opensap Intelligent Decisions with SAP Analytics Cloud

Transcription

1 opensap Intelligent Decisions with SAP Analytics Cloud Week 4 Unit 1 00:00:05 Hello, my name is Derek Johnson. I'm a Product Manager for SAP Analytics Cloud. 00:00:10 So this is our first session where we're going to be focusing on planning. 00:00:15 So when we talk about planning, this is one of the key components of 00:00:18 our SAP Analytics Cloud solution, and if you're a planner, 00:00:23 the other sessions will make a lot of sense and will help in your planning activities as well. 00:00:29 So, from a BI perspective, being able to create various calculations 00:00:35 and know whether you're heading in the right direction or in a bad direction is absolutely critical 00:00:42 for a planner. In addition, to be able to visualize your data as well 00:00:46 is very key to understanding how your performance goes from a historical perspective 00:00:52 and looking out into the future as well. So in addition to that, we have great 00:00:59 predictive capabilities that can augment your planning experience as well. 00:01:04 So we have the Smart Insights where we can look at our planning information and gain additional 00:01:10 insights into what is going on as part of our plans. 00:01:16 In addition to that, we have some predictive capabilities around time series analysis, 00:01:21 classification, and regression which can be useful for looking at historical information, 00:01:27 and kind of projecting what we think the performance, or some kind of activity will be in the future as well. 00:01:34 And these are all great capabilities to really augment the planning process. 00:01:40 In addition to that, we've recently announced the Application Designer, 00:01:45 and I think this is going to be a great way to streamline planning activities as well, 00:01:49 and really create an outstanding user experience. So we're not going to be covering necessarily 00:01:56 the other areas of SAP Analytics Cloud, the BI Predictive and the Application Design 00:02:01 in much detail in this particular unit, or session, but understand that they all 00:02:08 play a key role for a financial planner. So in addition to these 00:02:14 lectures or discussions that we're having on planning, there's also a hands-on exercise, 00:02:21 and I would encourage everyone to do the hands-on exercise as well, 00:02:25 and would really treat this as a starting point to explore planning. 00:02:32 So really, what is planning? For those that are new to planning, 00:02:39 we just want to give a little bit of a refresher as to what planning is, 00:02:43 and in what context it plays with the other product capabilities within SAP Analytics Cloud. 00:02:51 And really the nice thing about SAP Analytics Cloud is it's really a complete and holistic tool 00:02:56 for financial planning, so we have the ability to review results, 00:03:01 leverage prediction, and create very tailored applications as well. 00:03:07 So where does this fit in? From a financial planning perspective, 00:03:11 it's always critical to know what your past performance is, and that really kind of falls in the line of reporting.

2 00:03:18 So this can be looking at your historical performance, it could be your actuals, and it could also be 00:03:23 your comparisons of actuals to some sort of plan as well, to look at some sort of forecast accuracy as well. 00:03:31 So it's very key to both understanding how well you did, also it may be critical to also start to look 00:03:37 and identify your drivers for your business as well. That could be used for planning going forward. 00:03:47 One of the other capabilities we have is if we can start to leverage our history. 00:03:51 From a planning perspective, we can start using that history to look forward as well, 00:03:55 and this is really where prediction can come into play. 00:03:58 So prediction typically looks at historical performance, and that kind of projects into the future 00:04:04 based on this information. And so that will play a key role in our planning, 00:04:10 and we'll start to explore that a little bit in our planning exercise. 00:04:15 The key thing that I want to stress here as part of this session, 00:04:20 is what makes planning different, what makes planning special? 00:04:24 And really, planning is about trying to get to a specific end state, 00:04:29 and that's really the vision part of where we want to head as a company. 00:04:34 How much do we want our profitability to increase? Do we want revenues to grow by a certain percentage? 00:04:40 Do we want to capture market share? Do we want to increase our head count 00:04:45 within our organization for whatever reason? These are all things that are measurable, 00:04:50 and these are all things that we can work towards over time to get there. 00:04:55 And that really is what planning is about. It's creating that plan of how to get to that vision. 00:05:01 And some of these plans, I mentioned that vision that a high-level plan 00:05:05 could be a strategic plan, three to five years out, or where you want to go. 00:05:09 Typically, that's followed up by a more detailed plan. It could be an annual plan or some sort of budget 00:05:15 to provide that kind of road map of how to get there in specific detail as well. 00:05:21 In addition, if you want to kind track your performance going forward, 00:05:25 and with kind of a limited time horizon, forecasts are great as well to be, kind of, that... 00:05:31 actually, how are you performing based on your historics and how you expect to 00:05:38 track with your plan going forward? So these are various different types of plans you can have. 00:05:45 Strategic plans, budgets, forecasts. There's a lot of different plans. 00:05:50 Some of them can be line-of-business-specific, but just know that they all kind of fit together, 00:05:55 and they're all geared towards driving you and your organization to get to a desired place. 00:06:04 So from a collaborative enterprise planning, this is really our ability to kind of bring in data 00:06:09 and information from a lot of different sources. So this could be on cloud, 00:06:15 or in a premise. And we can kind of bring that all together 00:06:19 and tell one cohesive story for planning. And this is really critical. 00:06:25 Many times we have customers that are doing their planning systems, 00:06:30 or have many planning systems that they're using. So if you may have some sort or workforce planning 00:06:35 that's very separated from the financial planning, maybe your marketing planning and your sales planning 00:06:40 can all be very siloed, and distinct, and separated from each other. 2

