Purpose

Business Planning (EC-BP) enables you to produce a group-wide business plan at a high level. The business plan supplements the detailed plans of the operative components with a planning facility that encompasses all the components and participating companies. The aim of EC-BP is to produce a consistent and realistic plan that improves the efficiency of the enterprise and the management process.

Implementation Considerations

(EC-BP) is a component for recording and evaluating aggregated plan data. You can use it to collect and maintain data from various functional plan sections in one uniform view.

Integration

EC-BP has the same data basis and data collection facilities as EC-EIS. You can also use the EC-BP functions to create a report on your plan data.

In this documentation, unless noted otherwise, the sections Data Basis (EC-EIS/EC-BP) , Data Collection (EC-EIS/EC-BP) and Tools (EC-EIS/EC-BP) are relevant for both applications. The section Information System (EC-EIS) is only relevant if you wish to edit reports on plan data in EC-EIS.

Features

The EC-BP data structures are integrated with those of EC-EIS. If you implement EC-EIS, you have the advantage of being able to use and supplement the data pool in EC-BP. The data pool is organized into individual sub-sections of summarized business information called aspects. You can define these specifically for your enterprise for example, cash position, human resources, logistics. In addition to the available data contained in the aspects, you can transfer plan data from the various operative systems for example, financial information system, human resources information system, logistics information system, cost accounting etc.

For each aspect you can produce plans that portray different planning views for example, by group or business area, or you can produce sub-plans portraying investments or sales, for example. You can either enter your data manually or edit it automatically. In addition to planning values, you can also plan prices and quantities using appropriate formulas.

Using versions you can store various scenarios for the same time period. You can produce plans for a fiscal year, and also cross-yearly plans, for example, June 1998 - March 1999.

To construct the screen for interactive planning you configure planning layouts using characteristics and key figures from the data basis. You can also define formulas for locally-calculated key figures. The system saves the plan data bottom-up, which means that data from a lower level is aggregated to the next highest level.

Planners can use the interface of the planning processor (familiar from other applications) or Excel-In-Place. Excel-In-Place combines a Microsoft Excel interface with the planning functions of EC-BP. If you produce plan documents with Excel, you can save and edit them on your PC. After completion of the plan section, you can import the data back into EC-BP.

In automatic planning, the system generates plan data based on user-defined premises. After you have set the parameters for automatic planning, and have initiated the automatic planning run, the system generates and posts the plan data automatically.

Apart from recording plan data, there are various functions available for editing your plan data. Using revaluations, you can either increase or decrease the plan data by a certain percentage. Seasonal distribution keys help to distribute the data from year level to period level. Top-down planning distributes aggregated data to lower levels on the basis of reference data from a different version or a different time period. Using statistical methods, you can have the system forecast plan data on the basis of previous data. In the automatic planning, the statistical methods (forecast profiles), distribution keys and revaluation factors can refer to specific combinations of characteristic values.

Because EC-BP and EC-EIS share a common data basis, you can use EC-EIS functions to report on the plan data. For example, you can produce plan/actual comparisons, navigate through the data, create exceptions, and send the report to your manager using SAPoffice functions.

In this documentation, the application functions are described in detail and the customizing functions in brief. The information is intended for the EC-BP user, but also for the EC-BP system manager. To access the EC-BP application menu, choose  Accounting Enterprisecontrolling Business planning .

Carry out all necessary preliminary tasks and settings in Customizing. For more information about Customizing functions, see the implementation guidelines.