Business Process Flow, a component (Web based user interface) within SAP BPC. Why is it required? What it does and what it takes to get it ready to work. Let’s have a look.
Before we do that; let’s try to understand different Forecasting & Planning Cycles possibly an organization can have. Budget is generally done once a year. Forecasts can be done either monthly or quarterly depending on the need of the organization. Effort required to complete these budgeting & forecasting cycle vary depending on the nature of the business, size of the business, product-market matrix and so on, so forth. Employees, Managers, Budget Holders, Department heads, Division heads from different divisions located in different countries participate, contribute in order to achieve one single consolidated Budget or Forecast for the parent organization. This is quite a task, which requires a lot of coordination. Literally impossible to coordinate these activities in time, with accuracy and manually.
There comes the need of a tool like SAP BPC’s Business Process Flow (BPF), which is: A workflow driven component of BPC:
- Which guides users, reminds the users to complete the task, review the inputs/tasks/data, reminds what to complete, the sequence of these tasks to execute.
- Through email notification, monitoring ability & status tracking, it helps in coordination.
- Real time simulation, helps in early detection of potential issues during a planning cycle
- Integration with “Consolidation central” solves issues by working out; Opening Balance, Closing Balance, Reclassification figures, which were not possible from “Consolidation central” alone. So the entire set of tasks for a month-end process or year end process or Actual submission or Forecast submission or Budget Submission can be done from BPF window, seamlessly and efficiently.
- The tool can be used for user assignment to specific tasks & assigning authorizations to these users, within the scope of a particular forecasting cycle.
- The concept of Data Locking from previous SAP Planning tool (BPS or IP) has been provides in BPC, as part of BPF component.
- Detailed report delivery & Work status integration are some of the essential features, which provided completeness.
