Juniper: Recalibrating financial management reporting, planning, and forecasting for real-time data-driven decision-making
Explore Juniper’s journey with SAP
When AI-native networking company Juniper Networks Inc. sought to transform its financial management reporting, planning, and forecasting capabilities, it connected the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for planning with its ERP and business intelligence applications. This amplified its planning and forecasting prowess and enabled real-time insights and decision-making.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| High tech | Sunnyvale, California | 11,100 employees |
of data modeling and analysis on spend done in one solution.
of manual processes for planning and forecasting to be eliminated.
Senior Process Manager, Juniper Networks Inc.
Strengthening financial reporting and planning agility
Juniper Networks Inc. is a global leader in AI networking, cloud, and connected security solutions for enterprise, cloud, and service providers. Delivering network experiences that transform how people connect, work, and live, the company enables customers to build agile, scalable, secure, and cost-effective networks that deliver optimized efficiency and end-user satisfaction.
Juniper’s mission of connecting everything and empowering everyone means helping its customers deliver real results for their organizations and communities. Through its investments in research, development, engineering, and innovation, Juniper’s innovations impact critical areas of the economy, from education and healthcare to retail and banking.
Juniper is also recognized among the world’s most ethical companies, validating its commitment to conducting business with transparency, integrity, and trust as it builds global resilience, empowers the workforce of the future, and enhances governance.
With its business growing quickly due to soaring customer demand for faster, higher-volume network connectivity amid rapidly multiplying network connections from IoT and AI data, Juniper sought to upgrade financial reporting and forecasting planning management. The company wanted access to expansive planning capabilities and real-time data to provide insights that would help it react faster to market changes and stay ahead of customers’ needs.
Senior Process Manager, Juniper Networks Inc.
Accessing real-time data insights and analytics for enhanced decision-making
Juniper was using a legacy system that relied on manual processes for uploading data from one system to another. Planning, forecasting, and modeling functions were performed offline using Microsoft Excel, which slowed its finance team’s ability to provide timely insights to the business.
Looking to strengthen its financial management reporting as well as planning and forecasting capabilities, Juniper sought a modern solution. The goal was to provide its executive team with up-to-the-minute data insights while avoiding manual steps for data replication and modeling.
Juniper decided to invest in SAP Analytics Cloud for planning on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). It was impressed by the comprehensive planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud as well as the simplified integration scenario with its current ERP and business intelligence systems. Running on SAP BTP, the solution provides planning and reporting in one cloud-based offering, enabling its finance team to plan, forecast, analyze, and model data in one place, eliminating the need to use Excel for data modeling.
As part of the solution’s implementation, Juniper sought critical support from SAP Preferred Success offerings, gaining the expertise of a cloud solution specialist from SAP to help smooth the go-live.
Senior Process Manager, Juniper Networks Inc.
Providing visualized insights through executive-level dashboards
Kathleen Kuang, senior process manager at Juniper, comments on how the use of SAP Analytics Cloud for planning has simplified planning work. “By adopting the planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud, our planning team can perform planning and forecasting activities directly in this solution using data that’s flowing from our ERP application and business intelligence tool.”
And in terms of visualizing the data for up-to-the-minute insights, with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, Juniper’s finance team has created dashboards to provide executive-level views for monitoring key performance indicators and enabling data-driven decisions.
Elsewhere, as business users in the company are looking forward to leveraging AI-assisted user experiences from SAP, Juniper has set up an AI console to test out AI functionality. In its continued work with SAP Preferred Success, it is engaging with SAP experts on the release of the just ask feature of SAP Analytics Cloud. This natural-language query function enabled by AI is already being tested by Juniper’s IT team using its AI console.
Maximizing value from advanced analytics and planning
Juniper has been live on SAP Analytics Cloud for planning for over a year, with SAP Preferred Success continuing to provide advanced support services along the way. Whenever the company explores new functionalities or a new rollout, it engages SAP Preferred Success to gain a deeper understanding of how to maximize the functionality for its innovation use cases.
Kuang explains, “We are working to adopt every quarterly release from SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, continuing to work with SAP Preferred Success to explore the new capabilities and prepare for AI functionality that is being rolled out.”
She adds, “With SAP Preferred Success, we can connect to product experts and have a conversation with them. This helps us better understand the upcoming functionality in a deeper, more applicable way so we can really take advantage of it once the functionality is released.”