3 00:06:45 Really using SAP Analytics Cloud, there's really no reason for that to occur. 00:06:50 We can connect to a lot of different sources and bring that information in, 00:06:54 and we can use many of our capabilities to kind of bring that plan all together, 00:06:59 so we can look at our financial plans holistically and keep the entire organization kind of in sync 00:07:07 with where we're heading. In addition to that, we also have great 00:07:12 collaboration tools as well. I know we've looked at some of our 00:07:16 collaboration tools from a business intelligence perspective, 00:07:19 and now we're going to start to look at them from a planning perspective as well. 00:07:24 And really this is to kind of augment some of the capabilities that you've already reviewed, 00:07:30 and they really provide some great capabilities to release things like cell comments, 00:07:35 so if you change a plan you can write comments into a cell for others to review, 00:07:42 and we can also send out forms as well to solicit input from others. 00:07:47 So if you're doing a sales plan and you'd like your sales managers globally 00:07:53 to update their plan, we can send out forms and have them update that form as well, 00:07:59 so that our plan can be complete and take into account everyone's input. 00:08:06 So this is some of the ways that we can really enable everyone 00:08:11 to become better planners and engage in the planning activities. 00:08:17 So in addition to the planning capabilities which we'll be discussing in future units here, 00:08:24 I wanted to kind of pause and make everyone aware that we do have content as part of our solution 00:08:34 that can enable you immediately. And so one of the key contents that I would 00:08:39 like to highlight here is content that's released for S/4HANA, 00:08:46 connecting in with our workforce planning to really provide a kind of holistic 00:08:51 financial planning perspective. So it includes, you know, the operating income, 00:08:55 cash flows, and balance sheet planning, in addition to employee expense type planning 00:09:01 using our SuccessFactors data. I would encourage everyone to look into our content. 00:09:07 The great thing about the content is that it provides a starting point, 00:09:11 it may provide some inspiration on how to move forward. So I certainly would encourage everyone to do that. 00:09:19 This content is created both by SAP and partners alike. 00:09:26 So if you look for content, and perhaps you didn't find the content that you need 00:09:32 for your particular business scenario, that's fine as well. 00:09:36 It's very easy within SAP Analytics Cloud to create your own models and solutions as well. 00:09:42 And we can connect to a lot of different sources, and I think you've already explored that 00:09:47 as part of our business intelligence units as well. So from a planning perspective, 00:09:53 we often connect to, you know, ERP, as well as S/4 systems. 00:10:00 We can also connect in with BPC as well, and really anywhere where we can acquire the data in, 00:10:07 we can typically plan on that data going forwards. So there's a lot of different sources, 00:10:13 both SAP and non-sap, that we can use to build our planning models. 00:10:20 So over the course of the various units, we're going to be exploring, planning in 00:10:26 a little bit more detail, and these are some of the topics that we'll 00:10:30 be exploring that are listed on this slide. So I'm not necessarily going to go through them, 00:10:35 because we're going to have the opportunity to go through them in future units as well. 00:10:40 So really the key point here is that there's a lot of great information 00:10:46 that's available immediately to you as a planner about our SAP Analytics Cloud solution. 3

4 00:10:53 And I just kind of want to take some time to point out where some of this information is located, 00:10:58 as well as where we can find some of the content that I've talked to you about as well. 00:11:05 So here's a link that just is a link to our Help documentation. 00:11:11 One of the challenges is that we are rapidly expanding our solution, 00:11:17 and you can see that by the number, level, and complexity of our enhancements. 00:11:22 This is great news from a product perspective, but it really means that 00:11:27 you're going to have to invest in yourself to keep up to date. 00:11:31 So I just wanted to point out where some of the greatest and latest information is located, 00:11:37 so you can be a self-learner here going forward. In addition to this particular link 00:11:45 for our Help files, we also have Help embedded right in the system and solution as well, 00:11:51 and we'll take a look at that. Here we've opened up our SAP Analytics Cloud solution, 00:11:58 so this is going to be our opensap system if you have access and have logged on. 00:12:04 To get access to Help, we simply go to the question mark from the home screen 00:12:09 and then we have access right here. And I think one of the greatest pieces of help 00:12:14 is really these videos. I'm not necessarily going to go through 00:12:18 any of these videos in particular, but just want to point them out. 00:12:22 The videos are typically three to five minutes in length and cover a very specific feature. 00:12:29 You can see there's a lot of tutorials here and videos on modeling, enriching data, 00:12:36 we have connections, a lot of them, there's security, collaboration, 00:12:41 general, predictive, and we'll have one on planning here as well if I can... 00:12:48 we've got a lot of videos on planning. So really any time you're interested 00:12:54 in a particular topic and you want to explore it in a little bit more detail, 00:12:59 I would certainly encourage you to open up the Help, review the documentation, 00:13:05 or at least review some of the videos that are showcasing how to fully leverage these capabilities. 00:13:15 In addition to the Help, another item that I wanted to call out 00:13:21 for you as well is where to find information on the content that we deliver as part of the solution. 00:13:27 So if we go to Browse and Files, and then we'll go to our content library. 00:13:38 Let me close our Help. So here you can see we have some sample models as well 00:13:45 and then we have some business content as well. So there's a lot of content that's been developed 00:13:50 and it currently is being enhanced, and additional content packages 00:13:57 are being developed as well. So this is an evolving content library, 00:14:03 and I think that's fantastic, as it allows you as an end user to 00:14:09 explore SAP Analytics Cloud and explore that in context of some of the solutions 00:14:14 that you may already own from SAP. So just finding some packages here, 00:14:20 if we want to look at the S/4 package that we had on our slide, 00:14:26 you can see right here we have a number of packages for S/4. In this case, we had Workforce Planning, 00:14:33 and if we simply select this package, we can get additional information, 00:14:37 and then we can import this content directly into our system as well. 00:14:42 So like I said, you don't necessarily have to use the content strictly as delivered, 00:14:47 but hopefully this provides an inspiration for you for developing your own content as well, 00:14:52 or enhancing what's already been delivered. 4

