Improving profitability involves more than a headlong pursuit to increase revenues and slash costs. It's the ability to identify your most valuable customers and products, while testing the impact that changes in pricing and process improvements have on costs and profitability. This will give you the insight to act decisively with a clear understanding of what the outcome will be.

Yet today many organizations endeavor to do detailed cost and profitability reporting on spreadsheets and other in-house solutions. And that can result in infrequent reporting that involves a high degree of manual effort from your finance department – and that can produce results that have limited credibility with the business users.

The SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management application can help. This scalable software is owned and managed by the business users and can allow you to accurately and effectively measure product, customer, and channel profitability and develop and dynamically test out ways to improve them.

By using this application as a standalone solution – or to complement cost and profitability analytics done through SAP ERP Financials software – you can leverage comprehensive functionality for cost and profitability reporting, process costing, IT and other services costing, plus cross-charging and resource and capacity planning.

And in an era of increasing pressure to deliver sustainable financial results, there is no better time to drive more value from your cost and profitability reporting. So you can:

• Move away from crude apportionments towards cause-and-effect assignments that accurately reflect how products and customers consume resources.
• Minimize the amount of time and effort needed to produce cost and profitability reports.
• Give business users credible information that provides the insight they need to make better decisions that drive the bottom line.