deFacto Global Blog

Find New Life for Your Dead-End BPC System with deFacto Planning

Although migrating from a dead-end product can be disruptive, it also represents an opportunity to upgrade and improve a business process. This is the case with SAP’s BPC 7.x MS, for which maintenance and product refreshes are ending. For SAP customers looking for an alternative to their Microsoft-based BPC systems that are in limbo, an upgrade to deFacto Planning can bring an abundance of blessings and benefits. 

Announced two years ago, the end of the road for BPC 7x MS support has now arrived.  SAP told BPC 7.x MS customers that maintenance for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) version for the Microsoft Platform will expire as of March 1, 2018.

SAP is providing a number of migration paths for BPC 7x MS customers, including a move to BPC 10.1 MS or BPC NWS. Each of these migrations are more complex, offer limited functionality, can require proprietary SAP components (NetWeaver, HANA), and are more expensive options versus a move to a platform like deFacto Planning ’s. Support for BCS 10.1 MS ends in 2022, meaning another complex migration down the road.

In its support note, SAP advises customers with SAP ERP environments to move to BPC NWS, which is based on SAP’s proprietary NetWeaver platform. For Microsoft customers who have not implemented NetWeaver or HANA, this represents an entirely new deployment. A BPC MS to BPC NWS migration, says SAP, is “challenging but highly feasible.” 

Overall, customers who invested in BPC 7 MS are faced with a host of challenges, including discontinued support, performance limitations, proprietary SAP implementations, increasing costs, and changes to SAP’s product roadmap for BPC and successor products.

deFacto Planning, a Better Alternative

For customers who are looking to move away from SAP BPC onto a modern, Microsoft-based platform that will grow with you, deFacto Planning is the perfect alternative.  

Businesses that have migrated from BPC to deFacto Planning are realizing significant benefits.  AT&T, for example, replaced BPC with deFacto Planning and experienced a dramatic increase in performance immediately.

Customers who migrated to deFacto Planning from BPC have seen the time required to process models reduced from more than five hours to less than five minutes on the same hardware. This enabled them to perform significantly more detailed analyses with greater speed and accuracy.

The Same, Only Better.

By moving to deFacto Planning , BPC customers can preserve their investment while gaining the advantages of a next-generation business planning system. deFacto Planning  was designed and built by the experts who designed and built the original BPC, and has proven to outperform and out-scale BPC as well as other enterprise-class products on the market. Unlike SAP BPC, the deFacto Planning platform is a fully unified, 100% Microsoft-centric budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and reporting tool.

The shared heritage between BPC and deFacto Planning allows your initial investment to be repurposed more so than with any other product. deFacto Global has spent the past 10 years investing in deFacto Planning  on the Microsoft Platform, unlike BPC, which has focused on their proprietary NetWeaver and HANA platforms.

Much like the original versions of BPC, deFacto Planning was built to use the vast features of Microsoft’s Excel and the relational and multi-dimensional capabilities of SQL Server. deFacto Planning  also has a long history of integrating with SAP ERP and virtually every other ERP system, and takes it one step further with native integration with Microsoft BI and Office 365. The result is an enterprise-quality, highly intelligent, extremely fast business modeling, analysis, and reporting capability—in essence, a more intelligent use of BI technology.

A More Intelligent Solution

deFacto Planning  takes the Microsoft technology stack one level further than its competitors by using SQL Server and Analysis Services to construct centralized models and incorporate programmable business rules and logic that add an extra layer of business and financial intelligence to the models.  deFacto Planning  also uses SQL Server and in-memory capabilities as part of its high-performance data-management strategy.

That deFacto Planning ’s capabilities exceed those of BPC was confirmed by BPM Partners, an independent analyst of Corporate Performance Management solutions that conducts an annual survey through which solutions are evaluated by customers. BPM Partners’ 2017 Vendor Report revealed that deFacto Planning outscored SAP BPC for quality, support, training, speed, and overall customer satisfaction. The only category in which BPC outperformed deFacto Planning was the sales process – enough said. The differences were not small either – deFacto Planning shined with a 62% higher overall score than BPC.  

An Easy Migration

BPC customers will find that the migration process from BPC to deFacto Planning is straightforward, fast, and cost-effective. Moving to deFacto Planning enables you to preserve the vast majority of the work you have already done while giving you a boost in performance, scalability, and productivity.  

To see how easy it is to migrate from BPC to deFacto Planning , read this whitepaper, which provides a step-by-step walkthrough. The paper describes how BPC customers can easily transfer all of the six main components, including dimensions and hierarchies, models, formulas and business logic, data, reports and input schedules, and security.

In the end, being forced to migrate off of your outmoded BPC system can be a blessing in disguise, giving you the opportunity to obtain all the advantages of a more modern and future-proof deFacto Planning  solution. 

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