In today's high-stakes economic climate, consumer products companies are facing unprecedented challenges to compress new product time to market while facing increased customer demand for unique products and services. Globalization has served to increase competition and complicate your supply chain, making the need to tightly link strategy, performance metrics, and shareholder value creation even more crucial.

To succeed, you need to reduce key account planning cycle times, deliver timely management reports, enable faster consolidations, and quickly update forecasts based on changing economic conditions. But first, you need accurate, actionable information that can help you make better decisions – both on short-term operations and long-term strategy.

SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management solutions, coupled with software, services, and best practices from Accenture, can help consumer products companies like yours streamline planning, forecasting, and budgeting. Accenture's deep consumer products industry expertise is captured in the pre-built data models, reports, and business process flows that can help you jump-start your implementation.

The solutions provide robust functionality that can enable the following:

• Integrated data model – SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation is built on an integrated data repository that supports income statement and capital expenses. As a result, key stakeholders can assess figures up to the earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margin – maximizing overall process efficiency. You can leverage specific industry metrics and content delivered out-of-the-box.
• Real-time analytical investigation – You can quickly drill down in the software to understand how market changes are impacting the business. For example, finance managers can simulate a revised budget for both costs and sales within minutes, with planning figures adjusted according to contingencies.
• Integrated bottom-up and top-down planning – With SAP BusinessObjects software, you can plan at any level of detail. For example, you can engage department managers in the planning process with appropriate pre-built models and templates.
• What-if modeling – You can use the software to quickly run alternative scenarios, and assess and analyze the rationale behind version or scenario variances for sales, variable costs, and fixed costs.
• Budget administration and management reporting – Advanced allocation functionality allows key users to conduct financial and operational reporting and analysis, including real-time, high-level budget reviews for both sales and costs. Plus, you can perform production and management reporting, financial and operational analysis, and multidimensional analysis.
• Consolidation – SAP BusinessObjects software can help you centralize all performance-related data, shave weeks off consolidation processes, and improve compliance. For example, you can compare budget-to-actuals data, automate the intercompany elimination process, gain transparency into corporate transactions at all levels, and manage any number of currencies.

Want to Learn More?

"Efficient Consumer Products Planning and Consolidation" (PDF)

Accelerate Time-to-Value With Industry Value Accelerators

These solutions work with both SAP and heterogeneous enterprise applications and data sources. They includes industry-specific content such as a well-designed industry data model, pre-defined dashboards and reports, specific business logic, budget input templates, and an implementation guide. Empowering you to maximize the success of your solution deployment, speed time-to-value, and mitigate project risk.

With these powerful solutions from SAP BusinessObjects, along with content from Accenture, you can reduce the time it takes to create and approve budgets, improve decision making, increase user productivity, and minimize business and compliance risk. So you can concentrate on increasing your market share.