Extended Planning & Analysis: Business Content

Welcome! You have landed on the community page for Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A) Business Content available within SAP Analytics Cloud. This page describes the overarching xP&A Business Content vision and helps to navigate to the specific content packages via direct links.

Page Contents

On this page, you will find helpful information and resources regarding Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A) topics including:

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xP&A @ SAP

At SAP we understand the xP&A topic to cover several different perspectives on planning and align those individual plans into a holistic, interconnected enterprise planning framework. A short introduction for xP&A can be found here: What is xP&A.  For our german understanding readers a podcast in the SAP series "Close the gap" by Christian Michel is available as well. The podcast starts explaining xP&A from a Business Problem point of view, explains the overarching strategy, covers the usage of content and details out specific elements of the content packages. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast or download it from the linked page.

Here we focus on showing and explaining the SAC content packages covering the area of xP&A. Each content package focuses on an individual business point of view, covering mid and long term time horizons. As indicated by the blue integration processes in the following pictures, the goal is to connect the different planning activities and align them. In our xP&A Business Content packages, we deliver the base structure and base models for the individual Line of Business (LoB) planning activities and foresee an integration with other content packages. With a standard planning process in mind (see xP&A Business Process Maps), we showcase how such an integration can be achieved. Beyond the standard Business Content, there is even more value to be realized with capabilities like the SAC Planning Calendar which can be configured to meet the specific needs of your enterprise.

In this community we want to start discussion around this complex and important topic, reach a shared understanding, and learn from you about the challenges you face and where we can help further. We will also regularly share information with you about new offerings, content, and capabilities.

We sincerely want to hear from you and will answer your questions and help drive discussions. please raise your questions here in the community. As well you can find all related blog posts with this Hashtag #Extended Planning and Analysis, make sure to follow it!

Line of Business Planning Perspectives

Each of the orange honeycombs represent a single Line of Business (LoB), which each have their own LoB-specific planning activities. The goal in terms of xP&A is to interconnect those plans and synchronize them throughout the entire enterprise.

LoBs which are already supported with standard business content are:

Human Resources - HXM Operational Workforce Planning

The HXM Operational Workforce Planning content is covering the planning activity for the total workforce with a time horizon of 6-18 months in the future. Thereby you can take different perspectives like the Head of HR, focusing on the internal and external workforce and planning on an aggregated level. As well you can take a more detailed perspective and plan on individual positions as an HR Business Partner. The corresponding effects on costs are calculated automatically and can be adjusted. When the planning is completed the results can be transferred to the financial planning content. Please enjoy the following materials to familiarize yourself with this content. 

Content Packages:

  1. SAP Human Experience Management(HXM) Workforce Planning

Sales – Target Setting for the Consumer Products Industry

The Consumer Products Operational Target Planning content is designed to facilitate the sales quota and trade budget allocation process.  This allows sales management, such as a Global VP of Sales, Regional Sales Managers, and/or Trade Marketing Managers, to allocate corporate financial goals (revenue and volume) as well as investment budget (trade budget) by disaggregating across sales and product hierarchies.  The sales organization could over allocate volume/revenue targets and under allocate trade budgets.  This process facilitates an iterative top down and bottom up comparison of versions.  The finalized targets (quotas) can then feed into the Trade Management process as quotas and the trade budgets can feed into Trade Management as trade funds and/or dynamic funding (live) rates (rate/case and/or %/revenue). 

Community Content:

Official Documents: 

Videos: 

Content Packages:

  1. Consumer Products Sales Target Planning

Finance - Integrated Financial Planning

The Integrated Financial Planning for SAP S/4HANA supports the integrated financial planning process including cost center, product cost, sales & profitability, investment, P&L, balance sheet and cash flow planning. The different planning areas seamlessly play together, e.g. cost center planning provides the activity cost rates for product cost planning and product cost planning provides the product cost rates for the COGS calculation within profitability planning. In the end a plan scenario with complete P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statement is derived. Please enjoy the following materials to familiarize yourself with this content. 

Content Packages:

  1. Integrated Financial Planning for SAP S/4HANA
  2. Cross-model Add-on for Integrated Financial Planning for SAP S/4HANA

Vision: Supply Chain Management - Production planning

We are currently discussing a new package to extend traditional Supply Chain and Production Planning into a broader xP&A framework. The videos below provide a perspective on this topic.

Please submit your feedback and take advantage of this chance to directly influence our development efforts.

xP&A Planning Process Maps

For each content package we envisioned a standard "meta" process describing and showcasing the typical and most relevant planning activities in the content. We invite you to contribute and enhance these processes for your individual needs. To get to know this xP&A Process Map, please check out the Business Process Landing Page where you will find links to the LoB-specific processes. Note: You will need an active SAP S-User account to login.

You can directly provide feedback in the Process Tool SAP Signavio yourself by using the comment function and please keep in mind to raise your questions here in the community as well. For all other questions about xP&A Business Content, please, raise your questions here.

Maximizing the Value of xP&A

The xP&A business content presented here serves as a foundation and reference to help get you started quickly on your journey. As you further define the productive scenarios you wish to enable, there are configurations and extensions that can further assist in managing workflows, better aligning planners, and triggering actions based on planning results. Please enjoy the following showcases of such extensions:

  • Enhancement of HXM Content with Calendar API Video / Blog
  • Enhancement of Planning Workflow with Excel Planning Addin Video / Blog
  • Enhancement of HXM Content with Insight-To-Action writeback to SAP SuccessFactors Video / Blog

We need your input!

Please comment on the ideas listed below for future evolution of the xP&A vision within SAP. We are currently considering these future topics:

  1. Leveraging the strengths of SAP Analytics Cloud together with SAP Integrated Business Planning to more tightly connect Financial Planning, Sales and Operations Planning, and Production Planning
  2. OpenSAP Course presenting the possible usage scenarios of the different xP&A content packages in an End-To-End process
  3. Partner Hackathon to help enable the ecosystem on the xP&A content already available and identify new content extensions to co-innovate or develop and share
  4. xP&A content package providing a workflow to orchestrate the activities of the LoB-specific content packages

What would you like to see?

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FAQ

Collaborative Planning, Integrated Planning, Extended Planning & Analysis – do these terms all mean the same thing?

Yes they do. They are evolutions of the same concept through the years. Currently we are following the Gartner definition of xP&A

Where can I test the xP&A Business Content?

You can test the xP&A Business Content on any planning-enabled SAC tenant which you own. If you do not own a SAC instance so far, you can use a trial version. The content is free of charge and only needs to be enabled inside the tenant via the Content Network available on the SAC Main Menu. Here you can find a detailed description or follow our tutorial for enabling content based on the example HXM Workforce Planning Content.

Can I use the business content outside of SAC? Is the business content an independent product?

No, the business content is only available within SAC and comes free of charge within the SAC license.

Where can I learn how to use the xP&A content?

Based on the HXM Workforce Planning content, we provided a session on TechED2021 ANA360 in which we introduced the content, as well as provided a deep dive through the content. In this session we offered a publicly available tutorial based on GitHub. Please check out this repository for the full tutorial.

Where can I learn how to enhance and customise the content?

Based on the HXM Workforce Planning content, we provided guided tutorials on the SAP Tutorial Portal. Different activites are represented such as "create and upload assumption data", "add a new plan level", "add a new cost type", "add a new planning version".

As all xP&A content packages follow the same design the learning can be applied to the other content packages. Please check out this tutorial repository for the Customization of content.