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6 Week 4 Unit 2 00:00:06 Hello. This is Derek Johnson, I'm with SAP. 00:00:09 I'm a Product Manager for SAP Analytics Cloud, focusing on planning topics. 00:00:14 I'd like to welcome you to our second unit, which is going to focus on modeling. 00:00:20 If you've attended the entire opensap course thus far, 00:00:26 you should have already been exposed to analytical models. The good news is that looking at a planning model 00:00:32 looks very similar to an analytical model, and there shouldn't be really much difference 00:00:38 between the two, from being able to create 00:00:41 an analytical model versus planning. But I want you to be aware of 00:00:44 maybe some of the differences between the two. In particular, some of the features that we have 00:00:50 that may be available for an analytical model perspective, 00:00:54 but are especially useful for planning. From a planning perspective, 00:00:59 one of the key things that we always include in a planning model is time. 00:01:05 That's absolutely required. It's not required as part of an analytical model. 00:01:09 The other thing that you'll see is that we'll have category inversions as well. 00:01:13 Category is a broad way of defining our versions, so we have actual, budget, forecast, rolling forecast, 00:01:22 and different planning categories that we may have, 00:01:26 and then we have the specific versions as well. So you can have a January forecast, 00:01:31 a February forecast, March forecast, and the like. Really, you're not limited to the number of versions 00:01:38 that you can create in your planning model. I know sometimes that gets asked, 00:01:42 but you can create as many as you like, and you can give it very descriptive names. 00:01:47 The category just allows you to visually see what type of plan it is in a report 00:01:53 and in some of the visualizations as well. From a planning perspective, 00:02:03 some of the key features here is that we have the ability 00:02:06 to define in the account dimension what the account type is, 00:02:12 and this is really critical for handling signage. So if you have an income, an expense, 00:02:18 it'll handle these signs appropriately there as well, as well as balance sheet accounts as well, 00:02:24 so your liabilities and assets. Depending on what you're looking at, 00:02:30 you can tag the account type, and then it'll handle the signage correctly in a report. 00:02:36 If you're not familiar with financial planning, a lot of times revenue is stored as a negative number, 00:02:43 but if you are looking in a report, you typically want to see that as a positive number. 00:02:50 It's really... the account type is part of the account dimension, 00:02:53 so it's a critical role. In addition to that, 00:02:56 we can also specify what type of currency translation we would like to perform, 00:03:04 and that's a rate type. So we have average and closing. 00:03:07 An average rate is typically used for P+L type accounts, and we have a closing account, 00:03:12 which is typically for balance sheet accounts. This really ties in nicely with our currency conversion. 00:03:19 We can create a model specifically for currency conversion, and we can load that information 00:03:25 either directly by copy-paste or loading it from the system 6

7 00:03:32 that we may be storing a type of currency information. There's a lot of flexibility there as well. 00:03:39 Some other key things, of course, are the authorizations. 00:03:43 We can do that within the model, where we can grant read and write access 00:03:48 to specific nodes in the model. You may have a case where you'd like someone 00:03:53 to plan on a very specific node, maybe by country, 00:03:58 but then you want them to be able to read information from a continent perspective. 00:04:02 It's a little bit different that we have the ability to control 00:04:06 not just what data someone has access to from a read perspective, 00:04:10 but also control the access from a write perspective as well. 00:04:15 And lastly, we have the ability to put in data locking as part of our model definition as well. 00:04:25 And this is absolutely critical for planning. If you are in the middle of planning, 00:04:30 say, the sales by region, and you've gone through the approval process 00:04:36 for doing your sales updates, then you can start to use data locking 00:04:41 as part of the model definition to lock other users from making change 00:04:47 to that particular region of data. It's very helpful and critical, 00:04:53 and that's really some of the differences between the planning as well as an analytical model. 00:05:04 Another key feature that we use quite extensively in planning models is the ability 00:05:09 to control aggregation in dimension formulas. We'll take a look at dimension formulas here. 00:05:17 On our account dimension, as part of the model definition, 00:05:21 we can create calculations. And this is pretty exciting 00:05:25 because we can start to do conditional logic, if/then, and we can start bringing in attributes 00:05:31 of our dimensions to do comparisons. So if a product is equal to a certain product group, 00:05:38 we may do a certain calculation. If it's not equal to that, 00:05:41 we can do a different type of calculation as well. It's a lot of flexibility. 00:05:47 The nice thing about our dimension formulas is that the calculation is executed in real time. 00:05:53 So if you change the definition within the model, between running a report, 00:05:58 you'll see that change in the value reflected as a real-time calculation. 00:06:03 And this is going to be a little bit different than when we look at data actions, 00:06:06 which actually calculate and then store the value. So some of the things that we can do 00:06:12 within our dimension formulas is that we can do look-ups to your model, 00:06:18 if you're looking up other accounts for instance, to grab data. 00:06:23 This may be as simple as looking up prices. If we're doing some sort of price 00:06:28 or some sort of revenue calculation for sales times units equal a revenue, 00:06:34 we can look up price information, we can look up number of units, 00:06:37 depending on how we've staged our data. That's useful for driver-based calculations as well. 00:06:45 In addition to that, we can use attributes, 00:06:52 I think we discussed that already. We can do links, 00:06:54 so we can pull data from other models if we need to as well. 00:06:59 That's also a real-time calculation, so if you need to grab a value 00:07:04 that's stored in another model, maybe it could be a sales planning model, 00:07:09 it could be a workforce planning model, really any type of model that'll support your overall story, 00:07:16 you can bring that in as well using link formulas. And there's a number of formulas, 00:07:20 keywords that are defined, and I certainly would encourage you to 00:07:24 look them up as well in the help documentation. But really my favorite method 00:07:30 for using these dimension formulas is really for creating KPI type calculations. 7

