About Planning

With SAP Analytics Cloud, you can cover a range of planning operations like scheduling tasks, kickstarting forecasts with predictive features, building custom planning applications, carrying out data entry and version management, and writing powerful scripted calculations.

As you’re working in the application, you can collaborate with your team and apply advanced analytics to your planning data. This way, you know that everyone’s aligned on the same goal, and you can get more value out of your plan.

What Is Planning?

Reporting and analysis often focuses on historical data (known as actuals), but a business needs a clear vision of the future, too.

Planning is all about setting strategic goals and then determining how to meet those goals by creating annual budgets, tracking progress in forecasts, and simulating scenarios to find new opportunities. These plans are formed by projecting actuals into the future, by gathering input from different departments, and by considering trends, risks, and opportunities in the market.

Executive boards and finance departments play a big role in planning. But an effective plan needs input and support from the whole organization. Maintaining close integration between departmental plans and the overall strategic goals and financial plans is known as collaborative enterprise planning.

Roles Involved in Planning

A few different roles contribute to the process:

  • Planning modelers: These specialists have a strong understanding of the organization’s data and the other systems in their landscape. They’ll play a big role in setting up the planning solution in SAP Analytics Cloud, including creating models and structured planning operations.

  • Planning reporters: These users can be finance specialists who are working with the data on a daily basis to create budgets and forecasts, and to provide financial reports and analysis to business users and upper management.

    Planning reporters also include many users who just need to contribute planning data for their specific area as part of a bottom-up planning process.

  • Planning viewers: These are stakeholders in the planning process, such as business users and executives, who need to check to see how their team or organization is doing. Sometimes they might run their own simulations or contribute some planning data as part of a calendar task.

How Planning Fits into SAP Analytics Cloud

Applying analysis and predictive features while you're planning can help you plan faster and more accurately, and get a better understanding of your business.

For example:

  • When starting a plan, you might use predictive scenarios to set the initial values, letting you quickly identify the overall trend as well as expected fluctuations in your data. The predicted values give you a quick start that's grounded in past performance.

  • While you're adjusting this plan with manual data entry, you might refer to overall KPIs as well as variance charts for each data point to get quick feedback about whether the plan is on target or not.

  • If you want to understand the trends and drivers in your data, or investigate the root cause of a specific issue, you may want to do some free-form exploration of your data, and analyze it with smart features that identify key influencers and outlying data points.

You can integrate these features closely with the planning process so that data analysis, manual planning, and predictive features all reinforce each other without making your process slower or more complicated.

The Planning Process

Planning processes are collaborative, cyclical, and iterative. Broad phases in a planning cycle include preparing the solution, planning, and finalizing the data:

The planning cycle runs through the prepare, plan, and finalize phases, and then it repeats

Your organization might start a new cycle shortly afterwards, especially for rolling forecasts. You might also have simultaneous planning cycles running at different levels, such as an annual budget and quarterly forecast.

The Prepare Phase

Planning modelers do most of their work in this phase. After the initial setup of the solution, they can update and enhance it during later cycles.

Use this diagram to get descriptions of each step and click to open detailed instructions.

In planning models, you can define valid ranges of data that allow data entry and planning operations. Use data locking in SAP Analytics Cloud to prevent changes to specific data at different stages of the planning process. As a planning modeler, you can set up data locking and specify areas of model data to lock, restrict, and unlock, and you can also delegate ownership of data locks to other planners. In SAP Analytics Cloud, you can create a data action by specifying a source model, and then add steps to the data action. For planners who are new to allocations in SAP Analytics Cloud, setting up a basic process will help you understand how they're structured. Multi actions help you orchestrate a set of operations across multiple planning models and versions in SAP Analytics Cloud. They link together a sequence of steps such as data actions, version management steps, and predictive steps, which all run from a single planning trigger. Use a value driver tree (VDT) in SAP Analytics Cloud to visualize the entire value chain of your business, instead of looking at isolated KPIs. In the SAP Analytics Cloud calendar, you can create automatic data action tasks that help you define the start time of your data action. Data actions are a flexible planning tool for making structured changes to model data, including copying data from one model to another. In the SAP Analytics Cloud calendar, you can create automatic multi action tasks that help you define the start time of your multi action. Multi actions are a flexible planning tool for making structured changes across multiple model data and versions, including copying data from one model to another. In the SAP Analytics Cloud calendar, you can create data locking tasks to make sure that model data is locked at the right time. You can add a table to any SAP Analytics Cloud story or analytic applications page.

