To improve profitability, you need 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 impact. But to do this successfully, you need streamlined, connected processes that deliver credible, reliable results to your users.

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

SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management supports IT services costing, customer value analysis, cost to serve, bill of material costing, and activity based costing. Features and functions include:

• User-friendly, rapid, and efficient model building
• Flexible assignment paths
• Scalable, enterprise-class solution
• Reliable, on-demand what-if analysis and scenario modeling
• Higher-value cost and profitability reporting

IT services costing

• Accurately calculate and cross-charge for IT and other shared services.
• Leverage comprehensive invoices that detail IT services usage and cost details.

Cost to serve

• Monitor and manage costs, pricing, and true profitability.
• Accurately assign overheads and indirect costs to customers, products, and channels.

Customer value analysis

• Access cost and profitability data by customer, product, or business channel
• Quickly identify and understand issues.

Bill of material costing

• Accurately assign, monitor, and analyze overhead costs tied to your bill of materials.
• Calculate cost impact of carbon footprint and analyze for strategic decision making.

Activity based costing

• Leverage activity-centric multidimensional modeling and analysis functionality for visibility into cost and profitability drivers.
• Implement multiple activity based costing methodologies including time-driven activity based costing.

With SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management, you can reap benefits that include:

IT services costing

• Align IT resources and capacity with business demand.
• Make informed decisions about use of IT shared services.
• Gain insight into the cost of individual services helps drive down cost of IT.

Cost to serve

• Monitor and manage costs and pricing.
• Understand the underlying causes of changes in your costs and profitability.
• Gain actionable insight into the true drivers of profitability across your enterprise.

Customer value analysis

• Access cost and profitability data by customer, product, or business channel.
• Identify and understand issues and test changes that can improve the bottom line.

Bill of material costing

• Efficiently manage BOMs and associated data throughout the life cycle of the product.
• Accurately assign product overheads to finished goods based on consumption.

Activity based costing

• Gain a clear picture of your organization's cost structure and underlying cost drivers.
• Accurately determine the true cost of products and services so you can identify your most profitable products.