Despite the spike in digital transformation, many companies are still facing significant challenges when it comes to accurate forecasting and analysing plans. Whether that be strategic planning, budgeting or forecasting, in our experience, the reliance on offline spreadsheets and the use of siloed solutions tend to be the main culprits.

If planning takes up the majority of your day, then you’re most likely to be familiar with the term FP&A, which stands for financial planning and analysis.

In 2020, Gartner introduced extended Planning and Analytics, or xP&A for short, which is a planning approach that takes the best capabilities from FP&A, such as:

• continuous planning
• forecasting
• advanced analytics
• performance monitoring

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is SAP’s the latest tech solution to help businesses optimise their planning and analytics. Allowing users to plan, analyse, forecast, and collaborate all within a single interface. SAC is stuffed full of features that can be used to develop intricate planning and forecasting solutions.

Financial planning

Workforce planning

The organisations workforce planning solutions extract data from Success Factors – such as FTEs, salaries and benefits – and provides HR with a toolset that helps generate a plan covering different employee related costs.

Profitability

Profitability Planning solution provides users with the ability to generate a sales and revenue plan which is fully integrated into the organisations financial plan.

Due to the native integration between SAC and SAP IBP, the Supply and Demand quantities forecasted in SAP IBP can be used in SAP Analytics Cloud.