SAP: Deciding about SAP-BPC (nee Outlooksoft)
Posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007. Filed under SAP.
Update: Since this article was written, SAP has made public more of its Budgeting & Planning roadmap. At this point (3/21/2008), BPC is definitely the way to go if you don’t already have BI-IP implemented. Read more here.
Anyone who has been watching the acquisition activities of SAP and Oracle of late is sure to have their head spinning, and there doesn’t appear to be any pause in the pace either. A couple of weeks back, it was SAP’s assimilation of Business Objects. Right now, it’s Oracle with BEA pinned to a cork board like a bug. All of this activity is a bit unsettling for anyone trying get functionality implemented today since it may mean that the roadmaps for the functions you’re spending cold, hard cash on today are uncertain at best.
We are currently in the process of replacing our in-house developed budgeting system. Being an SAP shop, we’re looking for an SAP solution, or at least one that integrates really well. The trouble is not a dearth of options, but rather too many options under the SAP umbrella. Here’s a quick rundown on what’s available:
- BI-IP (BI Integrated Planning) - a relatively new option with a limited but growing install base - the current generation of SAP based planning
- BPC (Business Planning & Consolidations - here’s a pdf on reporting within BPC) - previously Outlooksoft, a best-of-breed budgeting system that is being folded into the BI landscape - this may be the next generation of SAP planning
- SEM-BPS (Business Planning & Simulation) - a couple of generations back - BPS was replaced by BI-IP
- Good ol’ R/3 based planning - be sure to have a couple of forks nearby to relieve your urge to jam one into your eye if you attempt this
We’ve seen demos of both BI-IP and BPC, and the BI-IP demo had us thoroughly hyped before Outlooksoft came into the picture. It was new, sported some very cool tools like Virtual Composer and Web App Designer, and was the way of the integrated future. Then suddenly, the landscape changes, and now there is Outlooksoft. Significantly less complex than BI-IP, more of an end-user tool, giving Accounting and Finance more self determination with less reliance on IT resources (at least that is the impression I’m given), and a 2-4 month implementation versus a 6-10 month BI-IP implementation. Of course there is additional licensing, but that is expected.
Is SAP-BPC the way of the planning future? There are certainly some very large companies drinking the koolaid, but I’ll let your SAP rep tell you about those.
The good news is that whether we go with BI-IP, BPC, or even BPS, SAP lets dead horses live on for quite a few years before taking them out behind the barn. All the same, this is one little piece of the future I’d like to know (certainly not the one piece I’d pick if I could choose just one 
, but one that would certainly help me today).
There is too much dust in the air to see clearly where it is all going. And unfortunately, we can’t sit around and wait for it to settle. We must choose and choose wisely. I’ll keep you posted!
Byron
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December 28th, 2007 04:17
Hello All,
Please provide be ample documents pertaining
BPC 5.1.
Regards,
Kamlesh.
February 6th, 2008 04:14
Hello All,
Can you please provide some documents on why a user would prefer SAP BPC over BI-IP in terms of application and usage.
Also who would ( Industry) prefer SAP BPC over BI-IP.
Thanks,
Prashanth
February 6th, 2008 09:29
Hi, Prashanth and Kamlesh,
Unfortunately, I do not have any documents beyond what is generally available through SAP. Here’s a starting point in SAP for BPC: http://www.sap.com/uk/services/education/partner/upcomingcourses/solutionsforthecfo/index.epx
I believe that many customers are choosing BPC over BI-IP for the simplicity that BPC offers. The cost to implement BI-IP is generally considered to be significant. I work in St. Louis, and am told that several of the LARGE SAP shops here in town are moving to BPC, including one that had started a BI-IP project and determined to switch. I have absolutely no evidence of this, so I’m not going to name any names. If you’d like corroboration on those statements, I’d recommend contacting an SAP representative. I can give you a name and em a il address if you’d like to em a il me at byron * citytracs.com.
Good luck in your implementation process!
Byron
February 14th, 2008 13:01
How does BOBJ compliment OutlookSoft or visa versa.
How does BOBJ compare, compliment or compete with HP’s NeoView.
February 14th, 2008 13:28
Hi, Jeff,
Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Busiess Objects’s or HP’s offerings in this arena. You do highlight yet another player in the Budgeting/planning field that SAP has acquired. What does this mean for good old Outlooksoft (BPC) if the BOBJ offering is superior? I, for one, will be glad when the dust settles a bit on the SAP Budgeting landscape. The choice is so much easier when there are fewer choices and a unified message. It will certainly take some time for SAP to get the message straight with all the acquisitions, and that’s understandable. But one can pity those poor folks who are being forced to choose one of the products, whether they are newly implementing SAP or switching from another GL package.
