Proven reasons to migrate from SAP BPC and BFC to Oracle Cloud EPM
If you’re an SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) and SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation (BFC) customer, you’re probably aware that these products won’t be supported within the next few years. The end-of-support date for SAP BPC 10.1 for Microsoft is 12/31/2026, and the date for SAP BPC 10.1 version for NetWeaver is 20271 and SAP BFC 10.12 is 12/31/2030. If you haven’t considered what you’ll do after SAP BPC and SAP BFC are no longer supported, now is the time to explore your options.
Oracle’s approach to cloud migration allows us to partner with any SAP BPC and BFC customer, regardless of their starting point, and move them to Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). Migrating to Oracle Cloud EPM will bring a number of benefits to your organization, including improved financial and operational planning, reduced business risk, greater agility, and a faster financial close, resulting in a lower TCO.
Why SAP BPC and BFC customers should consider migrating to Oracle Cloud EPM
Today’s EPM requirements go far beyond traditional FP&A processes to include enterprise-wide connected planning, end-to-end financial close, reporting, tax provisioning, integrated analytics, and AI/ML-driven automation, to name just a few. As a BPC or BFC customer, you could migrate to multiple SAP and partner tools, which can lead to higher implementation and administration costs. Or you could lower your costs, minimize multiplatform complexities, and realize faster business value with Oracle’s complete Cloud EPM suite.
Oracle Cloud EPM can deliver value to SAP BPC and BFC customers
Oracle Cloud EPM is helping organizations increase their focus on important projects such as environmental, social, governance (ESG) initiatives and connected planning.
| End of support | SAP BPC and BFC maintenance is ending between 2024 and 2030. You’ll need to consider alternatives and develop a strategy to move forward with a modern EPM platform. |
| Beyond FP&A | Today’s business use cases require more than just FP&A and consolidations. To grow and thrive in the future, companies are looking to xP&A, AI/ML-driven processes, and other EPM business processes that may not be supported by SAP’s legacy BPC and BFC versions. |
| Configuration | A modern EPM platform enables business agility. The old “build” implementation model doesn’t deliver a fast time to value and adds implementation and administration costs. Migrating custom BPC and BFC applications to Oracle Cloud EPM maximizes your agility with an innovative, modular framework of purpose-built applications that minimize or eliminate the need for traditional, custom application coding. |
| Integration issues | With Oracle Cloud EPM, all EPM processes are integrated into one, complete platform. You don’t need to put up with the complexities and costs of integrating multiple SAP and third-party tools. You get comprehensive EPM functionality in a single Cloud EPM suite. |
| Incomplete EPM platform | SAP does not have one complete and unified EPM platform for all your EPM processes. Customers migrating from BPC and BFC to other SAP offerings may still be dependent on third-party tools, which can create additional costs and complexities. With Oracle Cloud EPM, you have one complete solution for all your EPM processes, resulting in significantly less TCO, less complexity, and faster time to value. |
| Future-proofing | As a recognized industry leader, Oracle Cloud EPM is consistently a leader in analyst rankings. Our next-generation Cloud EPM suite incorporates innovative technologies such as AI, ML, and predictive analytics. You can trust Oracle to help modernize your mission-critical functions and to continue to support your changing needs in the future. |
Is migrating from SAP BPC and BFC to SAP Analytics Cloud and S/4HANA easy?
