SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) tool is used to support all operational and financial activities in an organization. SAP BPC helps in automating and streamlining business forecast, planning, and consolidation activities in your organization.

SAP BPC supports two types of migration - SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft Excel. BPC with Microsoft version enables you to perform modeling, application maintenance, importing data and applying transformations, creating scripts, etc. It leverages the power of MS Excel and provides the user with an Enterprise Power Management (EPM) solution, collaborative tool with robust, readily accepted environment.

SAP BPC provides support for existing Microsoft functionality and various enhancement features like drag and drop report builder, etc.

Following are the key benefits provided by SAP BPC: 

• It allows the user to make better business decisions by supporting What-If analysis and allows you to perform scenario-based planning.

• It allows you to collaborate data and thus increase accuracy in business planning and accountability.

• It helps in aligning your plans with strategic goals and hence decrease the cycle time.

• You have an option to choose the version of SAP NetWeaver or Microsoft Platform.

Following are the key benefits that can be achieved by using BPC:

• Business Forecasting

• Analytical Reporting and Analysis

• Budget Planning

• Predictive Analysis and Recommendations

• Improve Compliance

• Consolidation

• Business Process Flows and Smooth Collaboration

SAP BPC Objects

As per the above architecture, following are the key objects in BPC 10.0:

Client Interface: At the top, you have client interface which is a web-based tool used for configuration and reporting for business planning. It consists of MS Office client, Excel based admin clients, and web-based tool for reporting.

Microsoft-based admin tool is used for configuration of application and Microsoft Office tools such as Word and PowerPoint are used for reporting data.

Web Server and .NET Application Server: This tool uses web services to connect to .NET Application Server. It receives the request from client interface and directs all the requests to ABAP server, which is a part of SAP NetWeaver BW system.

This server is used for data conversion between client tools and SAP NetWeaver BW system.

SAP NetWeaver Application Server: This server is used to process all the requests from client tool. The request from .NET Application server is processed in this server as Remote Function Call RFC. This is used to process requests to create reports or to update the database.

When a request is processed by the Application Server, it gets the data and passes to .NET Application Server, and then sends it back to client interface.

Database Server: This layer is responsible to store all the data in the database. SAP NW back-end system is responsible to create objects and data is stored for BPC system. The NetWeaver supports most of the databases like SQL Server, DB2, Oracle and many more.

Release Strategy

Following are the release notes from SAP for SAP BPC 10.0:

Product Version 10.0, SAP NetWeaver

Area CPM-BPC

BPC now supports the following platforms:

• Server Support: Any operating system that is supported by SAP NetWeaver. VMware support as per SAP standard. Virtualization, VMware, Microsoft, Windows, Hyper-V, XEN, vSphere, IBM, INxHY, KVM, zBX. SAP NetWeaver Support for NW 7.3. No support for older versions.

• Database Support: BPC supports all database that are supported by SAP NetWeaver system.

• Client Support: Microsoft Windows, WIN XP (32 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit and 64 bit), and Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit).

• Microsoft .Net Framework: .Net Framework 3.5 is required.

• Web Browser Support: BPC supports the web browsers - IE 8.0 and IE 9.0.

• Microsoft Office Support: Microsoft Office 2007 (32 bit and 64 bit) and Microsoft Office 2010 (32 bit and 64 bit). .NET server is no longer required in latest BPC versions.