Any insight you might provide would be appreciated.
Byron
March 7th, 2008 15:05
Avoid BPC AT THIS TIME. It might be ok in a year or two or five, but right now, it’s just too buggy and immature - regardless of what anyone tries to tell you. Companies that have migrated from spreadsheets might say it’s good but that’s just because almost anything is an improvement over spreadsheets. Check out Oracle/Hyperion’s Planning product or even just the Oracle/Hyperion Essbase product by itself — 1st class and LIGHT YEARS better from a development and a user perspective. BPC Demos might look ok but setting the system up and even maintaining it in production is a pain - many, many undocumented errors; difficult, cumbersome report set-up; lack of flexibility with dimensions (ex. - Time dimension - prefers linear time instead of option to set up separate year and quarter/month dimensions, has significant difficulty with non-standard and/or multiple calendars, etc.) and MAJOR lack of dynamic analytic functionality - something essential for a good BI product. BPC utilizes MS Analysis Services/SQL Server (another company’s technologies) = potential code update and communication issues. MS also introduced PerformancePoint (a BPC competitor) this fall/winter = potential conflict that BPC may try to get over by changing its mdb engine (= more potential for problems). Also, don’t let the fact that SAP bought the product lead you to believe that it’s good — SAP simply waited too long to purchase and BPC was about all that was left.
March 8th, 2008 12:32
Nonie,
I take it that you are speaking from experience. It would be nice for others to weigh in on their experiences as well. I’d really like to see if this is a common experience or if the mileage varies on this.
Byron
March 26th, 2008 05:31
I’ve implemented IP and BPS and I’m familiar with BPC. They are all totally different solutions and are not comparable. The question is not witch tool you use but how you want to plan.
A central maintained planning(IP) tool or a decentral maintained tool. In case of a central maintained tool there is less flexibility but also less accuracy and it has a lower cost of maintenance. The decentral tool(BPC) gives more flexiblity to the end-user. But also don’t underestimate the IM work there, also in BPC they only have the possibility to work in the predefined set of data.
The time for implementing both in my cases were identical. If you have BW 70 installed the development is rarely more then 2 months for IP.
One of my most appreciated projects in planning is even running on BPS within BW. All people are really enjoying the tool not because it is flexible but because it is very fast and very detailed. They can do a complete new plancycle updating all 150 parts of the P&L within one day. Latest changes from management are entered and within 15 minutes a complete product p&l can be created.
For planning IP and BPS are very powerfull tools for the company but offer less flexibility for the user. BPC is quit flexible but doesn’t offer much added value for the company because you will see that the more flexibility the more time it will take for people to create the planning.
I would like a BPC frontend and the IP power and possibilities, maybe one day….
March 26th, 2008 09:53
Kris,
Thanks for the comments. I envy the opportunities you’ve had to implement planning. It sounds like your experiences were fairly positive and at 2 months each, they seem to have gone faster than other customers I’ve spoken with. We had occassion to talk with an SAP customer who was in their 8th month of a BI-IP implementation, and it wasn’t going all that well.
The BPC front-end does look nice and a bit simpler than IP. The simplicity of BPC certainly is what SAP keeps harping on. I hope it lives up to the expectations I’ve developed.
March 26th, 2008 10:12
Byron,
I think I have done one of the biggest planning projects in the pharmacy in Europe. With IP you can create your planning screens as simple as you want(use of BW webdesigner or visual composer), and the advantage is that if you know reporting you know planning. Indeed in BPC everything looks much simpler but only if you have as user a lot of time to navigate and is also a business expert.
This flexibility that we encountered made the planning not usefull anymore for coorperate reporting because everyone made a comlete new budget environment not taking into account that it always should match R3.
Keep in mind that BPC will not solve any planning issue compared to IP, If planning is 100% IP and BPS are able to resolve 90% of all complex functions and BPC max 60% but as always image is everything so BPC will indeed be sold better to the customer.
Last quarter we delivered an upgrade of 3.5 to 70 and an IP project in 80 mandays. Planning on quantities/prices/COGS/revenue on different planning levels.
If the customer needs 8 months for implementing a planning tool maybe is the planning process to complex or there is a technical problem.
Also as I understood SAP, IP will remain the base planning tool for planning functions but the frontend will be BPC, I can hardly believe that the complex planning functions that can be run in IP and are not applicable in BPC like fox programming or use of planning abap will be reprogrammed in BPC.
Kind regard
Kris
March 26th, 2008 10:55
Kris,
Thanks for expanding on those details. You’ve given me a renewed desire to look into BPC. One of our problems is that we’ve had trouble getting the Java stack implemented into our BI 7.0, so we still don’t have Virtual Composer or Web App Designer. I’ve been waiting a year to get into those tools, but no luck.
