To manage performance efficiently, midsize companies need a unified planning, budgeting, and consolidation solution. The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Planning and Consolidation application streamlines the planning process and produces management reports that instill confidence and reduce business risk.
CFOs and other senior managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize profitability, reduce operational costs, minimize risk, and improve stakeholder confidence. That pressure is even higher in a slow economy when revenue forecasts are at risk and profitability is in danger.
To be effective, business leaders need reliable, up-to-date financial and operational data both for planning purposes and for budgeting, forecasting, analysis, and statutory and management reporting. They need to be able to integrate corporate and departmental planning, model cost scenarios, and perform sensitivity analysis in order to determine operational budgets based on strategic plans and assumptions. They also need a way to help ensure a fully documented audit trail and compliance with regulatory mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for consolidating and reporting company information. The key to their success is an effective planning and consolidation environment.
Midsize companies face the additional pressure of having to operate with limited IT resources. Hence, they often resort to unmanaged spreadsheets for planning and consolidation, rendering the process chaotic, frustrating, and ineffective. The spreadsheets give them familiar modeling functionalities but lack structured processes and centralized data – resulting in significant time and manual effort throughout the planning process. Budgeting can quickly deteriorate into a “spreadsheet nightmare” in which operations managers submit unrealistic budgets, executives change figures without the operations managers’ knowledge, and version control problems multiply. There is a risk of errors resulting from a lack of checks and balances when entering or updating data. Statutory consolidations can be equally problematic when data is distributed across different departments, systems, and even countries.
The problem is made worse when critical operational and financial information is scattered across multiple applications and databases, or trapped as unstructured data residing in employee spreadsheets or e-mail attachments. Changing to a packaged software solution is usually too complex and expensive to meet the needs of midsize organizations. That’s why most of these organizations continue to settle for unmanaged spreadsheets – and to operate at a significant competitive disadvantage.
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Planning and Consolidation application addresses these issues by providing an integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation solution designed specifically for midsize organizations. The solution bridges the gap between the creation of financial and business plans and the daily operation of those plans – and does so at a cost midsize organizations can afford. By offering an integrated set of planning and budgeting tools and providing an intuitive, userfriendly solution, it helps align plans across the entire organization – driving great results no matter the size of the organization. That’s why many midsize companies are turning to SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation.
