Managing data and making it simple is easy with SAP FS-PER and HANA

I have some bad news, some good news, some really good news, and some fantastic news: 

The bad news is SAP Profitability and Cost Management (PCM) won’t be part of SAP’s mainstream maintenance beyond 2020. The good news is my colleagues at msg global solutions and Nexontis Consulting worked with SAP to develop SAP Performance and Profitability Management (PaPM). The really good news is that, in converting from PCM to PaPM, the dimensions can be mapped directly to fields in PaPM. The fantastic news is that, because PaPM provides complete flexibility to define any dimensions you want, you don’t create an PaPM model to match your PCM model. Rather, you can choose the dimensions you want to accommodate your business need.

A Meeting of the (Data) Mines

While SAP has been developing corporate software for decades, it hadn’t developed databases, relying instead on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and others. But as Oracle started entering the applications market, SAP started entering the database market. And in 2010, SAP released the first version of HANA as the recommended database for all SAP applications. 

Until recently, most developers didn’t care what database a given system used; although, they most preferred to have applications and databases on different servers because processing data in the application server was faster than sending complex statements to the database via an abstraction layer. But they care now because PaPM is built natively on the HANA database, taking advantage of HANA and making calculations, allocations and valuations lightning fast. 

Many SAP applications are HANA-enabled. Some are HANA-optimized. But PaPM is the first SAP application to be HANA native. In short, it’s a very flexible rule-based calculations engine. For the techies, it is a user-friendly business financial modeling solution, which manages completely behind the scenes the necessary integration with surrounding data models and applications, the generation of the modeled calculation logic, the reporting and what-if simulation artifacts. 

It’s Simple

The marriage of PaPM and HANA came about, in part, because of SAP’s new application-development strategy: Run Simple. (You might call it a philosophy, if you like.) For many years, SAP’s concentration was on the functionality of its applications. And while SAP will always continue to add functionality (in response to new business processes, new regulatory requirements, emerging industries, and more), the complexity of Big Data requires (and creates the opportunity for) it to be handled in a simple way, starting right where the data resides, the database. 

In partnership with SAP, msg global solutions and Nexontis Consulting are determined to reduce complexity while keeping or enhancing functionality, yielding greater levels of efficiency that translate into cost- and time-saving opportunities for our clients. 

With PaPM, that determination is built in.