Concerning the roadmap for IP, I sat in on a presentation by Stephanie Buscemi of SAP at Financials 2008, and the roadmap she gave indicated that IP was going to be primarily directed at customers with existing IP investments. We do have a meeting with SAP next week to discuss the BOBJ roadmap, so I hope to have a little better idea of what they’re thinking after that. I wrote up what I heard on the roadmaps here
I’ll post again if I get any more “official” information.
Best regards,
Byron
April 18th, 2008 00:04
I’m in the midst of a BPC 5.1 implementation and I can say it can certainly be setup to be very user centric and is also very flexible.
Main problems we’ve encountered thus far? Scalability (& stability in a large implementation) & integration with SAP.
I’m told SP4 will resolve the issues we’ve encountered in 5.1. My understanding is they finally got it right in the latest version of OutlookSoft 4.X but Outlooksoft 5.X brings in a LOT of new bugs. 5.1 SP2 is the most stable version available to public thus far.
How much data are you planning to put in? How important is the ease of formatted reporting? Do you need top-down planning functions?
Given your talking about being a SAP shop, How strong is your Company’s MS SQL Server & Analysis Services skills?
April 19th, 2008 21:05
TJ,
Good luck with the implementation. Thanks for sharing a little about what you’re seeing.
When we finally get started with a system, we are primarily going to be doing P&L budgeting. This is limited to a couple hundred thousand records for the P&L budget. We don’t budget at the customer or material levels.
We do have fairly strong MS SQL Server resources, but I’m not sure they do much with Analysis Services (if that’s reporting related).
Thanks again for dropping a note. Would love to hear back from you when you get up and running.
Best regards,
Byron
June 10th, 2008 06:07
Having done a very advanced setup of outlooksoft before it became part of SAP, I can say the tool was a pleaseure to work with, very flexible and the results highly rewarding (hmmm, maybe this is sounding too positive.) End users do demand an easy to use interface, and something that is easy to learn. Outlooksoft was very good at this, since it is using the spreadsheet interface that all financial people are intimately familiar with.
The way we pushed the outlooksoft tool was beyond what they had ever invisioned and many of the custom functions developed became a part of outlooksoft 4.2 (have them support the code, not us. Plus help gain a larger user base so the tool will have long term viability)
From what I have heard about the competing platforms, several aspects of our results would not have been possible. But having never worked on them before I cannot say for certain.
I am excited about where BPC is going and would like to see more of it, I think a lot of companies would have access to better information to make more informed decisions if they would use a tool like this.
June 12th, 2008 02:55
I recommend BPC for the speed of integration. From what we have seen, it is by far the easiest to implement, and extend with internal resources. New version 7.0 introduces Netweaver BI backend, and maintains ease of use. I have heard one of the old OutlookSoft partners offers an integration with Business Objects as an enhancement. Google OutlookSoft…
June 12th, 2008 13:14
We are looking to move from BPS to IP. We are a little concerned that jumping directly to OutlookSoft would be a risk. We planning to go to IP and take a wait and see approach with OutlookSoft. Does anyone have any thoughts on this approach?
July 6th, 2008 08:28
Hi Barry,
Sorry about the long delay in answering your comment…slipped by me. My understanding is that SAP is having a lot of success in bringing customers onto BPC (Outlooksoft). I don’t know of any major reasons to hesitate about BPC at this time unless you’re wanting to wait until it is fully integrated into the BI Netweaver as David mentions above.
I don’t know that anyone would recommend going to IP as a stop gap for BPC unless you just don’t want to pay the BPC licensing. Then BI-IP might be attractive. Even then, the major hurdle will be the implementation cost (and time and complexity).
Budgeting is generally not considered a great value add activity. Many “experts”/academics are starting to recommend that companies forego the traditional budget all together. This makes cost justification for something like BPC…mmmmm…tricky.
Best regards,
Byron
July 7th, 2008 03:30
Very strange remark on the planning recomendation, if planning doesn’t add value, then you are not doing your job correctly. A plan is like a promise a guideline, of course it is not correct but at least you have to have some direction.
It is like building a skyscraper and just starting it with no plans. But indeed the classic budgetting is out of business, budgetting is not a once a year action but a continues exercise. Every week revising the next 3 years, trying to predict the next three months with 95% accurancy. Therefor indeed the BPC is not suitable yet but it will if it works inside BW. But for now go for IP ir you want this.
We tried BPC in a complex planning environment, and we didn’t manage to make it powerfull enough to support complex and large datasets. But this will be solved in the comming months/years.
