Accelerating Sales Planning with SAC Smart Enablers

You often hear that not two SAP Analytics Cloud implementations are the same. Every organization has its own planning processes, data structures, and reporting requirements.  Still, the fundamentals are often the same, including matters such as setting up models, configuring base tables and building initial data actions. These early steps are essential, but they often take up a large portion of time, time that does not necessarily contribute to better business insights and more insight.

At McCoy, we believe smart work beats hard repetition. That’s why our consultants use so-called Enablers. Enablers are pre-packaged, SAP-generated content that are enhanced with the best practices we’ve honed through our hands-on experience at previous implementations. These Enablers allow us to accelerate the basics, reduce complexity, and create room for innovation.

In this article, we zoom in on the Sales Planning Enabler.

A Kickstart for your Sales Planning Implementation

Sales planning is more than forecasting revenue. Organizations typically plan across multiple dimensions at once while also understanding how different drivers affect results.

So aside from input, gaining insights and understanding the data is very important. To facilitate this, the Sales Planning Enabler is built on three essential components:

• Input Schedules
  At the heart of any planning process lies structured input. This component enables users to enter key planning variables, from volumes and discounts to cost of goods sold. This way, the planning process maintains its focus on business drivers, rather than manual spreadsheet calculations. 

• Reports
  Our reports provide a wide range of tables that translate your planning input into financial clarity, including views on the P&L. Perfect for tracking progress and aligning stakeholders. For example, variance report enables users to compare different time periods and versions with ease and Price-Volume-Mix (PVM) analysis, helps explain revenue differences between plan and actual results.

• Dashboards
  Kickstart your management meetings with interactive visualizations that turn numbers into insights. From charts to graphs, these dashboards are ideal for quick overviews and impactful storytelling as you will be able to show patterns in sales volume, differentiate gross margins per customer or product type and quickly display key KPIs such as net revenue growth.

 With these three components working together, you will be able to structure your planning process.

Simple Setup, Tailored to Fit

Each project starts with an exploration phase to discover what your current sales planning process entails, what data is available and what the requirements for your new planning system are. Our Enabler will be the starting point of our discussions with you. Together we will find out what is required to adjust the Enabler to your business process, while continuously asking ourselves: "what can we do to increase business value?".

Following the exploration phase, we enter a realization phase in which we start by migrating our Sales Enabler. Once it's in place, we establish the necessary connections and data loads. From there, it's all about using the knowledge we gathered in the exploration phase for shaping the Enabler to fit your business. Some examples of what we can adapt:

• Expanding the planning model with existing fields such as product, customer, or regional structures.

• Extending or adjusting calculation logic to reflect company-specific pricing or margin rules or add additional KPIs to dashboards.

• Defining data access controls for different teams or regions, to ensure only the people with the right authorizations can view or enter data.

• Adding features to increase user comfort, for example through automated filters or simplified data entry.  

In the end, every company has a different approach to sales planning. It’s not just about activating a template, the templates are merely meant to be a starting point to accelerate the implementation process to leave more time for what truly matters: enabling a smarter, smoother way to plan your sales.

Our McCoy Enabler Training

If our Sales Planning Enabler has caught your attention, we are happy to show you what it can do. In a short inspiration session, we are able to walk you through our enabler and explore how it could fit your organization. No generic demo, but a focused conversation based on your business needs.