Reducing cost, risk and cycle times whilst increasing transparency 

SAP planning can significantly reduce the cost and risk associated with your planning process, while driving down planning cycle times and vastly increasing transparency. However, SAP's planning toolset can be difficult to understand, and deciding which tool is the best for you is not always straightforward. Especially as planning and forecasting functionality currently exists in SCM(APO), CRM, BW and ERP.

Our experience of SAP planning, combined with our approach to your unique problems, will break through the confusion and allow you to construct a solution with measurable benefits and least risk.

Benefits of SAP planning

An SAP planning solution will address common issues such as:

• Long planning cycle time
• Lack of visibility and transparency during the planning process 
• No central view of the data or monitoring of the process
• Large effort in reconciling top-down targets and bottom-up planning
• Inconsistent data models, and high level of effort consolidating bottom-up data
• Risk of error during manual intervention
• More time spent arguing about the accuracy of the underlying numbers, rather than discussing the business issues that the forecast should be addressing 
• Low level of compliance with, e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley

And deliver benefits not only through reducing costs, but also increasing revenue such as:

• Faster period close
• Greater compliance with audit requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.
• Increased ROI on your investment in SAP
• Reduced Operating Costs through removing legacy planning applications
• Higher level of automation, bringing efficiency savings and greater risk control
• Greater ability to react to market conditions and increase revenue / market share, through speeding up the planning process and improving visibility
   

Packaged benefits delivery

SAP's flexible planning environment offers the capability to run a wide range of your planning processes in one, integrated place.

For organisations new to SAP NetWeaver-based planning, Bluefin can help identify an initial focus for a project that can move you towards your Integrated Business Plan vision or simply address a specific business issue to deliver benefit.

For SAP NetWeaver-based planning as with most of our solutions, from CRM to ERP to NetWeaver  the nature and success of early initiatives can form an ideal foundation for future planning projects.
Best practice shows that a phased and focused approach will deliver success for many reasons including: 

• Potential for a programme of projects to become self-financing 
• Builds momentum through early results and understanding
• Enables earlier return on investment
• Builds in-house capability more quickly and effectively
• Minimises the peak change load in an organisation
• Minimises technical complexity
• Minimises organisational complexity.