The Planning Phase

Next, planning reporters work to putting the figures into the plan, and sharing their work with viewers.

Use this diagram to get descriptions of each step and click to open detailed instructions.

When working with a table based on a planning model in SAP Analytics Cloud, you can create and edit model values by typing in the table cells. If data actions, multi actions, or allocations are available in an SAP Analytics Cloud story or analytic application, you can run them to carry out complex or repetitive planning operations more quickly and accurately. Use a value driver tree (VDT) in SAP Analytics Cloud to visualize the entire value chain of your business, instead of looking at isolated KPIs. In SAP Analytics Cloud, you can use the planning panel to quickly move values in a table. If data actions, multi actions, or allocations are available in an SAP Analytics Cloud story or analytic application, you can run them to carry out complex or repetitive planning operations more quickly and accurately. No need to leave your story to add new dimension members: add them to your table and let the system update the master data. To enrich the planning features in a story based on a BPC live data connection model, we now allow you to directly trigger planning sequences created in BPC from a SAP Analytics Cloud story, as well as set variable values. Use the SAP Analytics Cloud calendar to keep track of tasks in your planning processes, stay on schedule, and collaborate with your team. Create, assign, and work on tasks, and add files, approval workflows, and processes that link tasks together. When working with planning models in SAP Analytics Cloud, you can run predictive time series forecasts on your data within a table. About Forecasting with Predictive Planning

There are often iterative changes in this part of the process as planners and stakeholders at different levels and in different departments collaborate on the plan.

The Finalize Phase

This image is interactive. Hover over each area for a description. Click highlighted areas for more information.

With a planning model in SAP Analytics Cloud, you can use version management to organize, compare, and maintain different versions of your data. When you're done, you can submit the task. Your data changes are published automatically. When you're done, you can approve or reject the work of the assignees. Any data changes from you are published automatically. In SAP Analytics Cloud, you can prioritize locks to control data entry for table cells. You can export models and their data for reuse in other systems.

When the data is ready, there are a few steps to wrap up the process.

Other key features for planning workflows

Since SAP Analytics Cloud combines planning with analytics and predictive features, you can also support your planning workflows with several features that aren't specific to planning:

  • Tables: You'll often use tables to keep track of your data, and several planning features are based here. While working with tables, you can also customize your layout and formatting and enhance the table with calculations, data point comments, and in-cell charts. For more information, refer to Use Tables to Visualize Data.

  • SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office: If you prefer to work in Excel, you can use this add-in to connect to your SAP Analytics Cloud data, build tables, do data entry, and publish back to SAP Analytics Cloud. For more information, refer to SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office.

  • Content library: SAP and its partners provide prebuilt content here, including best practices content for planning based on S/4HANA Cloud and integrated financial planning for SAP S/4HANA. Admins can explore, import, and adapt the content to get a headstart setting up their solution. For more information, refer to Getting Business Content and Samples from the Content Network.

  • Collaboration tools: Basic collaboration tools let you share content and open discussions with other users. For focused discussion on specific data, you can use data point comments and commenting widgets. For more information, refer to Sharing, Collaborating, and Exporting.

  • Currency conversion: For international business, you can do planning and analysis with multiple currencies. For more information, refer to Plan with Currency Conversion.

  • Analytics designer: As a content creator, you might want to customize and streamline planning content to empower your end users. While stories are quicker and easier to set up, the analytics designer gives you more flexibility to create personalized analytic applications. For more information, refer to Analytic Application Design (Analytics Designer).

  • Digital Boardroom: To help figure out the big picture, you can turn your stories into interactive presentations with touchscreen support. The ability to run simulations and explore the data helps your team make strategic decisions together. For more information, refer to Digital Boardroom Presentation.

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