The objective of the privately held manufacturing company's project was to implement SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) for budgeting and forecasting in order to replace the existing spreadsheet-based budgeting process. This project brought together a team of experts from different lines of business from IT, Finance and the manufacturing company’s implementation partner, Analysis Prime, to achieve a common goal. The goal was to implement a planning solution leveraging SAP Analytics Cloud that aligned with the business strategy, met the needs of different departments, and was supported by scalable and efficient IT solutions.
By using SAC, the manufacturing company aimed to achieve an accurate and consistent budgeting approach and traceability within the budget to ensure alignment within various parts of the organization. Additionally, SAC allowed the company to easily integrate with other SAP systems such as BW, BPC and SuccessFactors. This also enabled the manufacturing company to provide cost-center-level budgets and the ability to have multiple forecasts as well as hour variables for different company codes, and do fixed and variable calculations. The traceability of changes and optimized usage of the system versus Excel or other systems were also some of the key benefits of this project.
However, the team had to work through some challenges involving data calculations related to models, structure and hierarchy decisions. Despite these challenges, we recognized significant business value, such as real-time changes to the budget, version control, governance, efficiencies of data connectivity and budget owner visibility. During the project, the manufacturing company learned the importance of iterations and the need to stay aligned with the implementation partner, Analysis Prime, during the development process. We also didn't anticipate the amount of change and adjustment that switching from an offline process to an integrated system requires.