Satwik Das - SAP Analytics Cloud: Financial Planning and Analysis (SAP PRESS)

Fourteen years ago, when I started my career in finance, I had this perception that all large companies in the twenty-first century must have everything pretty much figured out. I trusted that all processes, procedures, systems, data, and technology should be a well-oiled machine. It didnt take long for me to realize that wasnt quite the case. I learned that my ability (or inability) at getting the data and analytics my business partners craved depended on how successfully I could extract and analyze data from the technology I had at my disposal.

Like many newbies to the workforce, I had this notion years ago that all the planned and forecasted data just magically appeared in front of me. Obviously, that was a wrong assumption, and when I moved into an enterprise performance management role, I realized there was a lot more to planning and forecasting than meets the eye. During my time on the project team with our goal of rolling out a new financial planning solution, I immersed myself in the truth of what lay under the hood, so to speak, of our integrated management of data and processes within our SAP landscape.

During this time, I also learned how the end-to-end technology transformation process worked, from project concept to go-live. This included everything from project team norms, to design requirements, to build, to iterative testing, and dont forget about everyones favorite, change management. This specific project aimed to roll out, yet again, another latest and greatest on-premise, uniquely customized forecast technology solution for the business. Finance served as business leads while the technical team members were the software experts, and somewhere in the middle both sides found common ground to develop a solution that worked, at least for the current fiscal year (and maybe the next). But then change happened. The company reorganized, people got shuffled around, business processes altered, and suddenly we were left with new players looking at an unrecognizable relic of a technology solution that needed to be deciphered. Any possible hope of further changes, enhancements, or fixes to the platform was at the mercy of time and the availability of the remaining technical team.

Now lets step away from the nightmare just described. What this book will accomplish for business leads is a way toward the future of planning, forecasting, analyzing, and predicting data. Long gone are the days where every five years a giant capital project is drafted, a project team is formed, and the rest of the whole nine yards is lined up to launch yet another on-premise planning and analytics supposed answer, just to keep the cycle going. Instead, the future lies within the cloud. With SAP Analytics Cloud, the core business user can now own their planning landscape from start to finish. A general finance user can make many of the changes needed to the planning platform and be flexible to ever-changing business needs without having to fully depend on technical experts. If a group of core users can truly dedicate time to this technology, they can drive forward their own future of planning and forecasting within SAP Analytics Cloud.