Extended Planning & Analysis: Business Content

On this page, you will find helpful information and resources regarding Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A) topics including:

• xP&A @ SAP
• Enterprise Planning Process Framework
• Line of Business Planning Perspectives
  • Human Resources - HXM Operational Workforce Planning
  • Sales & Marketing - Commercial Planning
  • Finance - Financial Planning & Analysis
  • Cross LOB - Consensus Net Revenue Planning
• Partners Working on xP&A Content
• Customer Success Story with xP&A Content
• Maximizing the Value of xP&A 
• Vision for xP&A Content
• FAQ

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At SAP we are delivering an xP&A experience that combines Financial Planning with one or more other Line of Business planning processes. By connecting the various planning processes together in a holistic, interconnected enterprise planning framework, we are breaking down the traditional silos that exist across an enterprise. This then enables executives to get a comprehensive view of the true state of the business at any given time, and plan for the disruptions that are becoming a common reality in the global business landscape. A short introduction for xP&A can be found here: What is xP&A. 

On this page, we focus on showing and explaining the SAC content packages covering the area of xP&A. Each content package focuses on an individual business point of view, covering mid and long term time horizons. However given our xP&A focus, our goal is to connect the individual planning processes across business areas and align them while always keeping Financial governance at the core. With this finance focus, we strive to always enable planners the ability to see the financial impact of their operational plans and scenarios in real-time thus allowing them to make more informed decisions. In our xP&A Business Content packages, we deliver the base structure and base models for the individual Line of Business (LoB) planning processes and foresee an integration with other content packages thus accelerating implementation projects and time-to-value. With a holistic and standardized planning process in mind, we showcase how such an integration can be achieved. Beyond the standard Business Content, there is even more value to be realized in SAC Planning with capabilities like the SAC Planning Calendar which can be configured during project implementations to meet the specific needs of your enterprise.

In this community we want to start discussion around this complex and important topic, reach a shared understanding, and learn from you about the challenges you face and where we can help further. We will also regularly share information with you about new offerings, content, and capabilities.

We sincerely want to hear from you and will answer your questions and help drive discussions. please raise your questions here in the community. As well you can find all related blog posts with this Hashtag #Extended Planning and Analysis, make sure to follow it!

The Enterprise Planning process framework was built in collaboration with Accenture based upon our combined knowledge and experience designing, delivering, and deploying Enterprise Planning solutions. After several roundtables with a handful of customers, we detailed the end-to-end planning processes for manufacturing industries in four hierarchical levels of granular depth, although the top-most framework view depicted above is fairly common across many industries. This framework can be used as a process blueprint to help inform how a financial planning process can be expanded and interconnected with the rest of the enterprise. Within the framework, we find xP&A spanning across all functions, from finance to commercial to supply chain and human resources. It encompasses long term strategic planning, annual budgeting and mid-term extended integrated business planning cycles, the latter being an evolution of the sales & operations planning process that focuses on the combination of volume-based details from supply chain with value-based details from finance. The various functional processes within the main process cycles come together to form a cross-functional enterprise plan that is truly connected and collaborative, rather than sequential and disjointed. 

At SAP, we use the Enterprise Planning process framework to steer our xP&A content that we deliver with SAP Analytics Cloud. While each industry may have a unique flavor of such a framework, we attempt to identify the common aspects and deliver industry-agnostic content in order to address the broader market needs. For each xP&A content package we deliver, we have also documented the respective process describing and showcasing the typical and most relevant planning activities in the content. We invite you to contribute and enhance these processes for your individual needs. To get to know this xP&A Process Map, please check out the Business Process Landing Page where you will find links to the LoB-specific processes. Note: You will need an active SAP S-User account to login. 

You can directly provide feedback in the Process Tool, SAP Signavio, yourself by using the comment function and please keep in mind to raise your questions here in the community as well. For all other questions about xP&A Business Content, please, raise your questions here. 

Each line of business within your enterprise (Finance, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain) has their own planning process they are executing, often in a siloed and disconnected manner. The goal in terms of xP&A is to interconnect those plans and synchronize them throughout the entire enterprise.

