Gartner claims that by 2024, most companies will adopt a planning strategy integrating or aligning FP&A with at least one operational planning area. It frames this view under the umbrella acronym of xP&A, extended planning and analysis.
This view comes with the practical implications of more data being involved in the decision-making process, as well as more interactions between people to confirm this alignment. This raises the question how this can be best facilitated. This question is important because planning is not a one-time activity but rather requires continuous adaption of vast data amounts.
Therefore the controlled SAP Analytics Cloud export API release planned for
Q1 (planned to be GA in Q2) is something to highlight. This API allows for an external pull operation of SAC Planning data models transactional data as well as master data.
The API is comprised of two services: the Administration service and the Provider service. The first extracts a list of models on your SAP Analytics Cloud system, and the second one retrieves information about a specific planning model. The API support all standard OData parameters, as well as custom parameters. Both offer multiple endpoints to extract both metadata and underlying data. There is no dedicated UI for this functionality as the API simply facilitates extraction of SAC Planning models from an external platform.
At the time of release detailed documentation will be shared and the corresponding help pages will be updated. This blog is intended to highlight the feature and getting SAC Planning Administrators excited to use it to their benefit.
Thank you for your interest, and be sure to stay tuned as we release further details!