It’s natural to assume that your large customers, who unquestionably are the source of most of your revenue, also deliver the major part of your profit. The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers and assumes that the 20% are represented by the largest customers.

Within today’s business landscapes there has been a shift of power to the CFO (Finance) away from the 1990’s technology driven CIO (IT). IT is often seen as a cost rather than profit center. Elements once considered directly under the CIO business plans have been shifted to the new profit center under Finance, FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) or the CFO’s office.

The SAP EPM Mobility suite continues to gain momentum, most recently with the addition of Planning and Consolidation (BPC) to the SAP EPM Unwired app. SAP announced a mobile version of BPC in October 2012, and demonstrated the mobile app at SAP Financials 2013 in Las Vegas. 

"They spill more beer than we make in a year!" That line was from a great beer commercial for a small brewery that claimed small, handmade batches (or microbrews) were superior to the huge commercial operations of the beer manufacturing kings. Consequently, sales of "microbrews" took off, with consumers deciding that selecting a personal favorite from a market rich with a variety of choices was superior to buying beer from the monolith that had "regular" and "light" to choose from.

If you’ve read anything which has come from SAP in the last few months you will have heard of HANA. I understood that SAP thought it was very important but didn’t really understand what it was and how it was going to affect me. After some reading, attending a couple of courses and being involved in some discussions with SAP I know a little more and would like to share it with you.

You've heard the staggering metrics; The fastest growing segment of computing and internet access is within the mobility segment. Countries that may have limited hardwired infrastructure rely on cutting edge wireless communication networks to get internet access in the most primitive and remote locations. Emerging markets have leapfrogged more developed and mature economies in terms of the role mobile devices play in initiating transactions, granting access, and maintaining connections.

Do you ever wonder if you are keeping up with the plethora of project management methodologies? Waterfall, Scrum, Agile, Lean, ASAP,  Agile Waterfall and Sprints form just a handful of concepts. What is a project management methodology anyway and how do you choose the most appropriate one for your Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC) or Business Intelligence (BI) SAP project?

SAP has recently released Service Pack 9 for Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) 10, Netweaver version, with some notable enhancements that are worth discussing.  There are three that we are speaking of specifically:

• Support for Time Dependent Hierarchy
• Parallel execution framework is implemented
• MDX on HANA

This is Part 2 of 2 dealing with EPM Integration and Financial Information Management. If you have not read Part 1 discussing Installation, please read it first. For me, there are two components to configuration.  First there are systematic configurations to bring the environment up and running.  And then there is usability configuration to setup user & groups (although it’s part of environment configuration...), but most importantly creating and configuring data store connections.