LoBs which are already supported with standard business content for SAP Analytics Cloud are:

• Human Ressources with Operational Workforce Planning
• Sales & Marketing with Commercial Planning
• Finance with Financial Planning & Analysis

The Commercial Planning content is designed to allow Sales, Marketing, and Portfolio Managers to have the autonomy they desire during their 6-18 month planning processes while still maintaining alignment with Supply Chain and Finance. In order to achieve such alignment, this content brings value-based budgets from Finance together with volume-based baseline demand from Supply Chain as context for Sales and Marketing Planning. Portfolio Managers are able to plan list prices and respective revenue impacts of price changes. Sales Managers are able to plan Sales Activities and corresponding Revenue Plans. Marketing Managers are able to adjust Demand Plans based on Commercial drivers, plan Marketing Campaigns and corresponding Revenue Plans. The planned Sales and Marketing spend is then exported back to Supply Chain for updated demand forecasts to be generated and subsequently fed back into Supply and Cost planning. 

SAP currently offers two distinct sets of content packages for Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A). Both can add significant value in accelerating FP&A projects, therefore it would be wise to review both packages for the different types of planning throughout the FP&A function within the enterprise. While an overview of each of these packages is provided below, more details about the differences and guidance on selecting the best fit for your needs can be found in our “Accelerate Financial Planning & Analysis” discovery center mission.

The first set of packages, “Integrated Financial Planning for SAP S/4HANA” (IFP) supports the integrated financial planning process including cost center, product cost, sales & profitability, investment, P&L, balance sheet and cash flow planning. The different planning areas seamlessly play together, e.g. cost center planning provides the activity cost rates for product cost planning and product cost planning provides the product cost rates for the COGS calculation within profitability planning. In the end a plan scenario with complete P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statement is derived. Please enjoy the following materials to familiarize yourself with this content.

Arriving to a consensus on planned revenues is a critical step in the Extended Integrated Business Planning process. Finance, Supply Chain, and Commercial functions must align on the unconstrained demand that will be used in the subsequent supply chain planning activities. The Consensus Net Revenue Planning content package provides the ability to review the demand plans submitted by each of these functions, and collaboratively adjust the gross revenue in order to arrive at an unconstrained consensus demand plan. Three distinct scenarios are provided by default for such analysis to account for a pessimistic, neutral, and optimistic outlook before deciding on a final plan with which to move forward.

While SAP invests heavily into the production and delivery of standardized xP&A content, we recognize that every company’s journey with Enterprise Planning is unique, at some level, to that company’s business processes. In order to adapt standard best practices and associated content to such unique needs, you may desire additional support from SAP Consulting Services or one of our esteemed partners.  The following logos represent those experts in the field who have demonstrated knowledge and experience implementing xP&A for SAP customers by connecting one or more business planning processes together with Financial planning processes.  We encourage you to click on any of the companies below to learn more (listed in alphabetical order). If you are aware of a Partner who should be added to this list, please refer to our FAQ at the bottom of this page for details about inclusion here.

The xP&A business content presented here serves as a foundation and reference to help get you started quickly on your journey. As you further define the productive scenarios you wish to enable, there are configurations and extensions that can further assist in managing workflows, better aligning planners, and triggering actions based on planning results. Please enjoy the following showcases of such extensions:

• Enhancement of HXM Content with Calendar API Video / Blog
• Enhancement of Planning Workflow with Excel Planning Addin Video / Blog
• Enhancement of HXM Content with Insight-To-Action writeback to SAP SuccessFactors Video / Blog

The future vision for the xP&A content is to have a strong business data fabric upon which all planning and analysis content will be built. Functional data foundations will be leveraged to build planning and analytics models within the data fabric itself, which will be consumed by the planning and analytics content built in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Such an architecture would contain the following characteristics:

• Data federated and/or replicated from business applications to Cloud data warehouse
• Business data fabric modelled and catalogued across various information domains
• Planning and analytics models developed to support planning processes required by the business in a holistic, collaborative, and centralized manner
• Business content provided to support each line of business persona with a user experience that makes sense for their respective role

Please comment on the ideas listed below for future evolution of the xP&A vision within SAP. We are currently considering these future topics:

1. Line of Business-focused Data Foundation content upon which further content can be built
2. OpenSAP Course presenting the possible usage scenarios of the different xP&A content packages in an End-To-End process
3. Partner Hackathon to help enable the ecosystem on the xP&A content already available and identify new content extensions to co-innovate or develop and share
4. xP&A content package providing a workflow to orchestrate the activities of the LoB-specific content packages

What would you like to see?

• All community blog posts around #Extended Planning and Analysis
• Back to the Enterprise Planning expert page
• Back to the SAP Analytics Cloud community page
• Learn more about SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning with the
  SAP Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A) Learning Journey
• For our german understanding readers a podcast in the SAP series "Close the gap" by Christian Michel is available as well. The podcast starts explaining xP&A from a Business Problem point of view, explains the overarching strategy, covers the usage of content and details out specific elements of the content packages. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast or download it from the linked page.