- SAP Managed Tags
MOTIVATION
In today's fast-paced business world, the ability to effectively steer and lead an organization is fundamental for achieving strategic goals and maintaining a competitive edge. A key success criterion is the capacity to fully harness and derive value from organizational data. Many companies struggle with data problems, such as fragmented information, outdated systems, and the super important task of preparing data for emerging technologies like AI. Recognizing these challenges, we are excited to introduce a blog series dedicated to showcasing the substantial business value of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) in the context of planning and analytics.
The motivation behind this initiative is to provide a comprehensive exploration of how SAP BDC capabilities as essential instruments, facilitating robust strategic alignment and guiding effective decision-making processes across diverse organizational requirements. We aim to illustrate how SAP BDC, equipped with powerful data management, planning, analytics and innovative AI capabilities, empowers organizations with enhanced business steering agility by providing real-time insights, streamlined data management, and automated decision support – going from insights to action, helps mainly leaders guide their businesses with precision.
Our blog series will provide valuable insights for decision-makers seeking to harness SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) to enhance operational efficiency, optimize resource allocation, and achieve long-term objectives. By featuring detailed planning & analytics topics, the series will illustrate the transformative impact of SAP BDC in addressing the operational complexities of today’s business environment. This first introductory blog post will spotlight the strategic advantages of SAP BDC, particularly in the context of Business Steering, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of its benefits throughout the blog series.
There are several blog posts in the series that will cover advantages of SAP BDC in the context of business steering, so please stay tuned for the upcoming blogs:
- The Value of SAP BDC in the context of business steering
- Planning & Analytics is an essential part of SAP BDC
- Key Planning & Analytics components of SAP BDC (THIS BLOG POST)
- Is AI going to “retire” a dashboard?
- Simulations, a game changer in today’s volatile world
- Extend existing planning scenarios of SAP BPC/BW-IP in SAP BDC
- Real-time steering with LIVE planning
- PaPM - The role of business calculation engine in business steering
- Self – service analytics and real time business steering
- Business steering powered by AI agents
- Leverage data products in the context of planning & forecasting
- Introducing AI/ML capabilities by SAP Databricks
INTRODUCTION
In our previous blog post, @BlazZabukovec highlighted how Planning & Analytics plays a vital role in SAP BDC by enhancing decision-making, boosting efficiency, and strengthening strategic alignment to drive organizational performance and business value.
So, what exactly makes up the SAP BDC “magic sauce”? Let’s dive in and unpack it. I will take you behind the scenes to explore the core Planning & Analytics components of SAP BDC - powerful solutions that help businesses streamline planning, improve decision-making, and foster collaboration across departments. By diving into these capabilities, you will see how SAP BDC provides a trusted, unified platform that enables organizations to achieve more effective enterprise planning and analysis.
SAP BUSINESS DATA CLOUD ANATOMY
To start, we will explore the key features and innovations of SAP BDC to understand its core functionality and how it empowers effective enterprise planning and analysis. SAP BDC is a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution provided by SAP. Customers simply subscribe to access and consume its powerful data services. Built on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP BDC leverages foundational services that ensure scalability, security, and seamless integration across the enterprise ecosystem. At its core, SAP BDC harmonizes data from both SAP and non-SAP sources into a unified semantic layer of trusted information. This unified data foundation enables organizations to perform planning, advanced analytics, fuel artificial intelligence, and derive actionable insights. By integrating structured and unstructured data across business processes, SAP BDC empowers companies to bridge transactional and analytical systems, driving intelligent, data-powered growth.
SAP BDC builds on the strengths of existing SAP solutions, each contributing a vital layer to the overall architecture:
- SAP Datasphere: Provides the data integration and modeling layer, ensuring consistent, trusted data across sources.
- SAP Analytics Cloud: Delivers the planning, forecasting, simulation and analytics into a single solution.
- SAP BW: – When already in use, SAP BW can serve as a data source, enriching the overall data landscape with historical and structured information. You can materialize the BW data as custom data products in SAP BDC (BW Data Product Generator).
