SAP BPC powered by SAP UI5 is an enhancement built on top of existing SAP BPC Netweaver implementation regardless of BPC 10, BPC 10.1 or BPC 11. It uses SAP Netweaver components  for communication which is already included on your netweaver license and backend master data/transactional data flows from your existing SAP BPC system.

SAP BPC powered by SAP UI5 aims to provide missing functionalities such as master data management by business users with proper validations, visual process flow to control and configure existing business process, announcement or notifications to specific users groups sent by key users, EPM Add-in free templates with no dependency to any component at all, package run manager with visual information including errors and warnings along with the success messages highlighted in different colours, reading and writing data to any system or environment without any connection dependency, visual reports with interactive charts and pivot reports, instant system reports about planning status and countdown for gate-lock activities.

SAP BPC gives users a flat screen to create and edit their master data without any validations related to business process. It leads inconsistencies in attributes, missing core attribute values for BPC reporting/calculations, wrong naming conventions, wrong hierarchy mapping, lowercase-uppercase inconsistencies and without any approval mechanism. 

With SAP BPC powered by SAPUI5 you will have;

• Simplified master data screen with pre-defined and flexible validations.
• Role based master data creation even with role based attribute filling. 
• Approve mechanism after master data creation and email notifications along with built-in in-app notifications. 
• Excel Upload/Download for mass master data management including excel data validations in offline file. 
• Predefined attribute value list to make consistent master data.
• Get information about each members modification history including change by and changed on.

Yes. 
Your existing template are converted to web template with their existing functionalities and even much more!

You can either use web templates or download them to excel for any offline editing and deep analysis. Templates can be uploaded anytime and contents are validated during upload. Users are notified with any error existing in the template itself.

Based on our BPC implementation experience, we guarantee your existing templates will be simplified as well due to heavy macros to met user requirements in BPC implementation. Technical limitations in BPC implementations are always leading consultants to find a workarounds with heavy macros, unnecessary mapping templates and abap developments which will make the system messy and increase your dependency on IT.

Yes.

Existing BPC data access profiles, teams, users, task profiles, work statuses are working out of the box.
SAPUI5 application configuration screen, admin screen, announcements, master data approvals or any other authorisation dependent objects require in-app authorisation config which can be handled by business users without any IT dependency.

Yes.

There are severals reasons for this performance difference. First of all, BPC template configurations, selections, members and filters are all stored in template itself not in the server. Each time user click refresh button, EPM Add-in parses that configuration based on the master data files stored in system folders and sends hundreds of thousands line to server to process. 

If your template gets complicated with EPMRetrieveData formulas or EPMSaveComment formulas, this process get slower and slower.

In our product, all configurations and specific data retrievals/comments are stored in server configuration tables. In most cases, system only receives your VERSION/CATEGORY member and refresh data much more quicker comparing to standard BPC report.

Comments and data retrievals  also handled in ABAP layer with indexed tables to make data read operations much more faster.  

Yes.

Packages can be triggered without any problem including their parameters passed from the screen as well.  

Additionally package logs are displayed in a much more proper way rather than standard BPC package which looks like a software built-in 90s and full of unrelated, auto-generated system messages. 

Above is a sample log screen which can be enhanced based on your requirements. Users can take immediate action based on package status without asking help from IT team. 

Users don’t need to wait for package to finish to see the logs. Our approach allows you to see logs live during package run without waiting them to finish.

FIORI is a mobility approach for SAP applications which is built by using SAPUI5 technology. Not only BPC11, even SAP decided to use SAPUI5 in BPC 10.1 as well. Only difference is BPC 11 is using much more visual components comparing to BPC 10.1 including a limited charting options and colourful task list in homepage itself. Once your reporting queries get complicated, built-in charts will not be serving the purpose.

Considering planning, both BPC 10.1 and BPC 11 will give same functionality to end users. They will still use add-in for planning and web portal for administrative purposes.
Your add-in issues regarding performance, inconsistencies between different office versions,32/64 bit library difference, macro dependent heavy templates, workarounds due to missing functionalities with same master data management screen, same package logs and so on. 

