Introduction :
Companies might experience challenges in Planning as the economy has been transitioning towards Digitalization. Enterprises face new challenges with the latest changes and developments. Top and middle-level management across organizations have questions about leveraging the ever-growing data available to enable quick and fast decision-making. Accounting and Finance officers have planning, budgeting & forecasting at the top of their priority list of initiatives for improving performance. Well-integrated financial planning is necessary for their initiatives. Companies with these capabilities grow faster and can better serve their customers to seize new opportunities than their competitors.
SAP S/4HANA and planning capabilities from SAP Analytics Cloud will surely help companies in planning and budgeting areas.
SAP Analytics Cloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, which is automatically upgraded, easy to deploy, and highly robust.
The planning capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud
The capabilities related to SAP Analytics Cloud's planning will help companies analyze, plan, predict, & report in a single solution. It helps to analyze data directly within one application. Advanced visualization helps to view the impact of decisions. It enables the Finance and Accounting team to make quick and correct decisions spontaneously without moving the data to other applications.
Organizations will be able to use other tools in SAC to discuss their plans. Organizations can use these planning capabilities to budget and plan all their areas, wherever planning is needed across the enterprise.
SAP SAC helps organizations transform as Intelligent enterprises as they can use embedded predictive technologies to predict future values.
Using SAC Planning cloud, SAP Customers can have very intuitive & very comprehensive planning solutions with what-if simulations, workflows, multi-model support, built-in financial intelligence. Companies can do planning at any level and can have many more capabilities.
Planning is one of the essential functions of management. It involves setting up objectives and determining a course of action for meeting those objectives. SAP SAC helps managers become good decision-makers as they will be able to forecast future conditions and These forecasts form the basis for planning. Managers will be able to track progress in projections. They will simulate different scenarios to find new opportunities by considering trends, risks, and opportunities in the market. Organizations Working with spreadsheets or disconnected planning systems may face various issues. They will not make quick decisions that way, which slows down the decision-making process. It leads to uncertainty and does not no longer help organizations in current rapidly changing market situations.
SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning would be a single solution that unifies BI, Planning & Predictive to provide companies complete, confident & continuous decision making. Customers will be able to perform planning activities in various user interfaces.
SAC analytics designer helps analytic application designers to create governable analytical content, from dashboards to sophisticated planning applications. This designer is a means to supplement the SAC planning experience.
Analytic applications are built in a dedicated design environment. There are numerous planning relevant Application Programming Interfaces available. We will be able to write scripts based on other system events.
Dimensions and Planning Models
Consultants working on planning must consider different business scenarios that drive the need to design & create dimensions.
Dimensions might be either Public or Private. This is based on how the dimension is created and controls whether the dimension can be used in multiple models or a single model.
Public dimensions can be shared among models and are created and saved independently from models. Private dimensions are created in and exist only in the current model that is being made. It does not appear in the Public Dimensions list. When we delete a model, private dimensions are also deleted. Time & version are always private dimensions.
We will be able to create three types of public dimensions:
Generic: we can use as many generic dimensions per model as needed.
Organization: such as Cost Center.
Account: This dimension is typically used to store the chart of accounts for financial planning.
When creating dimensions, we will have the four options:
Enable Data Access Control
Hide hierarchy nodes for users without authorization:
Enable Responsibility:
Enable Currency:
Dimension Types & Properties
Planning models require at least three-dimension types: Date, Account, and Version.
Planning using SAP Analytics Cloud
Planning stories are based on models. Each planning model works with several functions.
Versions
Versioning enables us to create different views of the data displayed. This makes comparisons easier.
We will be able to create three different types of versions:
Public - Public versions are maintained in the model.
Private - Private versions are maintained in a story and are visible only to the version's creator it was initially copied from.
Shared - Shared versions are private versions that allow other people to see.
How to create a new version?
We can create versions using the Version Management option in the Story toolbar. We can copy an existing version to a private version and then edit it as a new version. When you create a new version, you select the type of version category that applies.
How to do Data Entry
Data entry is key to planning functionality. To enter budget or forecast data is the first step to comparing those numbers with actual and historical data and Analyzing the impact of this planning. SAP Analytics Cloud's planning functionality makes it easy to enter data perform calculations, and write it back to your database.