8 00:07:35 If you need to know sales per head count, for example, it's very easy to create that formula 00:07:41 and have that calculation occur in real time. We'll have a number of these calculations 00:07:47 that we'll include as part of the exercise. In addition to that, 00:07:52 we also have the ability to add inverse formulas as part of a calculation. 00:07:56 If we're looking at something like operating margin, because it's a calculation, 00:08:01 typically we cannot plan on that, but if we include an inverse formula, 00:08:07 what it allows us to do is actually plan on something like operating margin, 00:08:11 and then we can tell it what we'd like to adjust as part of that definition within the formula. 00:08:16 And the good news is we're going to have an example of that in the exercise as well. 00:08:22 In addition to that, we have exception aggregation, 00:08:24 and this is really a way to add some additional analytics into your data as well. 00:08:30 Some of the key things that we can do is do counts, min/max, averages, summations, 00:08:37 no standard deviation in this case, but you can certainly see 00:08:41 that there's a number of very analytical ways for you as a planner to look at your data 00:08:49 and get some insights, based on these exception aggregations and really get a better handle 00:08:54 on what holistically is happening in your data and in your various planning scenarios. 00:09:00 And certainly, we'd encourage you to take advantage of these as well. 00:09:05 And we'll include some examples of this and how to use that 00:09:08 in this part of the exercise as well. And probably the most interesting one 00:09:13 of the exception aggregations is really the summation, and that's super useful if we're trying to do 00:09:19 calculations like revenue equals sales times volume, where we can use the exception aggregation summation, 00:09:25 and then we can set our dimensions to say at what level we'd like this calculation to occur. 00:09:32 Definitely keep your eye open. There's a lot of great uses for exception aggregation 00:09:36 to really make your data analysis much simpler, using SAP Analytics Cloud. 00:09:44 Another key component, and I think we've discussed this as well, 00:09:48 certainly as we set properties in the account dimension to handle or specify how we'd like 00:09:53 to handle our currency translation, we can also have currency models as well. 00:09:59 And this is where we can store rates. We can store rates by different categories, 00:10:03 and we can include custom rates as well. This will really help you if you want to do 00:10:08 any type of currency analysis within SAP Analytics Cloud. And these rates can be loaded from a transactional system, 00:10:17 such as an ECC system or a BPC, or could just be copied and pasted 00:10:23 if you're just doing something quick and dirty for some currency analysis. 00:10:32 Data locking. This is great functionality 00:10:36 in terms of planning, of being able to lock down parts of your plan 00:10:40 once you've got approvals, and this prevents people from making additional changes. 00:10:45 You can specify someone as being responsible and they can override that lock as needed, 00:10:49 but for the most part, the lock is intended to start to lock down the plan, 00:10:57 prevent people from making changes, so that you can slowly get the entire plan approved 00:11:04 and not changed. Ideally, you'd be locked holistically 00:11:09 at the end of your planning cycle, and then you could move forward. 00:11:13 This is a great way to protect your work as a planner and keep people from continually making changes to your plan 00:11:20 and have to go through an endless cycle of review cycles. This is really meant to simplify 00:11:25 the overall planning process, and although we do not have an exercise 8

