SAP SE is giving its customers another nudge toward adopting its Hana hybrid transactional/analytical database with the announcement today of the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 11.0 for SAP Business Warehouse/4Hana.

Billed as a unified platform for planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation, the new version exploits specific features of the BW/4Hana in-memory data warehouse to improve performance, data loading and cross-functional integration, the company said.

As the version number would imply, SAP BPC has been around a long time. It was picked up with the acquisition of OutlookSoftCorp. a decade ago and has been adapted to run in Microsoft Office environments and on SAP’s NetWeaver development and database integration platform. The software is used to streamline business planning activities, improve forecasting and consolidate financial results from across divisions and business units. “Simplicity is one of its key benefits,” said David Williams, SAP vice president of product marketing. “A lot of companies do [forecasting and consolidation] in Excel, which is a nightmare because you need to manually roll everything up. We’ve brought them together.”

Forecasting also increasingly needs to be done on a rolling basis, since rapidly changing market no longer permit the luxury of annual plans.

With the port to Hana, SAP has moved many calculations out of the application and into the database where they can be performed more quickly. The integrated architecture eliminates data replication and its related hardware and administration costs, SAP said. The new release also features an improved web-based user interface with embedded visualizations. Existing versions that use Microsoft Excel as the primary interface will continue to be available, Williams said.

BPC 11.0 can also be integrated with the SAP Analytics Cloud Suite for access to packaged planning, data discovery, visualization and predictive analytics. Financial professionals can also set up business process flows to enable consistent planning across departments. 

Other improvements in this release include streamlined data loading processes that cover data sources from across a company. SAP BW/4Hana’s scalability and performance also permit the use of big-data-style analytics adjacent to production data. Instances can be located on-premises or on any cloud platform that supports BW/4Hana. Pricing is custom-quoted.

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