BPC Planning Embedded or not?

[former_member375076]

Hello

We currently have standalone BPC planning on HANA. We are trying to decide for the future to go with embedded or stay standalone. It seems SAP is releasing most the new features on embedded only. Is it worth rebuilding for these upcoming features and getting rid of data redundancy? Does it take away the flexibility the business has with the standalone?

[SarhanP · Accepted solution]

Hi Matthew,

There are two main embedded Planning options in S/4HANA

1. SAP BPC OPTIMIZED FOR S/4 HANA FINANCE : This is the real ( for me) embedded one, because it uses S/4HANA tables and views. Many Fiori Apps are available, Pre-delivered content offers Financial planning, of course there are missing content in terms of functionality, however by custom development this gap can be filled.

2. SAP BPC EMBEDDED : It requires SAP Business Planning & Consolidation version for NetWeaver license, this option required BW (this is available in S/4HANA) This is the most known BPC, instead of installing separately, embedded BW is used. This only saves Hardware costs, since BPC is running on same instance and DB. You have all functionality, however you will need cubes and extraction

I am recommending to my customers option 1 + development + SAP Analitics Cloud Planning, I will have 2 live customers end of 2018 with this recipe. Up to now, we did not face any barrier or complaints in terms of missing functionality.

Cheers,

Sarhan

[former_member186338]

To my mind most new features of embedded are just features already existing in standard 🙂

[former_member375076]

HAHA. I'm thinking more of how you can plan at hierarchy nodes and distribute to the children based on other measures, etc.

[former_member186338]

mguthrie0621

It's also possible to plan on nodes in standard BPC with distribution using write back badi...

Complex distribution will be complex in both standard and embedded.

[former_member375076]

That is a great point.. All of these points just further confuses me on the direction SAP wants to go and why should we use one over the other. They both work and SAP says they're going to support both.

[former_member186338]

mguthrie0621

A lot of marketing things...

[SarhanP]

Hi Matthew,

I am recommending embedded Planning because of 2 main reasons:

1. No need to extract/transfer master data and transactional data to BPC. This is more accurate and fast way for especially monthly rolling forecast activities

2. Lean Infrastructure: with the embedded approach no need extra BW server / hardware.

From the functionality point of view; it depends selected embedded BPC version.

[former_member375076]

Great points! Do you find users don't like embedded as much? From everything I hear business users don't like embedded because it takes functionality away from them.