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detlef_wassmuth
Advisor
Advisor
2,200

Planning as part of SAP Business Warehouse


As we discussed in the first sequence of our blog series, planning as part of a SAP Business Warehouse solution offers a lot of benefits. In addition, planning applications should be able to offer the most feasible flexibility and usability for the business. At the same time, planning applications should be able to offer the same advantages that we already know from other applications as part of our BW planning family…

How can we solve this dilemma....Maybe we should try to bring the best capabilities of the different solutions together?

Ok, let´s check the different planning applications in the sphere of BW SAP Business Warehouse.

Figure 1: Evolution of BW-based planning solutions

The first planning application as part of SAP Business Warehouse was Business Planning and Simulation (BW-BPS). The area of this application stretches from simple data input through to complex scenarios with data extraction, automatic planning preparation, manual data input, controlling the planning process, and retracting plan data. BW-BPS is still part of all BW software releases (7.5x). Due different reasons, we recommend that you use one of the other options rather than BW-BPS for business planning - either integrated planning (BW-IP) or, preferably, the premium version SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 10.1, version for SAP NetWeaver. Please see Note #1666756 for more information.

The next generation of planning tools is represented by BW-IP. This solution is more deeply integrated into SAP BW and uses the same metadata as BW. The end user client is represented with the help of the BEx Suite. Thanks to this approach, we can combine reporting and planning solutions as part of one common end user client.

By using this solution, we were able to build planning applications as part of BW. Thanks to the huge data quality and the data volume, the quality of our information - which we got from our planning solutions - increased significantly. At the same time, a new SAP product was born: SAP HANA. With the help of SAP HANA, we were able to start the in-memory area for BW-based planning applications successfully. With only minimum customizing effort, we were able to activate the Panning Applications Kit (PAK). From this moment on, SAP HANA supported the reading and writing of data, execution of planning functions etc.

Since then, we have got more and more requests for more flexibility for business users. They want to create master data on the fly or they want to change the data model without heavily involving the IT department. Therefore, we acquired the company OUTLOOKSOFT and developed a new version of this successful planning application as part of the BW stack. This was the beginning of SAP BPC NW.

The next logical step was very simple (regarding the evolution): we now had two different planning solutions (SAP BW-IP/PAK and SAP BPC NW), which were very successful in the market. But there was still a huge demand regarding integration for SAP BPC NW and the demand regarding flexibility regarding BW-IP/PAK. Thus we developed a new planning model - Unifying BPC NW and BW-IP (PAK) - the EMBEDDED MODEL - and we shipped this new model as part of SAP BusinessObjects and Consolidation 10.1. This model combines the best of both tools; integration and flexibility. At the same time, the planning model as part of SAP BusinessObjects and Consolidation 10.0 was re-named as STANDARD MODEL and is part of the SAP BusinessObjects and Consolidation 10.1 product as well.

The relationship between Product name, License and Model























Product Name: SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.1, version for SAP NetWeaver
License: SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.1, version for SAP NetWeaver
License contains: BPC Standard Model (formerly known as “BPC XY NetWeaver, BPC HANA”)
BPC Embedded Model: convergence of the most important capabilities of “BPC XY NetWeaver” and BW-IP
Planning Application Kit (PAK): Planning functions of the BW-IP or Embedded Model will be executed by SAP HANA*

*Planning Functions of type: Standard and FOX Formulas
Back to: SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for SAP NetWeaver -Useful product information-
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