Planning and Analytic systems are synonymous with:
- eXtended Planning and Analysis (xP&A),
- Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and
- Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
for semi-automated computing capabilities, allowing companies to perform the following types of activities:
Companies that start out small with Microsoft Excel for their planning and analysis eventually need a more dedicated and mature solution for better:
| • change/version management | • multi-user collaboration | • security/controls |
| • advanced what-if analysis | • driver-based planning | • rolling forecasts |
| • budget to actual reporting | • currency conversions | • predictive analysis |
What It Looks LIke
| Users interact through a web browser or Excel to the underlying system, which allows multiple users to run reports, create and modify plans, load data, run calculations, and analyze plan-vs-actual data. |  |
| A centralized database holds all the plan and historical/actual data. Actual data is typically summarized to the same level of detail needed for planning. | |
| When users need deeper detailed transactional data, the system can either store that additional detail or provide a pass-through view to the actual source system data. |
While some solutions pull data directly from their ERP/ECC or S/4HANA, others solutions source their data from a data warehouse.
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