COPA AND BPC

[Former Member]

Hi

Can any one please let me know why BPC shlould be implemented when the planning forecasting and budgeting can be done using COPA of ECC?

Best Regards

Anil Kaalla

[Former Member]

Good question!!

Plannng can be done in ECC i cost centre, profit centre, etc.

COPA planing and reporting is for profitability stuff. You define Profitabiity segments in COPA and plan on them and for actual values, you send to these segments. You plan in COPA and send the data to BW and do reporting.

The same this can be done in BPC and BPC comes with little more features like it is web centric wihout any more config, comes with standard workflow ( called BPF), etc.

BPC is "a " tool for planning. COPA is another tool. CCA is another tool.

Also, in BPC you can perform financial consolidations.

What tool to use depends on your circumtance.

Ravi Thothadri

[pravin_datar]

I agreee that COPA and ECC allow you to do planning and forecasting in R/3. However you can not compare them with the flexibility that BPC offers. If you have to make any small change in any planning procedure, you have to go through all sequntial steps in COPA where as in BPC ease of change and end-user empowerment is the essence. Second important point is that in COPA, the data is stored in OLTP system and while querying and analyzing anything the data, there can be a (unnecessary) drag on the performance of other mission critical transaction systems. If you use BPC, you are taking that burden away from OLTP to OLAP and thereby optimizing your performance.

Regards

Pravin

[Former Member]

Hi,

watch out to say too easily "COPA is bad and BPC is good ...".

1) COPA is part of R/3 and allows better integration with your (actual) data. For example you standard can use the details of standard costing to calculate your costprices or calculate your revenues by using the master data (SD master data of SD condition types) which is also used to calculate prices when creating customer invoices in the SD module.

2) BPC on his hand has a better front-end: easier to create reports for the user and they look nicer as well.

-> BPC is used to plan on a more strategic level and typically uses planning on accounts in values, CO-PA typically is performed bottom-up planning: volume -> value.

3) for BPC you have to pay additional licenses , COPA is part of your R/3 system

4) COPA is limited to the structure maintained in COPA. In BPC you decide yourself the dimensions for planning.

5) planning in COPA is setup in one to five days. BPC typically 20 for example.

If a customer requests only sales planning for which integration is needed with cost prices of Sales prices o-I often prefer COPA over BPC ... So it depends on the request you have ...

regards

D

[Former Member]

Hi Anil,

Thought I would at least post a comment on since I was brought into an SAP company as an accounting analyst back in 2003-2004 to specifically work on (A.) CO-PA and (B.) data exports from it to Excel.

For other readers, CO-PA is meant for internal reporting (CO-Controlling), and for analyzing business processes (PA=Profitability Analysis). Anyhow, at the time for this company, there were about 60 customer groups that they wanted to look at every month.

However, the SAP interface for CO-PA was a bit... "clunky" you might say. We couldn't re-orient views of the data exactly the way we wanted. We also couldn't PRESENT the data in the form we wanted to the management team. For example, we needed to show those values in Excel-based scorecards with a couple of little comparison graphs.

In the end, the data would be exported to an Excel file and then it was my job to do all these fancy links and formulas to bring it into an Excel report template to "massage" it so that it was presentable.

It is in this respect that BPC has a strong point. It operates from Excel natively and allows all of this kind of flexibility for reporting and analysis. So, you can avoid doing links to the 60 sheet tabs (one for each group), with #REF errors, lots of updates, multi-user issues, version issues, and what they call "Excel Hell", etc.

Finally, noone on the management team was comfortable in the SAP CO-PA environment generally, and BPC provides a more user-friendly experience in some ways.

Hope this helps,

Garrett