Planning Applications

Use

The SEM-BPS planning applications are used to solve standard tasks of business planning, for example, balance sheet or profit planning, with as little configuration work as possible. Some of the delivered planning applications are more specialized and show how you can solve typical planning tasks in the context of a specific industry (for example, CMCP Planning in the retail sector).

Specialized types of planning functions (for example, net present value or offsetting entry), Business Content of the SAP Business Information Warehouse (InfoCubes and InfoObjects), as well as preconfigured planning objects reconciled to this (for example, planning areas, levels and functions) belong to a planning application. In addition, sample data is available for some planning applications (for master and transaction data), which is also part of the delivery. You can execute the respective planning task immediately with these means. Planning applications are based on the elementary planning objects and functions, which you edit in the planning environment.

The planning applications are partly designed so that instead of the Planning Environment, an alternative user interface is used, which only offers the objects which are relevant for the respective application.

As a rule, you will use the planning applications first as sample scenarios to get an immediate idea of the uses of SEM-BPS. You can then either adjust the delivered applications to the conditions in your enterprise, or copy the appropriate objects and modify the copied objects correspondingly.

You should always execute the desired adjustments to copies of the objects delivered by SAP. Otherwise your adjustments could be overwritten by later deliveries.

In addition, planning applications can be used as complex, analytical tools to execute extensive evaluation of the data available in the data basis. An example of this is the Capital Market Interpreter, with which you can execute capital market orientated calculations and valuations using the SEM-BPS data basis.

Integration

The planning applications are based on the planning objects, which you can set up cross-application in the planning area. For this reason, you make adjustments to these planning objects for your enterprise-specific requirements in the planning environment. You adjust the planning applications suited to the Business Content using the SAP BW Administrator Workbench.

Furthermore, the different planning applications partly use the same key figures. As a result of this, interactions occur between the different subplans, which are presented as an example in the following graphic:

Prerequisites

To test the planning applications with the delivered sample data (master and transaction data), you must first import the sample data into your SEM System. You will find more detailed information about the procedure in the section Generating Sample Data. If you want to work directly with your own data, you can of course ignore this section.

SAP delivers the planning objects, from which almost all the planning applications presented here are put together (planning areas, levels) in the client 000.  To be able to use the applications in your production client, you must first execute a client copy. To find out how you proceed in detail, see Generating Sample Data.

Features

SEM-BPS contains among other things the following planning applications:

·        Balance Sheet Planning:
In balance sheet planning, you can plan the plan items of the balance sheet, income statement, and the cash flow calculation.

·        Profit Planning:
Here you can plan the quantities of products as well as the revenue made from this in the mixed top-down/bottom-up planning system. The absolute amounts as well as the percentage change can be planned, where the other value is calculated automatically.

·        Cost Center Planning:
Here you plan the necessary budget of cost centers in the organizational structure of your company. You identify and value the relevant cost drivers, define manually entered prices (also called “political prices”) for the internal activity allocation and enter primary and secondary costs.

·        Personnel Planning:
With this planning application, you execute a combined planning of the number of employees and the costs resulting from this at aggregated level.

·        Sales Planning:
This planning application helps you to concentrate your sales activities on the most profitable customers (or customer groups) and products. You plan quantities and revenues, sales and marketing costs as well as the contribution margins on different levels.

·        Investment Planning:
In the context of investment planning, you execute preinvestment analyses for a planned investment. Instead of an individual investment, you can also plan an investment program. You can let the results of investment planning flow into balance sheet planning as current acquisitions in the asset portfolio, and flow into profit planning with regard to the return on investment changed by the investment.

·        Liquidity Planning:
With this application, you can plan the available liquid funds period-specific and taking account of the various currencies which are relevant for the subsidiaries involved. The planning horizon extends over six months and is updated rolling.

·        Simplified Resource Planning:
With this application, you can estimate the impending overloading of individual production places on the basis of the itemization of product costing, compare the planned volume with den processing and delivery capacities as well as create a forecast of the total cost development.