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This is one of the newest E-bites from the popular new SAP Press series created to offer focused and detailed instruction and configuration for specific SAP Solutions. SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management is a very user friendly solution offering from SAP for calculating your firm's cost allocations and can apply simple or complex business rules for cost management, gross profitability, contribution and calculation of key performance indicators. It has multiple applications for providing insight into your business with on-demand cost analysis results.
The SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management is an SAP solution in the Enterprise Performance Mangement suite of solutions.
The software was developed by the innovative Amstrong Laing Group (ALG) founded in 1990, they developed a range Enterprise Performance Optimisation web based applications (Metify ABM, Activity Analysis, EPO). They were later acquired by SAP BusinessObjects who built on their code base and realized the extraordinary value of the agile single-click on-demand standalone or enterprise solution we have today.
The SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management E-bite addresses three areas primarily, Scenario Planning, Shared Service Costing and Driver-based Budgeting and Forecasting:
- Scenario Planning
Scenario planning is about taking control of your future. We want to be prepared for the known and mitigate the risk of the unknown. What-if analysis helps you do this. What has been a transformative journey for me in writing this E-bite is exploring the gap between what analyst currently do in a typical what-if analysis and the possible. I see there being the following questions that need to be answered.
- What are the assumptions I'm making about the future of my company?
- Are these assumptions based on fact or fallacy?
- What are the factors I control which will impact on my firm's future? What are the remaining factors I can mitigate for, and which factors are completely out of my control?
- What changes will be realistic to assume are probable and do I know the relationship between their cause and effect?
- Is there a sequential or concurrency behavior in the changes, and if so how can I model that?
In the E-bite we look at these questions and more surrounding the aspects and implications of scenario planning. So whatever your experience with scenario planning we present a simple but profound and scalable framework and show you how to configure this in the software.
- Shared Service Costing
This used to about how we quantify the effort given by our shared service teams to sustaining the business and justify insourcing them. Now it is about finding value from shared service teams both within and external to the business.If your IT department is saving you money, do you know? And if you know how much are they saving you? Can you create a service charging model in your business to encourage efficiency? What would that look like? We paint the picture and show you how you can build it in your software.
- Driver Based Budget and Forecasting
Honestly this area of analysis is very interesting but what does it mean in practice? Is it all about variable and fixed-variable costs? Or is there something else more delicate and subtle about the cause and effect nature of your business costs and drivers? Once we have explored the possibilities we explain how these can be built in SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management.
These areas have been at the top of the list of the application of SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management. They are represented in the context of seeking value created, sustaining the value creation behaviors and planning for value creation in a closed financial loop.
The E-bite is available now and each copy comes with a fully working SAP Business Objects Profitability and Cost Management model demonstrating the functionality discussed in the SAP Press E-bite, Modeling with SAP Business Objects Profitability and Cost Management.
