SAP BPC Customer Summit in Las Vegas Ends on Upbeat Note

Jan. 26, 2009 - PRLog -- Customers of SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC) software, after three days of networking with each other, as well as with experts on SAP BPC and key SAP staffers in the Office of the CFO solution area, were enthusiastic about the first SAP BPC Customer Summit.

The conference, hosted by Column 5 Consulting, started with a reception and networking event last Wednesday evening.  Friday, January 23rd, marked the close of the conference, and was the second full day of sessions.  Technical sessions on Friday included advanced reporting techniques, methods for creating business rules, performance tuning, and integration with business intelligence tools, along with an overview of the SAP Netweaver platform.

The Finance track featured sessions on the management process, including a workshop that provided a framework organizations can use as the basis for defining and documenting their management processes.  For Finance executives, the conference provided insight into best practices in planning, budgeting, forecasting and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), with a look at the impact these practices have on how organizations leverage BPC and other SAP products.

The American SAP User Group (ASUG) used this forum to create a new Management Process Special Interest Group (SIG), which held its inaugural meeting today.

SAP BPC customers Live Nation and Northern California Public Broadcasting (NCPB) presented case studies.

Live Nation is the largest producer of live concerts in the world, producing over 16,000 concerts for 1,500 artists in 57 countries each year.  Live Nation reported that they chose SAP BPC to provide driver-based, bottoms-up planning, rolling forecast capability, and robust analytical reporting.  To plan accurately for upcoming shows, for example, the application allows them to enter statistics such as number of tickets sold, average cost, etc., to calculate revenue and expense.  Each month this bottoms-up information is loaded into the system and an updated forecast and plan are produced that reflect the current real world data.  Challenges include large volumes of data from worldwide operations, a constantly changing organization structure, high expectations for performance and up-time, and auditing and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements.  Highly valued by Live Nation is BPC’s ability to provide the exact reports they need at any given time, in just minutes.  The time to produce their financial packages was reduced by up to 50% using SAP BPC, vs. their prior system.

NCPB is the most-watched public television and most-listened-to public radio broadcaster in the country.  NCPB said that they set out to improve their decision making, and to simplify a planning cycle that involved over 600 spreadsheets and took five months.  Also, their financial consolidation and forecasting processes took so long that they were not able to react in a timely fashion.  Using SAP BPC, they were able to cut consolidation time from six weeks to a matter of seconds, while gaining the ability forecast with greater accuracy and to make better, more timely decisions.  Column 5 was able to provide an experienced lead consultant to enable NCPB to meet its aggressive implementation timeline.

More information about the conference can be found at http://www.column5.com/summit.htm.

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Column 5 is one of the fastest growing consulting orgs in the U.S., providing top expertise in business performance management (BPM). Column 5 consultants have implemented SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) software for over 300 customers.