What is Oracle PBCS?
Oracle PBCS is an Oracle Cloud product called Planning Budgeting Cloud Service which has been recently renamed as Planning and Budgeting Cloud. PBCS is the first Hyperion EPM product on the cloud and it is an application based on the Oracle Hyperion Planning that supports enterprise-wide planning, budgeting, and forecasting in the cloud. The PBCS’s core functionality is the same as Oracle Hyperion Planning on-premises.
Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud offer integrations with Microsoft Excel, Word, Outlook and PowerPoint using the “Smart View” plugin for planning and financial reports; this means that users can view planning data forms from Microsoft Excel with the same functionality as the web-based interface. Both the interfaces support ad-hoc analysis of the data where row, column, and page dimensions can be pivoted to create different views of the same data.
Oracle PBCS enables the organizations of any size to quickly adopt the world-class planning and budgeting applications with no CAPEX infrastructure investments – driving market-leading functionality across lines of business in the enterprise.
Oracle PBCS Specifications
Differences (from a typical on-premise model) that enterprises should know before Oracle’s PBCS adoption/implementation:
- One planning application per cloud instance
- Up to the four plan types (ASO or BSO)
- EAS is not accessible here (key features added to Calc Manager)
- Classic managed applications only (no EPMA)
- Planning modules are on the roadmap for the PBCS, but it doesn’t include: Workforce, Capital Asset, Public Sector Budgeting, and Project Financial
- Data and metadata are loaded to PBCS via flat-file transfers
- 150 gigabytes of storage available for each environment
- Scheduled maintenance window needs to be specified for patching and version upgrades
- Single sign-on managed through the Oracle Cloud rather than the shared services
- No MSAD/LDAP user directory integration
Features and Functional Advantages of Oracle PBCS
Oracle PBCS offers enterprises with functional advantages that support robust planning and budgeting. Here’s how:
- Best-in-class financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting
- Ability to align top-down and bottom-up models
- Consistent use of assumptions, calculations, and allocations
- Use of web and Microsoft Office interfaces
- Powerful workflow and process management tools
- Leverages Oracle Essbase for the powerful reporting and analysis
- Flexible planning functions such as the rolling forecast wizard
- Drills-through Oracle’s EPMS to source integrations
What is SAP BPC?
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) is SAP’s flagship product for the planning, budgeting, forecasting, and both legal and management consolidations. SAP BPC provides a highly scalable, robust database combined with the business process and logic capabilities to provide a true Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform. SAP BPC is a unified solution that does not require individual software components to perform a core set of business functions and tasks.
For any organization to run the business successfully financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting are important attributes. SAP BPC provides everything in one package.
- Unified – The Planning and Consolidation in One Product. Single application lessens maintenance, enhances data integrity, and simplifies deployment. It also enables flexible planning & consolidation functions.
- Owned and Managed by the Business Users: – Business users manage processes, models & reports with little IT dependence.
- An open, adaptable application: – It extends the value of your investment in both SAP and non-SAP environments.
- Familiar, easy to use: – It is easy to use and support the native Microsoft Office tools and web browsers accessing a central database.
- Align Financial and Operational plans: – It helps to determine the financial goals and operational plans with the strategic objectives.
- Reduce the budget cycle time: – It helps to reduce budget cycle time.
Key benefits provided by SAP BPC
- It allows the user to make better business decisions by supporting What-If analysis and allows you to perform the scenario-based planning.
- It allows you to collaborate with the data and thus increase accuracy in business planning and accountability.
- It helps in aligning your plans with strategic goals and hence decreases the cycle time.
- You have an option here to choose the version of SAP NetWeaver or Microsoft Platform.
Following are the key benefits that can be achieved by using SAP BPC
- Business Forecasting
- Analytical Reporting and Analysis
- Budget Planning
- Predictive Analysis and Recommendations
- Improve Compliance
- Consolidation
- Business Process Flows and Smooth Collaboration
Pros and Cons of Oracle PBCS
Pros
- Smartview capability provides a flexible user interaction for those finance users familiar with Excel.
- The built-in finance adapter makes the data extract from Fusion ERP a seamless experience and proceeds with data integration as an easy chore.
- Webstudio or financial reporting enables the actuals vs plan comparisons a cleaner validation.
- Essbase Cube is strong
- Multiple dimensions and ad-hoc reporting is powerful
- Dashboard reporting is adequate
- It was secure and easy to implement.
- It allows us to get to the financial data as fast as we need it.
- It optimizes the performance of the cloud service.
Cons
- Performance has not been reliable in the cloud and support from the Oracle always requires the escalation
- Dashboard reporting would be better if it allowed stronger publishing and distribution outside the application.
- Better troubleshooting tools for the end-user for performance and errors
- The limitation of constrained out of the box dimensions that requires ripping the initial implementation to add the new dimensions is a major drawback.
- The Smartview interface is cumbersome for many.
- The only financial adapter is available for the integration for other modules we have to go with the file-based uploads which are cumbersome and not real-time.
- It is very costly in terms of licensing, unlike the other Oracle products.
Pros and Cons of SAP BPC
Pros
- User friendly, with the use of EPM add-in for Excel, business users can work in a familiar environment.
- SAP Analytics Cloud is a very easy and native integration for dashboarding purposes.
- Can manage several business scenarios (versions): actuals, plan and forecast, etc.
- For Consolidation, there is a required dimension for auditing purposes (audit trail) so it is useful for internal and external audits.
- Front-end of the SAP BPC is Excel-based, so drag and drop functionalities can be enabled to easily analyze the figures
- We can load data from the different source systems
- This software has helped to simplify, streamline and automate the whole budgeting process
- Simplify data aggregation
- Comply with the changing local and international accounting standards
- Very useful in analyzing the data. We are using it to compare the historical performances month by month to current months.
- Great customer service.
- This program is very easy to learn due to its Excel UI.
- It brings several business units under one system and therefore data presented at the enterprise level is really solid.
- Well integrated with HANA.
Cons
- The refresh time for our spreadsheets is maddeningly slow.
- It is not an intuitive product. I had to be taught how to unhide a tab in Excel because it doesn’t let you unhide in the traditional way.
- EPM add-in is only available for the Microsoft Windows Operating System.
- In order to open or refresh information, it is required to have an EPM add-in for MS Office already installed.
- Difficult to configure, ex. Script logic for ad-hoc adjustments.
- Protection on the data could be better, since creating restrictions based on the multiple combinations is quite difficult
- The license is expensive
- Performance when using dimensions with many massive data records could be improved
After Comparing features, the pros and cons choose the best one which suits your organization.