To complement these established tools, SAP BDC introduces new, powerful components and innovations designed to extend planning, analytical and data management capabilities:
- SAP Databricks: Equips data scientists with advanced AI and machine learning development tools to unlock predictive and prescriptive insights.
- SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation Services: Provides centralized management of SAP and non-SAP data, ensuring governance, scalability, and efficient data lifecycle handling.
- End-to-end data lifecycle managed by SAP: A key innovation of SAP BDC is that it automatically integrates and harmonizes data from all SAP LoB solutions, including S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, and Fieldglass. Data from these sources is replicated in real time, eliminating the need for customers to manually prepare and combine SAP data. With SAP managed Data Products in SAP BDC, you eliminate the heavy lifting of extraction, transformation, and pipeline maintenance. This allows organizations to focus on high-value projects, such as delivering Planning, Analytics, AI solutions, rather than time-consuming data preparation.
- Unified Data Foundation: With SAP BDC, data from all SAP applications is unified under a single domain model. When multiple systems define the same entity - like a customer or product - SAP BDC brings them together under one harmonized definition. SAP BDC offers curated, reusable, and semantically rich data products- trusted assets delivered by SAP as the backbone of planning, advanced analytics and AI applications. Business users no longer need to worry about data origins; they work with consistent, trusted information. Plus, all valuable metadata from the source systems is preserved, ensuring no business context is lost during replication. Everything is grounded in trusted business context - so your AI isn’t guessing, it’s truly understanding.
- Intelligent Applications: SAP BDC delivers ready-to-consume, fully managed by SAP Intelligent Applications that make planning and advanced analytics a business user task - not IT’s. Intelligent applications aren’t just static input forms or dashboards. They are dynamic, AI-powered systems of engagement that continuously learn from your business data, understand context, and act with precision. By bringing together curated data products, business semantics, and AI agents, these applications can reason, recommend, and even automate - whether you’re working in finance, supply chain, procurement, or HR. Planning and analytic workflows become proactive, decisions happen in real-time, and your business becomes more adaptive with every interaction.
SAP BUSINESS DATA CLOUD ARCHITECTURE
Let’s take a closer look at the architecture of SAP BDC to understand how its core components work together to deliver value. As highlighted earlier, by unifying and managing data across the enterprise, SAP BDC establishes a trusted foundation that simplifies planning, strengthens analytics, and empowers smarter, faster decision-making.
Here is a closer look at the core components and their roles:
- Source Systems: The journey begins with source systems, which include both SAP (e.g., SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, SAP SuccessFactors) and non-SAP systems. SAP bundles business data from these systems into entities such as tables and views, combining them to represent specific business scenarios - like Sales, Spend, HR and Finance Performance, Margin Analysis, Substainable Business Performance, Working capital - before replicating them to SAP BDC.
- Foundation Services: Once replicated, data is harmonized, transformed, and enriched in the Foundation Services, becoming reusable Data Products. Hosted on SAP HANA Cloud and Data Lake files, this layer fully manages integration, transformation, and cleansing, enabling seamless access for any planning and analytics use case.
- SAP Datasphere: at the heart of SAP BDC, SAP Datasphere defines the data model for data products. It powers both pre-delivered Intelligent Applications and custom models, which can be extended with AI or machine learning. SAP Datasphere also manages analytical roles and data access, ensuring the right users see the right data. Mainly it serves as the foundational data layer for all planning and analytics use cases.
- SAP Databricks: brings advanced analytics to SAP BDC through AI, machine learning, and pro-code engineering. Data products and planning models can be shared seamlessly (delta sharing protocol) between SAP BDC and SAP Databricks, enabling data scientists to enrich analytics and planning scenarios with sophisticated ML/AI logic. This empowers organizations to identify patterns, forecast outcomes, and automate decision-making. The insights generated in SAP Databricks can be integrated back into SAP Datasphere models, making analytics and planning applications even more powerful and actionable.The example below demonstrates how you can significantly enhance your BDC cashflow data product with advanced ML/AI logic to streamline cashflow forecast and provide deeper financial insights. Stay tuned for a dedicated post where we will explore these use cases in more detail.
