SAC with IM and PS

[misrasuman116]

Hi All,

Client is planning for their S4 HANA on-premise system to use SAC (SAP for Analytics Clouds) for their long-term budget planning and consolidation. Previously they were thinking to use Investment Management for their approval (Appropriation Request) and do the budget set up in IM and later distribute the budget to PS project.

One of the questions which has popped since the inception of the proposal to use SAC (as their long-term budget planning and consolidation) is why would they need IM? Why can't they set up a program structure in SAC, approval within SAC and then set up and distribution directly to the projects?

Is there any best practice followed across the industries on the above process?

We have also thought of proposing to use PPM Portfolio Management instead of IM. In that case high level financial planning can happen within the Item level which will go through phase wise approval process through decision points. As business has finalized to do detailed planning in Analytics for cloud it can be later interfaced and setup as PS budget once the items got approved in Portfolio Management and a PS project created from it.

[Ken_Melching]

PPM is the preferred solution for Project oriented capex planning, proposal, review, and execution. With PPM Investment Management is not needed. SAC-P as delivered by SAP is more of a FP&A tool. SAC-P is excellent for long term planning and deriving overall capital budget, then PPM is an excellent tool to accumulate proposed projects against the total budget, decide which projects are approved then execute those projects.

[andrea_langlotz]

As part of the roadmap we are planning to have a initial content that could be leveraged to do some basic financial planning, including top-down/bottom-up alignment for a set of projects in SAC https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?BA=6EAE8B27FCC11ED892E9610BC3DE80CC&PRODUCT=73554900100800000266⦥=CUR.... As Ken is pointing out rightly, SAC is particulary strong in the planning part. If we think about support of the actual process support PPM Portfolio Management is the tool of choice.