Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
The ability to create custom design to meet the organization’s needs.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
FP&A does not handle large amounts of data well: reports take too long to run and sometimes have to be exported to Excel. For example, a complex report in BPC currently takes about 10 seconds to run in SAP-BPC. In FP&A, the same report cannot run within the FP&A web or design clients and must be directly exported to Excel. Other reports in BPC that take under 10 seconds to run can take over 45 minutes to run in FP&A.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
FP&A is a good product for companies transitioning away from Excel as the primary budgeting tool. It allows for complete custom design. However, for our organization, FP&A does not run as fast as promised and has difficulty with large amounts of data, causing some reports/data to only be available when exported back to Excel. All of FP&A design consultants are in Europe. None are available in North America. For a Canadian organization, this can make it extremely difficult and ineffective for custom design. Implementation time may be greatly increased by the time zone differences.
How would you sum up your experience?
Generally, FP&A is OK, certainly much better than using Excel for budgeting. Our organization is currently using BPC (which is end of life) and transitioning to FP&A. BPC handles data much more effectively and is easier for users to use, especially for the creation of ad hoc reports. BPC programing is much more difficult. FP&A is easier to program/design. However, reports can take too long to run to be effective.