Software selection question list for SAP BPC
If you are faced with a software selection process coming up, or running a tender, we have compiled a must-ask question list for all customers to challenge software sales representatives:
1) How many applications or instances of SAP BPC will be required to support different requirements such as strategic planning, financial budgeting & planning, financial consolidation, management reporting?
2) How are different instances of SAP BPC administered, centrally or distributed? How can we synchronize data and meta data across multiple instances?
3) How many users can be supported on a single instance of SAP BPC? How many servers will be needed to fully support our application and user requirements?
4) What's your plan for industry or function specific planning applications? Are these built on the same platform as SAP and integrated with it?
5) How do you manage strategic financial modeling requirements with multiple embedded or layered "what-if" scenarios?
6) Which version of SAP BPC does SAP consider strategic?
7) Which version of SAP BPC is SAP demonstrating and why?
8) Ask SAP to demonstrate all the methods for creating complex calculations? E.g. Excel formulas, Visual Basic Macros, Business Rules Management and MDX Functions, any other type of programming language.
9) Did you / do you have to rewrite the SAP application to leverage upgrades and new upcoming technologies? Is that work complete? Has it been tested? Deployed? In production anywhere? How many users? How many countries?
10) How is SAP BPC integrated with SAP and non-SAP ERP applications? Is this an IT-driven process or user-driven? Does it support drill-through to transactional details?
11) How many clients with large-scale requirements have deployed SAP BPC for their entire, enterprise-wide financial planning process? In CPG, Retail? On which platform?
12) What role does a web based user interface (UI) have in your development plans? Is this getting as much emphasis as the Excel interface?
13) Is there any pre-built integration between SAP BPC and the BI reporting layer? Is there common security? Are there any pre-defined Universes?
14) How much work does it take to use BI on top of SAP BPC? Any restrictions or caveats? Does that depend on the architecture we choose to deploy?
15) Where does the calculation logic live in SAP BPC? In the worksheet? In SQL Server or others? How does that scale? Do you have any benchmarks?
16) When will the next version of SAP BPC and other applications be available? How will we be able to migrate existing applications?