Is migrating from SAP BPC and BFC to Oracle Cloud EPM easier or harder compared to moving to SAP Analytics Cloud and S/4HANA? With SAP’s disparate EPM products approach, migrating older versions of SAP to S/4HANA can be complex and costly. Here’s why:
| Reimplementation | Regardless of which direction you take, migrating from BPC or BFC will require a reimplementation that could be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Oracle Cloud EPM is designed for a faster, more flexible deployment. Instead of settling for a long deployment and thin functionality, you can quickly configure and deploy modern, best-in-class EPM business processes. |
| Multiplatform | Migrating BPC or BFC requires SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Group Reporting, and possibly additional third-party partner tools for various reporting use cases. Other SAP tools may also be required beyond your original planning applications. This can introduce multi-tool complexities, such as licensing, integration, support, learning curve, and administration challenges leading to significantly more technical support requirements—and a higher overall TCO. |
| Hybrid planning | SAP’s incomplete EPM offerings require more integrations with SAP Analytics Cloud to combine traditional BPC and FP&A processes with other planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud. Oracle’s complete cloud EPM platform offers fully integrated enterprise planning across finance, operations, and lines of business to help you move from siloed to connected planning. |
| Complex implementation | To move your BPC and BFC applications to the cloud, SAP outlines at least seven scenarios and multiple3 integration, hybrid, and other technical implementation steps, which can add unnecessary complexity and support costs. Or you could avoid all that with Oracle’s unified Cloud EPM suite. |
| Increased costs | With costly custom deployments, extensive integrations, and multiple third-party applications, migrating to various SAP hybrid and multi-tool scenarios can become a costly endeavor. Why try to duct tape different EPM tools, models, and data together when you can implement all you need in one modern, innovative, and cost-effective Cloud EPM suite? |
| Reliance on S/4HANA | BPC or BFC consolidation customers will need to adopt SAP S4/HANA Group Reporting—yet another platform—across all business entities. Adding S/4HANA can result in significantly longer implementations, costly learning curves, and additional reliance on technical integration and administration resources. |
| Hybrid cloud | If you choose one of SAP’s hybrid BPC, BFC and SAP Analytics Cloud, or S/4HANA approaches, you’ll still have to juggle a mix of on-premises and possibly private or public SAP cloud platforms. On the other hand, Oracle Cloud EPM is a complete, true cloud application suite. There’s no need for a hybrid legacy and cloud to implement and support. |
| Integration complexity | With SAP, you could be dealing with a mixture of SAP legacy, on-premises, cloud, and third-party partner tools with all the added integration complexity and version control issues. Unlike SAP, Oracle Cloud EPM seamlessly connects your planning and finance processes for fully integrated enterprise planning. |
Moving from older SAP BPC releases to SAP Analytics Cloud planning is, in most cases, a reimplementation; so is moving from older SAP BPC versions to Oracle Cloud EPM. There’s no denying that a move to Oracle Cloud EPM will involve the retraining of staff, and user acceptance of a reimplementation. We are ready to help you with that challenge.
EPM center of excellence
An EPM center of excellence (CoE) team oversees your Cloud EPM adoption, promoting best practices and helping you deliver better business results. Oracle can help you develop your own center of excellence to help mitigate risk in cloud adoption and process transformation efforts. Leveraging an EPM CoE enables you to increase efficiency by driving reviews and identifying automation opportunities while creating awareness of process improvements and communicating success to internal stakeholders.
In addition, Oracle Consulting and Oracle Partners, such as AMOSCA, Brovanture, Constellation Consulting Group, IBM, and Qubix (now Version1) have trained, experienced consultants and proven implementation methodologies that use industry-specific EPM best practices to address your unique use case requirements.
Most important—the migration from SAP BPC or BFC to Oracle Cloud EPM could be your final migration. Experience the power of a complete, purpose-built, and finance-driven Cloud EPM suite.
Learn how Oracle Cloud EPM delivers value to your business (PDF)
See how Oracle's Cloud EPM provides the agility and insights you need to outperform.
More reasons to migrate from SAP BPC and BFC to Oracle Cloud EPM
1. Purpose built
Oracle Cloud’s EPM platform is integrated, yet modular to enable you to deploy what you need when you need it. You control the pace and define which parts of your legacy BPC or BFC applications get migrated first. You can implement planning, consolidations, and any other EPM processes independently, and on your unique timeline, to address your immediate and emerging digital transformation business needs. Do you need to handle workforce planning calculations? Or is your business project-based? Keep in mind that EPM also has out-of-the-box modules for workforce and strategic workforce planning, capital asset planning, long-range planning, project planning and sales planning, which can all speed up your implementation process.
2. One platform for all EPM business processes
Unlike SAP’s incomplete EPM offerings, which are comprised of multiple products and partner tools, Oracle Cloud EPM delivers complete, purpose-built capabilities for connected enterprise planning across finance, operations, and lines of business, including HR, supply chain, IT, and sales. With Oracle, you can leverage built-in functionality that covers the full spectrum of end-to-end close tasks while automating account reconciliations and transaction matching. Migrate your BPC and BFC processes using one Cloud EPM platform and start using additional purpose-built EPM capabilities, all provided in a single Cloud EPM platform.
3. Complete replace with an industry-leading EPM
Rather than just “lifting and shifting” your legacy applications, Oracle can help you start with a clean sheet and replace your SAP BPC and BFC applications by incorporating modern, built-in best practices that can significantly enhance and optimize your legacy planning and consolidation processes.
Read the report: Measuring the Value of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (PDF)
4. Oracle Partners
Oracle’s partner ecosystem is critical to our customers’ success. Their differentiated services, combined with extensive Oracle Cloud EPM expertise and experience in migrating SAP BPC and BFC to Oracle Cloud EPM can help you realize greater business benefits and value in the shortest time possible.
Review the Oracle Partner catalog for a full list of partner resources available to you
Ready to learn how you can replace SAP BPC or BFC with Oracle Cloud EPM?
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