Optimizing Financial Planning & Analysis: Accelerating Decision-Making with SAP BDC

LeverX significantly optimized financial planning and analysis for a large manufacturing company. Our work improved the delivery of key metrics to teams by 95%, uniting 320 employees under a single corporate plan and providing them with a single source of truth for data.

Client and Challenge

Our client is a large manufacturing company, with a distributed structure and operating with high volumes of data, faced significant challenges in consolidating disparate data and accelerating financial planning, forecasting, and reporting processes. This directly hampered timely decision-making.

The company's main pain points included:

• Fragmented Financial Data: Data was scattered across numerous disparate sources, including Excel spreadsheets and decentralized reporting toolset making consolidation and obtaining a complete, reliable picture difficult.
• Slow FP&A Processes: Planning, forecasting, and reporting were slow, preventing agile responses to market changes. This led to delays in financial communication, where preparing consolidated reports could take days or even weeks, meaning data was outdated upon receipt.
• Manual and Error-Prone Processes: A significant portion of the work was performed manually in the on-premise and desktop-based data sources, which increased the risk of errors and led to inaccuracies in reporting, distorting the true financial picture.
• Lack of Current Data and Agility: Difficulties in obtaining timely and up-to-date information for decision-making were critical in a dynamic business environment. Slow processes prevented quick reactions to market changes, causing missed opportunities.
• Disagreements Between Teams: The absence of a single source of truth led to discrepancies in expectations and misunderstandings among various departments. Teams worked with different versions of data, which fueled disputes over figures and hindered strategic alignment.

Solution

LeverX helped the client implement a comprehensive solution based on SAP BDC . This solution ensured the integration and unification of financial data, significantly accelerating FP&A processes.

The choice of SAP BDC was driven by its key advantages, which perfectly aligned with the client's needs:

• Comprehensive Integration: BDC provides powerful tools for seamless data integration from various systems (both SAP and third-party), which was critical for eliminating the fragmentation of financial data.
• Flexibility and Scalability: The platform allows for rapid development and adaptation of applications, as well as scaling them as data volumes and business needs grow.
• Single Source of Truth: Thanks to BDC’s capabilities, including SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere, we were able to create a centralized data repository, ensuring consistency and reliability of financial information across the entire organization.
• Enhanced Analytics and Predictive Capabilities: The presence of built-in business intelligence and predictive planning tools (for example, in SAP Analytics Cloud) not only accelerated current processes but also enabled liquidity forecasting, providing deep insights for decision-making.
• FP&A Process Optimization: Unifying all necessary functions on a single platform significantly reduced the time spent on planning, forecasting, and reporting, shifting access to metrics to an "on-demand" mode.

Key components of the solution included:

• Unified Financial Data Source: Leveraging SAP BDC and specifically SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, we integrated financial data from various sources, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud, into a single, reliable source of truth. This eliminated data fragmentation and ensured consistency across all 200 profit centers.
• Accelerated Analysis and Planning: The solution provides on-demand data access, significantly speeding up analysis and planning processes.
• Predictive Liquidity Planning: We implemented predictive liquidity planning, aligned with both public and private versions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for treasury and risk management.
• Business Intelligence, Planning, and Predictive Analytics Solutions: SAP Analytics Cloud serves as a core component for business intelligence, planning, and predictive analytics, including the mentioned predictive liquidity planning.
• Data Integration: SAP Integration Suite ensures seamless data integration from SAP S/4HANA and other financial systems, guaranteeing a continuous and accurate flow of information.
• Data Unification: SAP Datasphere is used to create a unified financial data source, consolidating data from various disparate sources.

Through this phased integration project, the company gained real-time insights and was able to align expectations across teams, significantly improving overall financial management efficiency.

Technology Stack

The solution is built on a scalable and integrated SAP technology stack, ensuring high performance and accuracy for financial operations:

• Core Platform: SAP BDC — provides the foundational cloud environment and services for developing and running applications, forming the basis of the entire solution.
• Analytics and Planning: SAP Analytics Cloud — the key component for business intelligence, planning, and predictive analytics, including predictive liquidity planning.
• Database: SAP HANA Cloud — (core of the SAP Datasphere) utilized for high-performance in-memory data storage and processing, enabling real-time operational analysis.
• Integration: SAP BTP Integration Suite — ensures seamless data integration from SAP S/4HANA and other financial systems.
• Data Unification: SAP Datasphere — used to create a unified source of financial truth, consolidating data from various disparate sources.
• Predefined toolset: Intelligent Applications & Data Products - improved delivery time since they provided a solid foundation that can be improved by the customer unique business needs

Results

Implementing the solution led to significant, measurable business benefits for the client:

• Improved Metric Delivery: Achieved a 95% improvement in delivering metrics to teams, reducing data retrieval time from three days to on-demand access. This radically accelerated access to current information. (Example: In a similar project, data retrieval time decreased from three days to instant access.)
• Team Unification: 320 employees were united under corporate plans, working with a single source of truth.
• Centralized Profitability Management: A single source of truth was used for 200 profit centers, ensuring consistency and accuracy of financial data across the entire organization.
• Aligned Expectations: The company was able to align expectations across teams due to real-time data access.
• Phased approach: to reduce the risks for the overall implementation project and prevent one-time “big-bang” modernization