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Businesses in the public sector, including government agencies of any size, often have complex policies around their budgeting and may require licenses such as Citrix for secure access for remove devices. Many of these departments oversee tens of thousands of geographically dispersed employees and currently use SAP Analysis for Office (AO) to manage billion-dollar budgets. While this product provides extensive features, it can be overwhelming for team members who are new to the product and require basic functionality.
The Challenge: Overseeing budget recommendations for a geographically dispersed team.
A budgeting process that requires strict compliance policies and contains private data must be implemented and followed by all members across departments. Analysts are typically comfortable with an Excel-based experience to prepare budgets for cost center owners and may be hesitant to learn a new program. SAP out-of-the-box options would require employees to process data through Excel with Analysis for Office for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC); unfortunately, due to security and infrastructure requirements, this is less cost-effective due to the cost of licenses that will need to be purchased.
The alternative is to design a custom solution, which would be very complicated and involve several moving parts, each subject to interdependent system upgrades on different schedules.
The Solution: An out-of-the-box budgeting application connected to the organization's SAP backend.
To determine how this solution fits with the intricate business processes, the ConvergentIS team conducted a design thinking workshop to understand the steps team members follow and their key pain points. Mapping the customer journey, the ConvergentIS design team created high-fidelity mockups to address the current process concerns and map them against the out-of-the-box offering. The resulting BPC Easy Editor application simplifies the planning process with an intuitive Fiori interface connected to BPC for the casual user.
BPC Easy Editor is a packaged, supported, upgradeable application. Departments that deploy this solution can help managers by providing a simple, multi-language user experience for planning and forecasting budgets while leveraging the standard SAP BPC and SAP Fiori. The intended result is an increase in employee productivity through more efficient processes and an increase in decision accuracy – all with minimal training time. As updates are rolled out, teams will continue to gain access to the most up-to-date product and ongoing support as new features are required.
What's Next: Continued upgrades and new application offerings.
The app continues to improve as new features are released, and the client can influence the roadmap for the application by continuing to co-innovate with the team at ConvergentIS. Additionally, teams can seek out additional Fiori-based applications that run on their SAP backend, providing one unified for all business processes.
Why ConvergentIS
The ConvergentIS team comes from a variety of different operational backgrounds, meaning we understand how people work. We recognize SAP S/4HANA as an out-of-the-box solution that has successfully solved business problems across several industries. But we realize some work processes are still challenging to learn with so many capabilities available in SAP.
Leveraging the SAP design methodology, we have co-innovated with organizations to build solutions that match the way they work. Since many teams face the same problems, we packaged them and made them available as out-of-the-box applications. This means your business still receives many of the benefits of a tailored application without the cost of a custom solution.
About ConvergentIS [ON THE DOWNLOADABLE VERSION OF THIS DOCUMENT]
ConvergentIS is an SAP partner offering a design, build, sell, and service focus and transform the enterprise experience since 2002. Learn more at convergentis.com.