Business Challenges and Objectives

• The client was in the process of migrating to S/4HANA and required assistance to choose the best-suited SAP Planning Solution that is compatible with S/4HANA.
• They were experiencing issues with their existing planning solution, which was manual, inflexible resulting in long closing and planning cycles.

TekLink was approached to:

• Recommend ways to address their system issues
• Assist in the selection of the best SAP Planning solution compatible with S/4 HANA
• Device business roadmap to simplify integration and operation

The Solution

TekLink provided a holistic solution including Advisory, Technical and Functional services. The holistic solution was multi-phased and involved assessments, recommendations, roadmaps, implementation, and maintenance.

• Advisory Services
  • TekLink performed an assessment that included:
  • Holding workshops with different user groups to identify requirements and pain–points of the current planning process.
  • Liaising with S/4 Team members to understand plans and align roadmaps.
  • Reviewing existing planning team composition and responsibilities.
  • Evaluating existing technology stack to determine what is the most appropriate SAP tool for them.

• Assessment documents were analyzed and the following were the findings:
  • The existing BPC solution although migrated from 7.5, was not optimally tuned to leverage the features of the 10.1 or the new EPM Add-In.
  • Several design flaws were identified that prevented the solution to scale to the changing and growing business.
  • Misconception prevailed regarding BPC among users
  • Lack of training in reporting capabilities

• The client was provided with the following recommendations:
  • Retaining the existing BPC Version to ensure maximum ROI and future compatibility with S/4 HANA
  • Improving BPC design by incorporating the advanced features to achieve more benefits
  • Training client-end resources on available reporting capabilities

• Technical Services
  • Based on the assessment performed by TekLink, the Client had agreed to implement the following design changes:
  • Developing a flexible design
  • Optimizing the financial reporting and planning solution
  • Automating data loads from SAP to BPC

• Functional Services
  • TekLink assisted the Client team with data validations activities and testing scenarios, also held workshops to provide report writing training.

• Application Managed Services
  • Post-implementation of the project TekLink continued to provide maintenance support and assisted the client with parallel closing processes.

Key Benefits

• Increased confidence about the BPC Implementation and its future compatibility with S/4 HANA
• Avoided unnecessary investment on implementation of the new tool
• Smoother and faster planning and consolidation cycles
• Faster turnaround to incorporate changes for organizational alignments
• Increased reporting flexibility and user satisfaction
• Automated data loading process