In today's fast-paced and ever-changing business landscape, it has become imperative for organisations to be agile and adaptable. The ability to embrace change and respond quickly has become a key differentiating factor in success. 

With new technologies and disruptive business models emerging at an unprecedented pace, organisations that fail to embrace change risk falling behind their competitors. To stay competitive and thrive in today's dynamic environment, organisations must adopt an agile mindset and be willing to embrace change as a constant.

With SAP BPC, adapting to the quick changes and fostering agility the modern world demands is difficult. The software, built for success in the yester, years, is highly complex and less self-reliant for today’s agile organisations. 

Through 2025, 7 in 10 organisations shift on-premises workloads to cloud data platforms, prioritising business needs over maintenance, according to Ventenna Research

As businesses strive for enhanced efficiency and streamlined enterprise performance management (EPM), the call to make a move away from SAP BPC has grown louder than ever and here’s why:

The Broken EPM Experience: A Disjointed Landscape

Agility, faster time to results, lower licensing, shorter implementations, and support costs. These are the reasons why organisations are moving to unified EPM solutions. No wonder more than 60% of finance leaders chose having ‘unified system’ as their top transformation area. (Refer to the graph below)
 

Imagine driving a car with misaligned wheels – the journey becomes uncomfortable and unpredictable. Similarly, a broken EPM experience disrupts an organisation's growth journey. SAP BPC’s requirement to completely migrate (eventually) to other SAP solutions from BPC pushes for a fragmented, multi-solution approach:

1. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) for Planning & Analytics
2. S/4 HANA for Group Reporting

This translates to using two different solutions against one unified EPM solution. Finance teams deserve a cohesive and integrated EPM environment, where data flows seamlessly and insights are readily accessible, rather than working with disjointed systems.

High Business Costs: The Financial Strain

When it comes to financial decisions, cost considerations are of utmost importance. While the explicit cost of continuing with SAP BPC is the per annum subscription, multiple hidden costs escalate the total cost of ownership(TCO) in future. 

One of them is the 3rd party maintenance costs that organisations will start incurring as soon as SAP ends the support for all its versions of BPC before 2027. 

Organisations could still choose to continue with the multi-solution landscape suggested by SAP. In that case, additional license, implementation, and maintenance costs will be incurred for operationalising SAP Analytics Cloud for planning and S/4 HANA for group reporting.

Organisations, often dealing with tight budgets, find themselves burdened by the weight of such steep costs. These expenses can impede investment in other critical areas, hinder growth initiatives, and impact the bottom line. 

Unfriendly User Interface that Hinders: A Roadblock

A user interface should be a gateway to efficiency, not a roadblock. With the different skills required to operate, manage, and make changes, the cumbersome interface can stifle productivity and hinder the accuracy of financial decisions. Here are a few factors that customers feel make SAP BPC not a user-intuitive platform:

1. Need for heavy training
2. The complexity of navigating the ins and outs of daily tasks
3. Long data loading procedures
4. Difficulty in creating custom reports
5. Lack of intuitive workflows
6. Need for coding for advanced analytics and simple customisations
7. Sluggish Excel Add-in

Heavy Dependence on Technical Teams: A Bottleneck

In an era of self-service and empowerment, the last thing finance teams need is a heavy reliance on technical experts and system integrators. SAP BPC’s complexity often necessitates extensive involvement from technical teams. This dependency acts as a bottleneck, slowing down processes, inhibiting agility, and zero control. Scenarios such as:

1. The definition of custom calculations, data transformations, and business rules requires the knowledge of SAP’s proprietary scripting language, Script Logic.
2. Customising or modifying data interfaces and connectors requires heavy custom scripting and coding.
3. Data extraction and modelling from BPC or advanced analysis require specific MDX and SQL skills.

Operating in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world demands flexibility and adapting to changes quickly. SAP BPC requires script logic to accommodate such changes, again increasing the dependence on technical teams.

Organisations in this modern world yearn for solutions that allow finance professionals to take the reins, empowering them to drive the planning and consolidation without unnecessary delays and absolute control. But SAP BPC takes away the control from finance users!

In conclusion, the decision to transition away from SAP BPC is not merely acknowledging its limitations; it's a needed step toward a future of enhanced efficiency and innovation. Organisations seeking a seamless EPM experience have begun exploring alternatives that address the pain points hindering progress. 

From this search emerges a clear message: the era of complex, technical solutions has given way to a demand for unified, user-centric EPM platforms. Witness how JustPerform, the new age unified platform, can accelerate your upgrade to a new age planning and close solution from SAP BPC with complete automation. Book a demo now!