This session provides an overview of the top financial industry benchmarks, best practices, and trends to help your team create a sound strategy for all planning and consolidation initiatives.

• Prepare for the steps you need to take to achieve unified planning, consolidation, and management reporting across your business, including process alignment, data harmonization and change management
• See how your organization measures up to the top 2011 industry benchmarks for planning and consolidation, such as time-to-close and the overall time spent on planning
• Get detailed answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, including how the solution can scale to meet an organization's unique needs
• Understand and prepare for the effects of specific regulatory and economic initiatives on your financial planning
• Explore some of the key trends within the financials industry, such as rolling forecasting, driver-based budgeting and IFRS conversion, and examine how they can be applied in your organization
  
   
• Session presented by: Jens Koerner, SAP Labs

This session provides SAP and SAP BusinessObjects customers with the product updates, comparisons, and guidelines needed to choose the right budgeting, planning, and consolidation tools.

• Step through demonstrations and in-depth explorations of the functionality, requirements, limitations, and usability of: SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, SAP NetWeaver BW Integrated Planning, SEM Business Consolidation Systems, and EC-CS
• Understand the operational and end-user effects of SAP's new solution releases — such as BPC version 10.0 — and maintenance strategy on your own solution adoption decisions
• Find out how each planning and consolidation solution affects a company's ability to meet evolving audit requirements
• Prepare for the change management effort required when migrating from IT-centric applications, such as SAP NetWeaver BW Integrated Planning functionality, to business-centric applications, such as BPC
• Evaluate these tools and their cost/benefit impact on budgeting, planning, and consolidation processes
  
   
• Session presented by: Jens Koerner, SAP Labs

See demonstrations and drill down into the capabilities, interfaces, process flows, and unique terminology of both the SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft versions of BPC.

• Explore the five user inteface options in BPC — Web, Server Manager, Microsoft Office, Word, and PowerPoint — and learn what is required to access them
• Learn how to leverage business process flows (BPFs) to guide users through a sequence of tasks and see how data is imported, exported, copied, and moved via data manager packages
• Walk through the four distinct methods of creating new reports and input schedules (i.e., EvDRE Builder, drag-and-drop reporting, dynamic templates, or creating them from scratch) and know which method to use, depending on your needs
• Familiarize yourself with the key application design differences between SAP NetWeaver BW and BPC
• Understand the significance of the action pane, current view and dynamic hierarchy editor when creating input schedules and reports
• Find out how critical differences between the version for SAP NetWeaver and the version for the Microsoft platform affect every aspect of your project, including necessary skill sets and data modeling approach
  
   
• Session presented by: David Dixon, TekLink

This session illustrates the most important planning and forecasting scenarios within BPC and offers tips to help you achieve more streamlined and effective planning.

• Step through examples and get best practices to build and execute the following planning scenarios: top down distributions, sales and operations planning (S&OP), cost center allocations, and account transformations
• See how to use the spread modeling function to allocate values across destination cells, such as months of the year
• Learn how to use the administration console to add master data to your planning scenario
• Observe an annual budgeting process as executed via the Microsoft Excel user interface
• Find out how to compare actuals to forecasts within BPC
• Understand how to perform key financial calculations such as allocations and distributions
  
   
• Session presented by: Scott Cairncross, TruQua Enterprises

In this session, get expert lessons to optimize month-end closing activities and ensure accurate and compliant consolidated reports.

• View a best practice approach for using BPC to execute six critical period-end closing steps: load and validate data, create journal entries, perform currency translation, perform intercompany reconciliations and eliminations, execute consolidation of investments, and run reports
• Understand the concept of IC matching, and learn how business process workflows play a crucial role in speeding up financial close
• See how to create a transparent audit trail to ensure compliance with internal policies as well as external regulations
• View examples of pre-consolidated and consolidated reports within BPC
  
   
• Session presented by: David Dixon, TekLink

This deep-dive session provides step-by-step instruction to help new and experienced users alike optimize their planning processes using BPC.

• View detailed demonstrations and get best practices for performing common planning scenarios, including: headcount planning, sales and operations planning (S&OP), capital expenditure planning, and profitability planning
• Learn how to analyze your company's balance sheet, statement of profit and loss, and statement of cash flow to identify weaknesses in your financial plan
• Evaluate the three distinct options for bringing pre-delivered planning and consolidation content into your BPC environment: consulting accelerator, starter kit, and business analytics solution (BAS)
• Delve into the benefits of using the starter kit available with BPC, such as leveraging pre-delivered content for liquidity planning
• Explore the concept of business analytics solutions (BAS) with BPC, and understand how it supports supply and demand planning
  
   
• Session presented by: Jens Koerner, SAP Labs

Step through proven approaches for leveraging BPC to streamline closes and consolidation and ensure the accuracy and compliance of consolidated reports — both within business units and across global entities.

• Get best practices (such as leveraging the proper design of your entity structures) for performing both management consolidation and legal consolidation
• Understand the different accounting options within BPC, such as one-sided versus double-sided eliminations, and guage which would best meet your team's financial needs
• Learn how to create business rules to optimize common consolidation activities, including: currency translation, carry-forwards, intercompany bookings, and account transformations
• Get best practices for performing three different methods of investment consolidation — purchase, proportional, and equity
• Find out why entities and account dimensions are a critical element of master data management
• Learn how to use the starter kit to boost your consolidation project
  
   
• Session presented by: David Dixon, TekLink

This session offers strategies for successful data integration between SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and your other SAP and non-SAP systems to ensure the accuracy of your financial reports and calculations.