9 00:11:31 specifically on data locking, feel free to explore this as well. 00:11:36 There's certainly some good videos in Help and documentation as well 00:11:40 that should help you guide you on how you could set this up if you like. 00:11:45 One of the things that you should be aware of though is that as a person that creates the model, 00:11:52 you are an owner of the model, so you can overwrite a lot 00:11:56 of these data locking type scenarios as well, because you're kind of the admin for the model. 00:12:03 That's really what makes it a little bit trickier to test as part of creating an exercise. 00:12:13 Security. There's really two basic ways we can do security. 00:12:17 We can certainly do role-based security, and that is setting up a role 00:12:21 and then we can go through the process of defining what we'd like people to have access to. 00:12:26 This is very similar to business intelligence and when we create analytical models. 00:12:31 One of the things that's a little bit different is that we can enable the data access control 00:12:37 within the model, and then we can set read and write within a dimension as itself. 00:12:44 When we set this property and say what dimensions we'd like to secure, 00:12:49 we'll have two additional columns that get added for read and write access. 00:12:53 And then we can specify individuals or teams to these nodes, 00:12:58 and that'll provide data access to various team members for accessing the model going forward. 00:13:04 So you don't have to set read and write at the same levels. Typically, the read access is a little bit more generously granted, 00:13:14 but if you want to control who has access to write to a particular node or area or region, 00:13:20 you can control that in a similar way as well. We're going to have a click-through demo 00:13:30 on a BPC integration scenario. There's certainly some great videos 00:13:38 and help that go through the steps to create this integration as well. 00:13:42 Really what I wanted to cover here is what's some of the differences 00:13:46 between the some of the options that you may see, because it can be a little bit confusing on first review. 00:13:54 From a BPC perspective, we really have two basic flavors. 00:13:59 We have the standard model and we have the embedded model. 00:14:04 And so for this, we're really talking about the 10.x and above, 00:14:08 but I just want to take the standard model first. We have two different ways 00:14:13 that we connect to the standard model. One is through a near-live connection 00:14:19 and one is through data acquisition. From a data acquisition perspective, 00:14:25 we can connect BPC to a BPC standard model, in this case. And we can go through a wizard to create our model. 00:14:35 So we get to select our dimensions that we like to bring over, 00:14:40 and we can do any kind of filtering as well. The data will be brought over 00:14:44 and physically stored within SAP Analytics Cloud. And it's really going to be treated 00:14:50 as its own planning model in this case, and with that, 00:14:56 we can start to add dimensions into the model. If we wanted to have different dimensionality 00:15:02 or extend the dimensionality, we can do that within SAP Analytics Cloud. 00:15:07 In addition to that, we could also add members 00:15:09 within SAP Analytics Cloud as well. All the capabilities of planning will be available 00:15:14 to the user and then they can plan to their heart's content. If you want to transfer that data 00:15:21 back into a BPC environment, there's some export capabilities as well 00:15:26 where we can write this data back to BPC, and that would be in a batch job. 9

10 00:15:32 In addition to that, we have the near-live scenario as well. This is a case where we want our standard model within BPC 00:15:40 and our standard model within SAP to be tightly linked. And in this case, we're going to have... 00:15:47 when we go through the model build process, the dimensionality and members will be identical 00:15:53 between the two models. Essentially, BPC will be driving the dimensionality 00:15:59 and the members as well. There'll be a one-to-one relationship, 00:16:04 we can start to plan within SAP Analytics Cloud, we have a lot of the... 00:16:09 because we're still acquiring the data within SAP Analytics Cloud, 00:16:12 we have full access to all the planning functionality within SAP Analytics Cloud, 00:16:17 and we can plan to our heart's content. The difference is that instead of using a batch job 00:16:23 to write the data back from SAC to BPC in this case, we can simply go to the version management 00:16:31 and then publish it back to BPC. And when we do that, 00:16:35 it's going to write the data back into BPC and it'll execute default logic in BPC in this case 00:16:43 and then it'll resynchronize the data between BPC and SAC again. 00:16:48 So it refreshes the data so you get the latest view. 00:16:52 This is a great way to extend your planning scenario, especially if you own BPC already. 00:16:59 The next option relates to the BPC embedded model, and this is a little bit different paradigm here, 00:17:07 because instead of being near-live, I say near-live because in the standard model, 00:17:11 we're acquiring the data in, in the BPC embedded scenario, 00:17:16 this is a live connection, which means that we're not staging the data 00:17:20 within SAP Analytics Cloud. We're using SAP Analytics Cloud really as a front-end 00:17:25 to a BPC embedded model. And then with that you can do a number 00:17:31 of planning functions, planning activities within SAP Analytics Cloud. 00:17:37 You can run data sequences as well and really get the best of both worlds 00:17:44 of being able to do your planning within SAP Analytics Cloud, 00:17:47 but have the updates immediately occur within BPC embedded as well. 00:17:53 Depending on what tool you're using, all the updates in this case are made in real- time 00:17:59 and synchronized for everyone at the same time. We'll let everyone explore the exercises 00:18:08 that relate to data modeling. Please take a look at the videos within the help 00:18:12 related to the BPC connection options. And I just wanted to explain why you might use 00:18:20 one type of connection versus another, as that isn't always so clear 00:18:25 from our customers and partners as well. In the next session, we're going to look at planning functions. 00:18:32 And now we'll take a look at the demo. Now we're going to look at a system, 00:18:41 and we'll go through the models that we've created as part of our planning activities. 00:18:46 The first thing I'd like to call out is certainly, I'll go through this probably every single time, 00:18:52 is really take advantage of the help. In this case, we've opened up the help, 00:18:56 we're looking at some videos. If you really want to better understand some 00:19:00 of the specific aspects that we were covering as part of the session, 00:19:04 you can certainly dive into more detail looking at the videos. 00:19:08 If we look at some of the model connections, we can see that here as well, 00:19:14 where we have a specific video on connecting to BPC here. 00:19:22 It'll take me just a little bit of time to find it, but certainly... 10

