If you have a background in SAP COPA (Controlling-Profitability
Analysis) and wondered if similar planning can be done in SAP BPC, you will
find this article interesting.
SAP COPA is a great tool to collect the
actual data, but does not have a good user interface for planning. Users of
COPA usually plan in Microsoft Excel sheet and plugin the values in COPA
planning templates. This defeats the whole purpose of interactive planning.
This is due to the fact the templates are not flexible and cannot be generated
dynamically.
The other limitation is COPA can have 50
Characters, whereas a BPC Model ('Application' in 7.5 am older versions) can
have only 20. An Environment ('ApplicationSet' in BPC 7.5 an older versions)
can have 50 or more dimensions, if required we can create multiple Models each with
different sets of COPA characteristic (or Characteristic groups) and join them
using a common denominator (e.g. a segment).
We have helped clients to address COPA
planning limitations in BPC. Contact us to
discuss your case scenario.
With HANA, many limitations of COPA using
traditional database can be overcome. We will cover COPA+HANA in over next
blog.