At this moment I recommend if you have a complex planning scenario and a lot of data to move to IP. If you have a normal planning environment then BPC is a very good tool(but not yet on top of BW what is a pitty soon to be in ramp up). I’m convinced that BPC will in the comming years be a mixture of the power of IP and userfriendliness of outlooksoft. Where there will be migration tools from IP and outlooksoft.
Kris
July 7th, 2008 10:32
Hi Kris,
Thanks for jumping in. My comments were perhaps a bit hasty/incomplete. There is certainly a need for planning. You have to know where to concentrate your spending and your selling, and having some expectation of the outcome lets you plan those activities even further out. As you say, though, the once-a-year budget is being put out to pasture in favor of a more agile model.
Putting an ROI on budgeting software is a challenging exercise. Particularly if you’re not in a complex budgeting environment. This is where my value-add comment came from. If you could improve your current budget process so that it lets you spend 10% less money and earn 10% more in sales, you would do it. For companies that have already optimized the output of their planning processes, the biggest gain they can hope for from new software is to be able to do it easier and at less expense. That value goes up with complexity. For companies that have not tried to squeeze the value from their plans because it would be too complex, perhaps new software will open new doors.
I’m in wholesale distribution, so I don’t get the fun that goes into a manufacturing plan. I could see where an integrated planning system would be a major boon. Still, putting a $ value on that would be tricky.
Byron
July 8th, 2008 05:03
Hello Everyone…
My brother and I are considering doing one of SAPs training courses on BPC in Boston later this month. He is a freelance consultant in the area of SEM-BPS (and now IP). He thinks BPC might be an interesting area for future projects, and wants more knowledge. I’m a bit younger (I come from a SAP recruiting background) and am looking for some hands-on SAP experience and thought BPC might be a good new technology to familiarize myself with.
Do people think BPC is a good area to get into? Is the market shifting in this direction? Is it too early to start learning this application or should we wait until BPC is running off of the SAP Netweaver platform?
Any comments would be most appreciated!
Thanks,
Alex
July 8th, 2008 07:53
Hi Alex,
I don’t have a real good answer for you (hopefully someone else will). There are 2 big questions about whether it’s too early to take the training or not:
1) Does the training already use a version of BPC that uses the Netweaver backend?
2) Does the switch to the Netweaver backend dramatically change the configuration activities in BPC?
Bear in mind that BPC is being represented as more of an end-user tool than BI-IP, where accounting/finance departments can play a major role in the configuration of the actual budget process. This portion of BPC should not dramatically change with a backend switch.
I’m not really sure category of consultant BPC or BI-IP fall into. Is it FICO or a general Netweaver?
July 10th, 2008 09:58
Hi,
I was recently enquiring into the courses and SAP mentioned that the training is currently on the older version of BPC and not the new one (which uses the Netweave backend)
July 10th, 2008 11:54
Arin,
Thanks for the info. I don’t recall when the new version of BPC was released. If it’s not too far in the future, it may be worth waiting, but software releases are somewhat unpridictable, so holding one’s breath doesn’t always pan out.
Cheers!
Byron
July 12th, 2008 22:12
Current training is still with version 5.1
I believe 7.0 is to be released shortly if not already, but only on ramp-up. Keep in mind that there is a microsoft version as well as a netweaver version for v7.0.
Keep upto date, by reading Ryan Leask’s blog on sdn!
July 13th, 2008 10:47
Hi Ivan,
Thanks for the info. Particularly the tip on Ryan’s blog!
Here’s the link:
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10100
Cheers!
Byron
July 13th, 2008 12:25
[...] a comment on another post, Ivan pointed out an excellent/authoritative blog post on SAP’s SDN by Ryan Leask (SAP) on [...]
July 14th, 2008 03:18
I’d like to thank everyone on the feedback! I think now I’m going to wait until SAP gives training on the 7.0 Netweaver release, hopefully within the next 1/2 year or so. I’d rather take the course based on the new release rather than learn 5.1 and then have to jump to 7.0.
July 14th, 2008 07:52
Alex,
Hopefully the wait won’t be long. It would be a great bonus if they provide both the Microsoft and Netweaver training in the same package for you (if that’s even possible).
Good luck!
Byron
August 21st, 2008 03:45
Hello Everyone,
I have found your comments about SAP BPC and IP very interesting.
I am part of a Oil & Gas company in Europe who are using Cognos Planning 8.1 at the moment for our budgeting and forecasting cycles. We do a 15yr Plan cycle as well as a quaterly forecast cycle.
We are looking at migrating to BPC and would appreciate if you guys had any thoughts on how BPC compared to Cognos and even how Cognos compared to IP.
From the posts that I have read, BPC does not seem to be as powerful in terms of developing complex models as Cognos or IP.
Regards
baba_man