11 00:19:30 ah, here it is. It's right in the center. 00:19:32 If you wanted to go through a video, watching someone go through the connection steps, 00:19:36 you could do that. We're going to try to create a click-through as well 00:19:40 to allow you to step through the process and experience that as well, 00:19:45 if you don't have access to a BPC system. Just looking at the models that we've included, 00:19:53 we're going to go to Browse and Files, and then we want to open up the files that we've saved. 00:19:59 As part of our exercise, what we've done is we've stored models in a public folder. 00:20:06 We are encouraging everyone to make a copy of those public models 00:20:10 and store them under your My Files directory. And this will mean that once you save your files, 00:20:16 these models are yours. Any changes you make to the models 00:20:21 will not affect other students. The two models we have are our operating income 00:20:28 and our employee expenses. We look at our operating income model. 00:20:32 One of the things that we'll see is that we'll see that we have a version 00:20:35 which has the various planning versions that we're going to be using as part of this scenario. 00:20:41 We have actuals, we have some versions centered around allocations, 00:20:46 creating our annual plan for 2020, and we have a forecast version here as well. 00:20:51 And there's a good number of steps we're going to be taking throughout the exercises 00:20:55 to showcase some of the capabilities here as well. In addition to that, 00:21:00 on the account dimension, as I had previously mentioned, 00:21:03 we have the ability to set the exception aggregation as well as create account formulas, 00:21:10 and we're going to be taking advantage of that as well. And I just want to cover some of these capabilities. 00:21:18 I think the examples in our exercise are pretty straightforward. 00:21:22 We do have a little bit more complex examples as part of this data model, 00:21:28 but we didn't include them in the exercise. But just taking a high-level look, 00:21:33 here we have some price-times-volume type calculations, and it's very simple, 00:21:39 where sales revenue equals a unit times price. And here we can, for North America 00:21:44 in this case, we can look up a price and we know where it's stored. 00:21:48 It's in this DRV0050, which is the stored price. 00:21:54 And then we are looking at our entity, which is assigned to a pound sign, 00:21:58 which means not assigned. That's where we're storing the price in this case, 00:22:03 and then if we want to do that calculation, we can simply do price times our units. 00:22:09 One of the things that we did that I'd like to call out 00:22:13 is we took advantage of some of the exception aggregation here as well, 00:22:18 when we're now doing an aggregation where we're using SUM. 00:22:24 So we want to multiply the two values together, but when we set that up, 00:22:30 we're going to use the exception aggregation by dimensions to say at what level we would like 00:22:34 to create this calculation. In this case, we would like to create it 00:22:38 at the most detailed level. So all of the numbers were selected in this case. 00:22:43 But if we, for instance, had a price that didn't depend on time, 00:22:47 so it was just one price, we could certainly deselect time here 00:22:51 and that calculation would occur at a higher level in this case. 00:22:58 There's a lot of power in calculations, using the exception aggregation. 00:23:06 Some additional things that we can do are when we look at the accounts, 11

12 00:23:11 as we see that there's an account type, I do want to call this out because this is critical 00:23:15 in managing the sign of our values when we load them in. From a P+L or operating income type scenario, 00:23:26 we typically deal with income and expenses, and so we can this set this slide to manage that as well, 00:23:34 assign how it treats the signs. Revenue is typically stored with a negative value, 00:23:40 but then we're going to display the report, we typically want to do that as a positive value, 00:23:45 or at least hopefully it is positive. That would be one case for income and expenses for P+L. 00:23:53 If we're looking at a balance sheet, we would then have assets and liabilities, 00:24:00 which are two standard modeling types as well. So this account type will dictate how things are managed 00:24:09 from a sign perspective, and then we can set those. 00:24:13 And certainly, I recommend always setting the account type. I think it makes it easier to be very deliberate 00:24:19 with your modeling and keeping that blank in this case. If you have some values 00:24:24 that don't necessarily have... are not really financial in nature, 00:24:30 you can set them to non-financial as well. Some other items are the rate type, 00:24:37 and this is really dictating the currency calculation. In this case, we have an average and a closing balance. 00:24:45 Here we're looking at P+L, so we're going to be using the average rate. 00:24:48 And that directly ties in with our currency model as well, where we can specify rates 00:24:53 based on the rate type here as well. And then you can have different rate types set accordingly. 00:25:00 Certainly, a lot of our basic formatting and everything else is set on the account dimension as well. 00:25:06 This is really going to drive, for the most part, 00:25:08 your planning model. And very similarly, if you want to have hierarchies, 00:25:17 you can maintain it here as well, I just selected Hierarchy tab. 00:25:22 You can drag and drop and move things around to adjust your hierarchy here as needed. 00:25:28 So a lot of power. For the most part, a lot of this... 00:25:33 of what we do for creating planning models directly mirrors what we do 00:25:37 from a business intelligence perspective as well, and that's really by design. 00:25:41 There's just a few little nuances, not really many, 00:25:45 but once you start to explore them, you can see some of the additional capabilities we have 00:25:50 from a client perspective, versus a business intelligence perspective. 00:25:57 Some other things that I would like to call out here is as part of our exercise, 00:26:03 we're going to be creating a number of simpler dimension formulas. 00:26:09 This is one where we're doing a simple calculation for operating expense, 00:26:13 ratio, where we're looking at our operating expenses divided by our net revenue 00:26:22 to do this calculation. When we get a calculation in from a planning perspective, 00:26:27 we typically cannot plan on these cells. So in a report, they'll be grayed out 00:26:33 and won't be available for data entry. One thing that we can do is we can 00:26:39 create inverse formulas for this as well. Here we have, for the operating profit, 00:26:44 we say that we'd like that to be our operating income divided by our net revenue in this case, 00:26:50 and then we can specify an inverse formula. And what the inverse formula does 00:26:55 is it just tells the system that we'd like to use this for planning, 00:27:00 how we'd like to adjust the other members in the calculation so that everything balances out. 12

