitive, 100% thin-client Web interface, serve as native interfaces to the application.

Business users can access Microsoft Excel spreadsheets linked directly to live operational data; as data is updated, so is the spreadsheet. Working with tools they know well, business users need minimal training and are productive from day one.

Intelligent Action Panes
Business users view relevant, context sensitive selections based on where they are in an application and their security profile, enabling them to understand what to do, when, and why.

Self-Service Reporting
All users can access information and create reports on the fly without help from IT. Drag-and-drop interfaces enable them to create reports intuitively. You can create custom reports or adapt the report templates that come with the software to meet your needs.

Process Centric

Today's finance department must ensure that staff and line-of-business managers follow consistent processes enterprise-wide. Without the right support for processes such as annual or quarterly budgeting or closing the books, even small deviations can throw off key figures.

With SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, you can perform activities such as planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting with familiar and intuitive tools.

Self-service business process flows guide users through each step of a given planning or consolidation-related process, providing confidence that all relevant contributors consistently complete all required steps. Business process flows are automatically tracked and audited and are customizable to the needs of your organization.

Unified

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is a single application that delivers planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and financial consolidation functionality, eliminating the need to use multiple applications that require manual integration. The result is saved time and money, fewer errors, and a more consistent user experience. The centralized data repository contains up-to- date actuals from your operational systems in addition to plan data. This provides instant access to a complete picture of how your business performed and how it is expected to perform. If you need to drill into the specifics - to compare marketing expenditures last year to the budget this year, for example - you can do that from one application. Activities such as budgeting and statutory reporting are transformed into efficient, collaborative processes that foster confidence. With a greater understanding of company performance, you can make better decisions that contribute to future business results.

Business Planning

With SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, you can perform activities such as planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting with familiar and intuitive tools.

Planning and Budgeting

You can perform bottom-up and topdown financial and operational planning with a single application and user interface. You can collaborate on plans, manage stakeholder interactions, track versions and changes, engage managers in the planning process, and enable clear ownership and accountability. Planning processes are supported by business process flows and automation that help ensure the right people participate at the right time. And you can incorporate unstructured data such as Microsoft Office documents and e-mail to help tell the story behind plans.

The application supports a streamlined process for business-relevant budgets that everyone agrees on and that align with strategic plans. Widely distributed stakeholders can work together on spreadsheets, both online and offline. Because you start with a single, consistent version of operational and financial data - both real-time and historical - you can be confident in the integrity and accuracy of your budgets.

Forecasting

To simplify forecasting, business process flows are tightly linked to the data and processes supporting planning and budgeting. What-if modeling and scenario-planning functions enable assessment of budgeting reasonability in real time.

Reporting and Analysis

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation supports financial and operational reporting and analysis. You can perform production and management reporting (including exception reports), financial and operational analysis, and multidimensional analysis. The software also provides a "park-and-go" feature that captures the data you are currently working with so you can work remotely offline when performing analysis.

Financial Consolidation

Now you can meet legal and management consolidation and reporting requirements for a fast close process. Because a central data repository contains up-to-date actuals from your operational systems, you have instant access to harmonized charts of accounts. This shaves weeks off your consolidation process and supports compliance with regulatory mandates, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. You gain a single, centralized view of performance data and can instantly generate clear, transparent financial statements and reports relating to, for example, profit and loss, cash flows, and balance sheets. The software helps you compare budget versus actuals data, automate the intercompany elimination process, gain transparency into corporate transactions at all levels, manage any number of currencies, and perform conversions, allocations, and eliminations. Automated reports support all reporting standards, including GAAP and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Finally, the software improves compliance with regulatory and financial standards and generates a fully documented audit trail.

With embedded support for financial consolidation, the software facilitates compliance with regulatory and financial reporting requirements.

Business Benefits

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for the Microsoft platform, lets you:

• Reduce cycle time in creating and approving budgets by enabling stakeholders to collaborate to align budgets
• Improve planning and forecasting accuracy
• Empower finance to own and modify common business processes without IT assistance
• Increase productivity with minimal training thanks to native access to familiar tools such as Microsoft Office
• Minimize business and compliance risk by enabling transparent financial reporting with a fully documented audit trail from a single data repository

SAP BusinessObjects EPM Solutions

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is one of the SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions that help you capitalize on the value of existing data assets. With these solutions, your organization becomes more agile, gaining organizational alignment, visibility, and confidence to optimize control and competitive advantage. The solutions can integrate with SAP Business Suite applications; SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance solutions; SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions; and SAP BusinessObjects information management solutions. As a result, you can maximize profitability, manage risk and compliance, and optimize corporate systems, people, and processes.

For example, with the SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management application, you can manage the process of accessing, mapping, and loading information directly from source systems to SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation. SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management combines intuitive operation with functionality that facilitates full compliance, builds trust, and helps ensure data reliability from source to disclosure. It provides connectivity to SAP and non-SAP applications. It lets you move resource, capacity, and financial data from the SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management application to SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for planning and budgeting purposes. You gain robust data collection capabilities along with strong finance controls, data validation, and auditability. This reduces the risk, cost, and effort of data integration. In addition, it helps ensure the delivery of quality financial data to support traditional performance management processes, as well as new processes based on integrated performance management scenarios.

Find Out More

Call your SAP representative, or visit www.sap.com/americas/solutions /sapbusinessobjects/large /enterprise-performance-management /planningandconsolidation/index.epx.

Summary

The SAP® BusinessObjects^TM Planning and Consolidation application, version for the Microsoft platform, brings order to business planning processes by helping you plan, budget, and forecast more effectively. With embedded support for financial consolidation, the software facilitates compliance with regulatory and financial reporting requirements.

Business Challenges

• Accelerate cycle time for planning and budgeting and increase business user productivity
• Improve the accuracy of planning and forecasting
• Model potential business strategies and decide on a course of action that maximizes value creation
• Streamline the statutory consolidation process
• Keep compliance and auditing costs down

Key Features

• Business planning and budgeting - Gain support for top-down and bottom-up planning and budgeting, leading to timely, more accurate plans aligned with strategic goals
• Forecasting - Enable continuous planning and rolling forecasts to meet rapidly changing business conditions
• Reporting and analysis - Generate production and management reports (including exception reports) on the fly
• Consolidation - Fulfill legal and management consolidation and reporting requirements for a faster, more compliant close

Business Benefits

• Reduce cycle time in creating and approving budgets by enabling finance and line-ofbusiness managers to collaborate to align budgets
• Improve planning and forecasting accuracy via a unified, agile solution that supports rapid reforecasting and standard business processes
• Empower business users to own and modify common business processes without IT assistance via a solution they can maintain themselves
• Increase business user productivity with native access to familiar tools such as Microsoft Office
• Minimize business and compliance risk by enabling transparent financial reporting with a fully documented audit trail from a single data repository

For More Information

Call your SAP representative, or visit www.sap.com/americas/solutions /sapbusinessobjects/large /enterprise-performance-management /planningandconsolidation/index.epx.