- SAP BW / SAP BW/4HANA: With its long history in SAP’s data and analytics ecosystem, SAP BW brings a wealth of legacy objects that remain valuable today. In SAP BDC, both SAP BW NetWeaver Cloud, private edition and SAP BW/4HANA Cloud, private edition can be integrated, allowing BW objects to be onboarded as fully usable data products (as highlighted in the SAP BDC Anatomy section).
- SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC): is an all-in-one enterprise planning solution that empowers businesses to analyze, plan, budget, forecast, and predict. With SAC, businesses can perform comprehensive planning, budgeting, and forecasting, make data-driven decisions with built-in business intelligence, gain trusted insights and automated forecasts powered by predictive analytics. It allows organizations to simulate multiple scenarios in a sandbox environment and facilitates cross-department collaboration through dynamic workflows.
- SAP BDC offers the SAP Seamless Planning approach, which tightly integrates SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP Datasphere. This allows SAC planning model data - including facts and master data - to be stored directly in SAP Datasphere. By blending live actuals and plan data through Datasphere’s capabilities, and referencing data in planning models without replication, organizations can significantly reduce their overall data footprint. This approach ensures real-time data availability while enabling advanced processing and extensibility scenarios through the combined power of SAP Datasphere and SAP Databricks. ( Seamless planning between SAP Analytics Cloud and ... - SAP Community )
- Intelligent Applications: Intelligent Applications were described already at the SAP BDC Anatomy paragraph. Beyond custom planning input forms and visualizations, SAP BDC provides ready-to-consume SAP-managed Intelligent Applications via SAP Business Technology Platform. Actually they reduce time-to-value for data analysis and planning. For a comprehensive list of available SAP Intelligent Applications, please refer to the link.
- SAP Business Data Cloud Cockpit: is a key component in the SAP BDC landscape, providing users with easy access to pre-delivered Intelligent Applications and Data Products. Through the cockpit, users can quickly install applications, browse available data products, and share them with SAP Databricks to enhance analytics with AI and machine learning capabilities. This tight integration helps organizations build a trusted, advanced data foundation, powering smarter planning and analytics across the business.
- SAP Profitability and Performance Management (PaPM) is a powerful calculation engine built on SAP HANA that delivers real-time profitability and performance analysis. It enables users to create flexible models, process large volumes of data at high speed, and integrate seamlessly with both SAP and non-SAP systems. When deployed on SAP BDC, PaPM gains access to SAP BDC’s integrated ecosystem - including SAP Datasphere and SAC. Within the SAP BDC landscape, PaPM serves as an advanced calculation engine, empowering organizations to maximize performance and profitability through intelligent modeling and simulation. Combining PaPM and SAC allows users to run advanced profitability calculations and execute sophisticated data processing directly from the SAC interface. This integration enriches the planning process with enhanced computation capabilities and deeper insights. PaPM also offers a range of prebuilt business scenarios - spanning both cross-industry and industry-specific use cases such as Profitability and Cost Management, Tax Modeling, and Transfer Pricing - to accelerate deployment and value realization.
SUMMARY
SAP BDC is a central hub for enterprise planning and analytics, providing a unified, fully managed platform that helps organizations turn data into actionable insights. Core components - SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Datasphere, SAP Databricks, SAP BW and Intelligent Applications - enable businesses to streamline planning processes, perform sophisticated analyses, and make faster, more strategic decisions. By harmonizing data from SAP and non-SAP sources, SAP BDC creates a trusted foundation that supports advanced planning & analytics, AI, and intelligent applications. With SAP Profitability and Performance Management (PaPM) in SAP BDC, organizations can run complex cost and profitability simulations, enhancing the accuracy and depth of planning. Collectively, these capabilities establish SAP BDC as a strategic asset for any organization aiming to optimize enterprise planning and drive measurable business value.
Do you want to embark on a journey? Please reach out to your SAP representative and register for your SAP BDC Discovery Workshop!
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