13 00:27:08 In this case, you could plan on the operating profit percentage 00:27:13 and as part of your planning activities. The other model I would like to cover, 00:27:23 and this is just, if you're not familiar with employee expense 00:27:27 or head count type modeling, just to provide some context 00:27:31 for what we're doing here. This is a case where we're really trying 00:27:35 to plan a head count and then we're trying to create some data actions 00:27:41 to do the employee expense type calculations, and we'll certainly cover that in a later section. 00:27:48 But one of the things from a modeling perspective I did want to cover is that, 00:27:52 from an account perspective, it's pretty straightforward. 00:27:57 Our main account, in this case, of main members is going to be head count, 00:28:04 and we have a lot of other fields for entering in drivers 00:28:09 for driver-based calculations, and we have still some additional account members 00:28:14 where we're storing those results of our calculations. For the most part, this is pretty straightforward. 00:28:22 But if you're not familiar with head count planning, I did want to take a moment 00:28:27 just to cover this movement dimension. In the movement dimension here, 00:28:31 it's really where we're tracking the movement of head count. Head count is a number, 00:28:37 but really it's broken down in opening balance, so what are we starting with? 00:28:42 And then we're looking at the changes, which is our hiring and terminations, 00:28:48 and that can be voluntary and involuntary. And then finally we'll calculate our closing balance. 00:28:53 So throughout any type of report that we create on our employee expense model, 00:28:59 we're really going to be paying close attention to this movement indicate, 00:29:06 so we really track the type of head count we want to use for calculations. 00:29:12 That's it for this section on our modeling, especially as it relates to planning. 00:29:18 The next section we're going to be looking at in the next unit is going to be looking at how to take advantage 00:29:22 of some of the planning capabilities within a story. Thank you, and I look forward to talking to you soon. 13

14 Week 4 Unit 3 00:00:05 Hello again, my name is Derek Johnson. I'm a Product Manager for SAP Analytics Cloud 00:00:10 and I focus on planning topics. We're going to be looking at planning functions. 00:00:16 So first thing I'd like to cover before we actually look at some of the functions 00:00:19 that we can use within planning, is just to have a quick talk about versions. 00:00:24 And versions are really a critical piece of any planning activity. 00:00:29 And we have two different types of versions that are available within our SAP Analytics Cloud solution. 00:00:35 We have public versions and private versions. And public versions are pretty straightforward 00:00:40 as they are versions that everyone can see if they have access to the model of that version 00:00:47 and the area of data that they're looking at at that time. So these are typically where you store 00:00:55 the corporate versions that you want to make available to the company at large. 00:01:01 We have a different type of version that's very useful as well, 00:01:04 called a private version. And this is really a sandbox version. 00:01:08 So this is a version, when you create it, you would typically create that off 00:01:14 another public version. And you can do it off of another private version as well. 00:01:20 You essentially take a copy of that and then you can perform all of your planning activities 00:01:25 on that private version. And it's only available to you 00:01:28 so that others cannot see your particular planning scenario using this version. 00:01:35 What you can do, if you want to share your private version with others, 00:01:39 is there is an ability to share your version. And you can share that 00:01:44 from both a read and read/write perspective. And this is very useful if you're collaborating 00:01:49 with colleagues on a particular issue and you'd like to share the version 00:01:53 to really engage the team or group in your planning activity. 00:01:58 So if you make any mistakes as part of the exercise or you want to test out different assumptions 00:02:03 while you're planning, another useful feature of version management in whole 00:02:09 is that you have the ability to undo changes, and you can also look at your history as well. 00:02:15 So for a public version, you can only review the history 00:02:18 since the last time you published a version. But this is very useful when you're doing planning 00:02:24 as you may enter in a value and decide that you'd like to 00:02:28 maybe increase the value from 20 to 25%. Instead of doing that math, 00:02:32 you can just quickly undo your last action and then multiply the value 00:02:37 by 1.25, in this case, for 25%. From data entry perspective, 00:02:46 we offer a lot of capabilities here. And what we first want to cover is some of the capabilities 00:02:51 of directly entering data into the plan. So from a table, you can plan at any level. 00:02:57 So what's interesting about SAP Analytics Cloud is that we don't restrict you 00:03:01 to just planning at the lowest level of our base members, but you can plan on hierarchy nodes as well. 00:03:09 So if you wanted to plan by year and you have a model sorted by month, that's okay. 00:03:14 So you'd simply plan by year, and then those values would be disaggregated down by month 00:03:21 based on the history or weighting. So there's a lot of flexibility here, 00:03:27 not only in time but your other dimensions as well. So if you're planning by product, customer, 14

