All you wanted to know about SAP BPC,
but you didn’t ask.
From a finance perspective, it’s a tool that helps small and big companies to go through the finance plannification and consolidation.
BPC = Business Planning and Consolidation
If you are new and you don’t understand a lot about finance, the plannification will help the company to do prospects about short/long period of time about the expenses or the profits the company will have, having in mind the past and actual data.
About the consolidation, it’s possible to use it when 2 or more companies do a merge in a specific way and they want to show their finance results as it will be just one company. The consolidation will just delete any sale operation done between them, this way wrong results will be avoided. If you want to know more about this, you will find a nice surprise, just log on into our newsletter to know more.
Why you say that there are 2 versions of SAP BPC ? Microsoft and Netweaver
We need to understand a bit of history. SAP BPC is actually owned by SAP AG, a German company, that years ago acquired it to Outlooksoft when BPC’s name was CPM. That is one of the main reason that actually there are 2 different versions of BPC, the Microsoft one(MS) and the Netweaver one(NW).
At the beginning SAP started with the Microsoft version but some years later developed a new version known as SAP BPC Netweaver. In very general terms, the “main” difference between them is the database they use and how you can access the data stored in them.
The Microsoft version uses Oracle database, and the developers can access to the data stored here and interact directly with the tables using SQL. The great advantage of this is that develop profiles, can fix issues easily, access the data faster or do their own views using this version. The disadvantage is that you can delete all database if you are a bit new on this.
Acces to the Microsoft’s DDBB
By other side the Netweaver version, can use several databases as: SAP DB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, some IBM ones or SAP HANA. To interact with any of these databases, SAP adds a new tool called SAP BW (Business Warehouse). While in Microsoft version you could use SQL directly in the database, in BW you will use “transactions” that are pre-defined commands that will allow you to interact with the system in a great variety of ways. SAP BW will also help to communicate with other SAP tools.
SAP BW accediendo a la arquitectura
Is important to mention, that SAP BPC has suffered many changes and improvements through the different versions, we will review this in a future entrance.
What means these 2 versions to the user that only inputs data through Excel (controller)?
Well, not too much, the most viewable difference for the controller could be that the Netweaver uses a “chain of logics” or BPFs that will help to control better processes like the monthly closings. The user’s profile that suffers more with this kind of differences are the developers, as the way of interact with the data is totally different and require very different skills.
The Excel has changed through the different versions
