Due to SAP’s fast-approaching end of support for SAP BFC (See Figure 1), many BFC users are considering what direction they will take. They have the option to migrate their BFC consolidation processes to SAP S/4 HANA, and other SAP partner tools for extended financial close and reporting processes, or they can consider other modern and complete Cloud EPM Financial Close solutions that are available today.
You may be a more recent SAP BFC customer, or a long-time user back when it was known as Cartesis Magnitude. Cartesis was a Paris France-based company that was founded in 1990[1] and its flagship product was known as Cartesis Magnitude, which was one of the few web-based solutions for strategic financial management, more popularly referred to as enterprise performance management (EPM) today.
Fast forward 17 years and Cartesis built a customer base of approximately 1300[2], mostly in France and parts of the European region, but then in April 2007, they were acquired by the legacy business intelligence software company, Business Objects for $300 million[3], and six months later Business Objects was acquired by SAP[4] which then renamed Cartesis to SAP BOFC, and then to SAP BFC[5], and finally to SAP Financial Consolidation (SAP FC)[6] which is most likely what you are familiar with and using today.
Since 1990, SAP BFC (formerly Cartesis) has been the primary solution for SAP customers, but like several other Business Objects acquired products such as SAP BPC, BFC has not kept pace with EPM innovation. As organizations worldwide continue to migrate to modern cloud financial consolidation and close platforms, Oracle Cloud EPM has become a leading solution suite that potential SAP BFC users have or are considering migrating to.
Source: SAP
SAP BFC customers realize that they need to transition to a modern EPM platform to meet their goals of modernizing their financial consolidation and reporting processes with AI/ML-driven technologies in addition to other integrated EPM processes to achieve enterprise-wide financial consolidations that generate high-value and strategic business insights.
Examples of some questions SAP Financial Consolidations users are asking:
As an SAP BFC user, you have the choice of either reimplementing your legacy SAP Financial Consolidation processes using SAP S4/HANA combined with 3rd party SAP partner tools to address your financial consolidation and reporting requirements or, you can move to a modern and fully complete Cloud EPM platform that has everything you need for modern financial consolidations and regulatory reporting you need in one common and integrated platform. Let’s look at these two options a more detail.
Rather than building a complete, purpose-built cloud EPM solution suite that addresses all financial consolidations and reporting and extended EPM business processes in a single integrated and unified platform, SAP has taken a siloed approach by providing financial consolidations in S/4HANA in addition to other SAP and third-party partner tools to support processes such as Account Reconciliation, Tax, and Narrative Reporting.
SAP may offer several migration options for BFC customers, but careful consideration of the various costs and effort associated with migrating from your current SAP BFC platform is recommended as you may be introducing more complexity and costs by implementing and managing multiple platforms and tools.
Technically, and with enough time, money, and resources, these SAP and added partner tools could conceivably be made to work together, but SAP BFC customers would likely need to deal with potential challenges such as:
All of these can drive higher TCO and overall administration complexity while potentially impacting system stability and availability if any one of these disparate tools develops issues.
Oracle Cloud EPM delivers a complete, integrated, and unified software-as-a-service (SaaS) EPM suite. The depth of Oracle Cloud EPM’s complete end-to-end financial close delivers intelligent process automation (IPA) using advanced AI to enable you to automate consolidations, orchestrate a connected close, and automate narratives in reports.
With Oracle Cloud EPM, SAP BFC customers can migrate and optimize their legacy BFC applications to run in a unified, single platform that is purpose-built to support all your current and future financial consolidation and close use case requirements without having to depend on multiple tools, platforms, and vendors. This can significantly lower your conversion, integration, and administration costs while speeding up time to value and making it easy for you to implement Oracle Cloud EPM financial consolidations and other EPM modules at your own pace.
Take the first step to migrate to Oracle Cloud EPM. Customers are choosing Oracle for our complete and purpose-built cloud EPM platform instead of struggling with the complex implementation, administration, and added costs related to other vendors’ incomplete and fragmented tools and technologies. Oracle Cloud EPM helps address all your requirements in a single, unified, and complete cloud EPM platform developed and supported by Oracle.
Why settle for an incomplete SAP portfolio that may have you implement multiple tools from different vendors to fill financial close and reporting gaps, or wait for a costly, time-consuming, integration, and customized development effort? We invite you to take the next step and allow us to share with you the vast benefits thousands of Oracle Cloud EPM customers are experiencing today with the leading complete cloud EPM suite for an end-to-end financial close.
Additional resources:
[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cartesis
[2] https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cartesis
[3] https://www.cfo.com/news/business-objects-to-buy-cartesis/674911/
[4] https://news.sap.com/2007/10/sap-to-acquire-business-objects-in-friendly-takeovercombined-companies-to-accelerate-leadership-for-business-user-applications/
[5] https://answers.sap.com/questions/8382735/bpc-vs-bfc.html
[6] https://support.sap.com/en/product/support-by-product/01200314690800000356.html
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