Evaluating the Profit Planning Process

The Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for SAP Simple Finance applications provide a consistent view of the planning process. From the UI perspective, all planning applications can be accessed by a Microsoft Excel front-end to provide a homogeneous look and feel. There are no longer silos for the planning data. All planning data is now contained in a real-time info cube of the local Business Warehouse (BW), which is optimized for SAP HANA. Actual data and master data are accessed directly in real time without any replication that would be necessary in a standalone BW.

With SAP software for financial planning and analysis, you can plan and allocate your resources to market and strategy. They develop and cascade strategies, model cost drivers, improve forecast accuracy, and analyze huge amounts of data. Your employees streamline the budgeting process, take advantage of growth opportunities, circumvent forecast deviations, and modify business processes. The result is a higher profitability and a perfect coordination of their tactical measures with the company strategy.

Sales and profit planning is an integrated process involving various roles within profitability and sales accounting. These roles include sales managers, regional managers, and sales employees.

Planners can use various planning approaches, such as central top-down planning and local bottom-up planning.

The planning tool in CO-PA offers planners a conglomerate, uniform, modern, and straightforward graphical planning interface. This interface ensures that the power user, who models and monitors the planning process, and occasional users, who only occasionally confirm planning values, can work together.

The content and level of information of individual plans varies depending on the planner's role and area of responsibility. For this reason, the planning screen in CO-PA allows you to structure planning selectively according to specific planning levels and planning contents, and assign that planning structure to individual users.

Your planning structure is represented in a tree hierarchy. From the initial planning screen, you can execute almost all the planning functions, from modeling the planning process and monitoring the planning tasks to the manual entry of the planning data.

In costing-based CO-PA, you use the SAP Fiori apps for planning. The data is updated in the CO-PA tables.

In actual release 1610, you cannot transfer the data to FI GL and Profit Center Accounting (PCA) in the New GL.

In Margin Analysis, the plan data is updated in tables COEJ (plan line items) and COSP (plan total).

Taking into account a typical sales and profit planning process, a professional planning tool must have the following functionality:

• Support for the individual planners by guiding them to the planning levels needed for planning.

• Support for the individual planners by providing personalized access to the required plan data using planning packages.

• A set of relevant planning functions, such as valuations and simulations, to apply the required planning packages using planning methods and parameters.

The figure, Manual Planning: App, shows the steps required to perform manual planning. You can use this app for costing-based CO-PA.

For planning in Margin Analysis, you can transfer the plan data to SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning.

Before you start with manual planning in CO-PA, you must consider the planning version. While the actual data in CO-PA is not updated using a planning version, you need the settings for the planning version in CO-PA.

The settings are as follows:

• Currency Type:

  Currency Type can plan in a currency that defers from the group currency used in the controlling area.

• Exchange Rate Type:

  Exchange Rate Type defines the exchange rate type to calculate the amount in the controlling currency relative to the operating concern currency.

• Check Derivation:

  Check Derivation determines whether the profitability segments planned are to be checked for compatibility with the derivation strategy.

• Derivation Date:

  Derivation Date is used in planning to specify rules valid for a specific date on which characteristic derivation is performed.

• Characteristic Group:

  Characteristic Groups are used to hide, sort and group certain characteristics on screens where you specify the profitability segment for Profitability Analysis. You can decide whether a manual entry in each field should be mandatory, optional, or not allowed.

• Controllers use CO-PA to plan sales by customer, product, and product group.

• Planning involves systematic distribution from product group to product level.

• CO-PA planning uses SAP Fiori apps for a modern graphical interface.

• Planning structure is represented in a tree hierarchy for selective planning.