Having HANA won’t speed up your browser performance or BPF reactions once you click any task. From here, you can see the total duration of an opening an exchange rate template in BPC 11. Around 30+ seconds just to open it 🙂 

Other than performance, another problem is “how much you can customize a SAPUI5 application”.
Our system can be built on top of BPC 10, BPC10.1 and BPC11 without any issue by taking all your requirements in to account.

To be honest, during our implementations SAP country heads always tried to sell SAC to customers as if SAC is what they need and how perfect it is 🙂

SAC (Sap Cloud Analytics) is nothing but a combination of some visual tools done by SAP with SAPUI5 for planning purpose with limited  functionality especially on SAP BPC 11 connectivity.

SAC doesn’t have any master data management system as per mentioned here, it is just a copy of existing BPC master data screen. Another thing, if you already connected SAC to your SAP BPC system, master data becomes read only. Means you can’t create a master data in SAC and synchronise with your BPC system. You can’t customize SAC to trigger custom proces in your SAP BPC system. In some point of your planning application, you will hit a scenario to have a custom button for triggering a calculation  or displaying some information which should go through your system (i.e. via RFC from ECC system). Well, that is not possible again. You can’t trigger packages, custom events or even view logs. You can’t trigger a planning functionality for embedded BPC as well. You have a fixed layout, fixed functionality provided by SAP with read/write your models and read-only master data.

Yes they have some cool features like formula building screens, charts and excel-like data input but i can’t say they are enough for a planning system.

With all above limitations and license cost, we don’t see a reason to insert another expensive layer to your business process just to give them functionality to input on the web. Combination of SAC and BPC 11 would be like below for a sample input and calculation scenario; 

• Open BPF from BPC 11 screen.
• Open link for SAC 
• Choose proper version and enter data.
• Come back to BPC 11 BPF screen.
• Run package with whatever parameter is needed.

With our application;

• Navigate to your input template from application
• Input your data and click run package/or automated package run without any selection. 

With our application, you don’t need to keep jumping from BPF step to another step or open another application such as SAC. You don’t even dependent on package screens which looks like you are in 90’s.  Everything is in one place with a modern user interface.

Yes.

By default system supports any complicated formulas which you can write manually to an excel file. All those formulas are configurable and can be changed at any time easily.

No.

By default, system is able to generate macro-enabled files without any issue. As long as users are okay for the compatibility issues which might occur during MacOS or Linux usage due to macros, there won’t be any problem.

Well, this is dependent on the content and complexity of the excel file. 

Based on our stress tests, generating an excel file with below details;

• 47 columns
• 42545 rows
• Sum formula on 10 columns
• Different colours for formula cells
• Column filters
• Table style applied
• Number formatting on 37 columns

took 2min+ only.

Performance is all dependent on the excel file content, formulas, colors, data validations, formattings and the performance of the application server.

For rest of the templates which has less than 1000 rows, users even don’t notice any delay during download.

Yes.

Online planning is already browser based so you won’t have any issue with it. For the offline planning, which is done via system generated professional excel files, you can use Number in MacOS and LibreOffice in Linux without any problem.

You are right because we are not limiting ourselves with SAPUI5 library as well. Their own chart libraries are okay but not enough and boring. Very few of them are cool and we are already using in different part of our application.

SAPUI5 opens a new world to access open-source resources with all fancy looking, nicely crafted and beautiful web controls. 

Not only charts but we are already providing dozens of different controls which will make your life easier.

Yes.

There is no limitation for backend. Any existing process which requires monitoring, processing, triggering or any integration logic can be moved to SAPUI5 screens. It can be your ECC process, BW process chain, HR integration, master data flow from any system and so on.

Yes.

You can group your reports how you want in application and open with with just one click!

No.

But it would be great to have HANA 🙂 so we can push existing  calculations to HANA layer to increase calculation speed and decrease package run time. You can find more info here which is done by us for another project.

No. 

All the components are coming with your netweaver license already. Depending on your netweaver version, they are either included in your server already or needs to be downloaded and installed.

SAPUI5 is a free open source library built by HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 which doesn’t require any license.