15 00:03:32 by account, you can do the same thing, using the same technique of planning on parent nodes. 00:03:39 So I think it's pretty exciting. Also, to simplify planning, 00:03:43 is you can certainly add plus/minus percentages. To make it easy, 00:03:49 you can enter the number directly into a cell. If you do that, you can also enter in keywords like an M, 00:03:58 like for 60 M would be 60 million, just to simplify data entry as well. 00:04:04 So when you start making changes to your plan, one of the things that you'll see 00:04:07 is that any numbers that get changed in the report will then show up as yellow in the table. 00:04:15 So this is to give you kind of a visual indicator that you're making changes to the plan. 00:04:20 In addition to these types of changes, we also deliver functions which we'll be exploring 00:04:25 as part of the exercise for spreading, distribution, and assignments. 00:04:30 So we'll take a look at those in the exercise. We also have the ability to do allocations. 00:04:39 Certainly allocations are used in a wide variety of cases. I think the case that we're going to be exploring 00:04:45 as part of the exercise is going to be looking where we're starting to pool some costs. 00:04:50 So I believe that they're IT costs, or they could be marketing costs, 00:04:54 and where we've pooled them to a certain cost center or region 00:04:58 and then we want to distribute that out to various product lines. 00:05:02 So one of the nice things with the way that we set up our allocations is that 00:05:09 you have kind of a visual wizard to guide you through how to set that up. 00:05:13 And certainly you can chain multiple allocation steps together as well. 00:05:18 So we'll have an exercise on this as well. If you'd like further information on allocations, 00:05:24 certainly you can review the Help or the online videos as part of the Help as well. 00:05:33 We'll also be looking at predictive forecasting in our scenario as well. 00:05:37 So predictive forecasting, as we're going to be using it in our scenario, 00:05:41 is going to be looking at history in this case. So we're going to be forecasting by product group, 00:05:47 and then we're going to be forecasting for the next quarter going forward. 00:05:50 And so it's very easy to use the predictive forecasting capability set 00:05:56 provided within SAP Analytics Cloud. You'll also start to see that, 00:06:00 as part of the predictive area within SAP Analytics Cloud, 00:06:06 there's some additional capabilities that are being developed 00:06:09 as part of time series forecasting as well. The important thing with our predictive forecasting 00:06:15 as we're going to be reviewing in the exercise is that it really is based on a certain level. 00:06:22 So you can go anywhere within, let's say, your product hierarchy, 00:06:26 and then you can forecast, create a predictive forecast at that level. 00:06:30 So in my mind, it's a great way to kind of put some guardrails in to see what the system would think 00:06:38 that your performance should be going forward, and that can serve as the checks and balance 00:06:42 for your planning activities. And lastly, as part of planning functions, 00:06:50 we have value driver trees. This is a holistic way of doing planning. 00:06:58 And it's a way to graphically depict calculations and modeling. 00:07:04 So, unfortunately, we're not going to be looking at this as part of this exercise, 00:07:08 but it's a great way to do strategic-level planning where you're just looking at some high-level drivers, 15

16 00:07:15 such as growth percentages for yearly planning. And then you can enter in those growth assumptions, 00:07:23 you can execute a value driver tree, and it'll look at your results. 00:07:27 So it's a very interesting capability and I certainly encourage everyone to, once again, 00:07:34 review some of the Help files on this topic as well as the videos that are provided 00:07:41 as part of Help as well. And certainly with the models that we've provided, 00:07:44 you could set up your own value driver tree if you wanted to do so. 00:07:53 And really the last area, and we'll demonstrate this 00:07:56 along with some of the planning functions as well, is around our master data management 00:08:02 and creating master data on the fly. One of the nice things about SAP Analytics Cloud, 00:08:07 especially as it relates to planning, is that you don't have to go back out to the model 00:08:11 if you want to add a new member to your planning scenario. You can do that all within a story. 00:08:17 You simply right-click in the model in where you'd like to place this member. 00:08:22 You can enter in the member. If it recognizes it, 00:08:25 it'll add that to the model. If it doesn't recognize the member, 00:08:30 it'll create one on the fly. And with that, you can also associate it 00:08:35 with the hierarchy as well so that it can be appropriately placed 00:08:39 for your planning activity. And once you create this member, 00:08:43 it doesn't only exist in the story, but it exists within the model itself. 00:08:47 So if you did want to go back out to the model, you would see your new member that you've added as well. 00:08:53 So because everyone is copying a model for our scenario or exercise that we've provided, 00:09:02 we're going to be including this capability in our exercise as well. 00:09:06 So you get to explore how to create a member on the fly and use that for planning. 00:09:11 So that concludes this session, this unit, and next we're going to go into our demo. 00:09:19 Thank you. Now we're going to take a look 00:09:23 at some of these planning functions in a little bit more detail. 00:09:26 So we've opened up our report and we're looking at our product sales for Q1 of 00:09:33 And in this case, we might want to add a new member. As we discussed, we simply use the context menu 00:09:40 within the table and we can add a member. When we do that, we can assign it 00:09:44 to wherever it would fit within the hierarchy. In this case, that would be Apparel. 00:09:49 And you can give it a unique ID as well as changing the description. 00:09:55 So we've created this already as Headband and we've added it to the hierarchy 00:09:59 and it's now available for planning. So to plan, we can simply directly enter 00:10:05 in a value into a plan, in this case, 10 million. And then we can do our spreading functions 00:10:13 to choose how we'd like to model these sales through the first quarter. 00:10:21 So I'm just going to very simply take our spreading function, and in this case, show how it will work. 00:10:30 So spreading is a relative weight here. So in this case, I'm just going to use one, two, and three 00:10:37 for the relative weights. And we can see that the first month 00:10:40 will be 16.7% and 1.67 million. February will remain unchanged. 00:10:48 It's 33.3 and 3.33 million. And then our third month, for March, 00:10:54 will be 50% and 5 million. So when we apply that, 16