Strategic Business Planning 
Strategic Business Planning
Purpose
Strategic business planning 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 which encompasses all the components and participating companies. The aim of business planning is to produce a consistent and realistic plan from various perspectives. The plan should improve the efficiency of the enterprise and the management process.
Business Planning is a planning system, in which you can record and evaluate aggregated plan data. It is suitable for the collection and maintenance of data from the various functional plan sections in one uniform view.
The EC-BP data structures are integrated with those of the Executive Information System (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).
You can produce plans for each aspect which portray different planning views (for example, by group or business area), or you can produce sub-plans which portray investments or sales, for example. You can either enter your data manually or process it automatically.
Versions allow you to maintain various plan scenarios for any particular time period. You can produce plans for a fiscal year, and also cross-yearly plans, for example, June 1999 - March 2000.
The screen used for interactive planning is structured using planning layouts. You can configure these planning layouts as you wish. Here, you can use the characteristics and key figures from the data basis, and you can also define formulas for locally-calculated key figures. The planned data is saved bottom-up, which means that data from a lower level is aggregated to the next highest level. In addition to planning values, you can also plan prices and quantities using appropriate formulas.
You may opt for the R/3 interface of the planning processor which is familiar from other applications, or you may integrate Microsoft Excel into the R/3 System. This method links the Microsoft Excel interface with the EC-BP planning functions. If you produce plan documents with Excel, you can save and further edit these 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 started the automatic planning run, the plan data is generated and updated automatically.
Apart from recording plan data, there are various functions available for editing your plan data. Using revaluations, you can increase or decrease your plan data values by a certain percentage. Seasonal distribution factors help you distribute the data from the year level to the 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 project plan data based on historical figures. In automatic planning, the statistical methods (forecast profiles), distribution keys and revaluation factors can relate to certain combinations of characteristic values.
The fact that EC-BP and EC-EIS share a common data basis means that 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.
Process
Result: data model