• Learn how to leverage the data manager in conjunction with the ETL engine to load flat files or SAP NetWeaver BW data into BPC
• Discover how the BPC version for SAP NetWeaver versus the version for Microsoft integrate differently with SAP systems
• Acquire insight into the technical integration points between BPC and SAP NetWeaver BW
• Understand how data should flow from other SAP systems into BPC to perform common business processes
• Review the top data integration challenges experienced by SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation users — such as determining which allocations to execute — and get best practices for overcoming them
• Explore creative solution architectures that will allow you to leverage real-time data for fast financial closes
  
   
• Session presented by: Jens Koerner, SAP Labs

Examine the various data modeling options available within BPC, such as creating distinct application sets or workbooks, and evaluate the impact each option has on your solution's security, performance and usability.

• Explore best practices for determining dimension types and incorporating planned/actual data into your overall data strategy
• Get criteria to help you decide whether to take a data mart versus enterprise data warehouse (EDW) approach to modeling BPC data
• Gain insight into when you should leverage application sets versus application modeling to ensure optimized performance
• Leave with guidance for compounding time dependencies and determine whether to limit the size of your characteristic values ahead of time, or generate new characteristic values to intergeate with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation
• Understand the impact your data model design will have on script logic and custom coding
• Discover best practices for pulling non-account-based models (e.g., from SAP NetWeaver BW Integrated Planning) into BPC
  
   
• Session presented by: Scott Cairncross, TruQua Enterprises

This session explores the many adoption and migration paths available when moving from other SAP planning and consolidation tools to SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation.

• Get answers to critical decisions that must be made before embarking on a BPC implementation; for example, whether to start with planning or consolidation
• Determine whether older SAP solutions you may be running still have a role in your planning and consolidation processes, even if you use BPC
• Compare and contrast the effort involved in migrating to BPC from another planning application versus a "greenfield" implementation
• Gather implementation best practices that will make future enhancements and global rollout projects easier and less costly
• Understand the unique migration scenarios when migrating data from SEM Business Consolidation Systems, SAP NetWeaver BW Integrated Planning and EC-CS to BPC
• Hear detailed, real-world examples that illustrate the successes and challenges experienced by other SAP customers who have chose to adopt BPC
• Gain an understanding of how much BPC functionality can be used "out of the box" and what needs to be customized, depending on your needs
• Walk through the key criteria — such as your use of on-the-fly calculations — to determine whether data migration or re-implementation of BPC would be better for your organization
  
   
• Session presented by: Scott Cairncross, TruQua Enterprises

When it comes to financial planning and consolidation, reporting is key. This session provides detailed instruction for leveraging complementary SAP BusinessObjects solutions to ensure accurate, user-friendly reports and analyses.

• Navigate a decision tree to identify the pros and cons of two distinct reporting strategies: leveraging SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions in conjunction with BPC and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver, Excel client
• Step through demonstrations that illustrate how to leverage the reporting tools native to BPC, including SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Live Reporting
• Assess the strengths and limitations of using specific SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions with BPC, including Xcelsius®, SAP Crystal Reports® and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®
• Map each of these reporting tools to specific report types, including profit and loss, balance sheets, and cash flow
• Understand your options for report customization — such as embedding an Xcelsius dashboard within your BPC workbook — to meet your unique financial reporting requirements
  
   
• Session presented by: Scott Cairncross, TruQua Enterprises

While BPC is touted as a business-centric, user-oriented solution, it can still be a complex technology that requires enterprise-level technical administration and development. This session offers models for IT-finance collaboration, as well as governance, that are a must for any company wishing to succeed with BPC.

• Acquire best practices for establishing and maintaining an efficient communication strategy between the business and IT, both during a BPC implementation project, and long after go-live
• Learn how to determine early on what roles IT and the business will play with regard to BPC
• Find out how your peers at other companies have dealt with challenges, such as defining a clear project approach (departmental versus enterprise) and performing proper gap analysis
• Discuss proven communication methods to employ during the requirements gathering and scoping phase of your BPC initiative, such as holding workshops, utilizing governance frameworks and leveraging project dictionaries
• Get tips for gauging how much flexibility end users will have and what will be controlled by IT, depending on your organization’s policies and culture
• Walk away with strategies for building and sustaining a solid bridge between business and IT
  
   
• Session presented by: David Dixon, TekLink

Whether you currently run SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation or are implementing it for the first time, the seven lessons offered in this session are a must to guarantee high ROI and a successful deployment.

• Weigh the pros and cons of running BPC on the same (or separate) instance as SAP NetWeaver BW
• Understand the barriers and challenges of obtaining a unified planning and consolidation environment, such as proper data alignment, and get tips for overcoming them in your organization
• Hear the top 10 frequently asked questions surrounding BPC implementations, data migration, and performance optimization, including: How will BPC fit into my unified planning strategy? Will BPC scale to meet my organization’s needs? How can I ensure BPC is running as quickly and efficiently as possible? What are the benefits of using the SAP BusinessObjects BI tools combined with BPC for my reporting needs?
  
   
• Session presented by: Jens Koerner, SAP Labs