BPCX Montreal May-2013 Bell Canada

BPC Customer Spotlight: Bell Canada

Mario Barbieri,

Associate Director Finance,

Bell Canada

SAP BPC Implementation ProjectPlanning, Budgeting & Forecasting

May 30, 2013

Page 74 | May 30 2013 | PUBLIC

Agenda

Company description

Context of the BPC implementation

Our current BPC landscape

Transfer process

The evolution of our BPC solution

Question period


Who we are

Bell is operating in 4 segments: • Bell Wireline• Bell Wireless• Bell Media• Bell Aliant

Segments are further broken down in Lines of Business or Units (i.e. TV,

Internet, Home Phone, Bell Business Markets, Wholesale, Field Services)

54,000 employees

2012 Operating revenues of $20B

We have one goal: To be recognized by customers as Canada’s leading

communications company


Context of the BPC implementation

Multiple tools required to document

budget, plan, and forecast

Existing tools were built on

older technology making them expensive to

modify

Process highly manual,

decentralized and prone to

error

Inability to perform

modelling with existing tools

Confirmed the need for a new corporate-wide planning tool


Project objectives

Accommodate submission, aggregation and consolidation (intercompany eliminations) processes and BU specific modeling

Improve and accelerate month-end reporting and standardize processes across Finance

Leverage prior investment in SAP, by integrating SAP BusinessObjects into the SAP platform (BW data, BWA, ERP)

Setup a common platform to document the plan, budget and forecast

Objectives Results

5 systems decommissioned and replaced by 1 corporate-wide planning system: BPC

Standard BPC intercompany elimination now used and various submission methods are available. Driver-based models are currently being developed.

Leveraging BPC offline distribution and BPC journal entries to accelerate month-end reporting

Daily and intra-day interfaces are in place between BW and BPC using delta loads. Master data refreshed automatically from SAP on a regular basis.

All corporately reported results are sourced from BPC and new metrics are added monthly

Decommission corporate legacy systems and all LOB-specific systems


How is BPC used at Bell?

BPC Users

• 600 users mostly in Finance and growing

• 5 major subsidiaries• 10 line of business spanning: IT, Wholesale, Corporate, Bell TV, Bell Media, etc.

What is documented

• Financial – Mostly P&L, and Balance sheet for one LOB

• Headcount – End of period employee, full-time equivalent, etc.

• Metrics - Business unit specific operational drivers (e.g. subscribers, Average Revenue Per Unit, etc.)

Processes

• Budget – documented in November for the following 12 months

• Forecast – Corporate forecast documented 3 times a year and BU specific on a monthly basis

• 3-year Plan – Documented as part of the Strategic Planning process

• Outlook – Documented just prior to month-end close or at mid-month (as required)

• Actual – For metrics only (each BU obtains this information from various sources and loads it into BPC for month-end)

Reporting

• Corporate month-end Management reporting

• BU Management reporting

• Planning related reporting

• CRTC reporting

Support

• Managed by the Finance department. Limit the use of BADI where possible to keep flexibility and control within Finance.

• Key structural items (Dimensions, cubes, etc.) are transported. Scripts , IS and reports are ported.


BPC applications – as of May 2013

Corporate

P&L

TAFIFinancial transfer

TAHRHeadcount

transfer

HRHeadcount

MetricsFinancial metrics

Media FIMedia P&L and Balance sheet

BRSResidential P&L

RateFX rates

SAP Business Warehouse (BW 7.0 with BWA) - Staging area

BPC (7.5 NetWeaver)

SAP ECC 6.0


Our landscape - Financials

Corporate• Documentation of the

official financial plan, budget, forecast

• Corporate reporting

BRS• Documentation of the

financial plan, budget, forecast for the Residential Business unit

• BU specific reporting

MediaFI• Documentation of the

financial plan, budget, forecast for the Residential Business unit

• BU specific reporting

TAFI• Documentation of

financial transfers • Discussed in more detail

later on

Applications

Dimensions # of members # of hierarchies Corporate BRS MediaFI TAFI

CATEGORY 153 - � � � �

ACCOUNT 13,587 4 � � � �

TIME 217 2 � � � �

COST CENTER 42,848 8 � � � �

TRADING PARTNER 365 1 � � � �

DATA SOURCE 149 1 � � � �

POSTING LEVEL 7 2 � � � �

REPORTING CURRENCY 2 - � � � �

BIZ TYPE 169 2 �

DEPARTMENT 105 1 �

VENDOR 1135 1 �

TAGROUPID 1404 1 �

TAID 307 1 �

TAFROMTO 2 1 �


Our landscape – HR & others

HR• Documentation of the

official EOP/FTE plan, budget, forecast

• Corporate and BU reporting

TAHR• Documentation of

EOP/FTE transfers• Discussed in more detail

later on

Metrics• Documentation of the

official operational metrics plan, budget, forecast

• Corporate and BU reporting

Rate• Used to hold the

currency conversion exchange rates and other global drivers

Applications

Dimensions # of members # of hierarchies HR TAHR

CATEGORY 153 - � �

ACCOUNT HR 6 1 �

TIME 217 2 � �

COST CENTER 42,848 8 � �

EMPLOYEE 34,857 1 �

BARGAINING UNIT 28 1 � �

FORCE STATUS 15 1 � �

TIER 13 1 � �

EMPLOYEE GROUP 9 1 � �

BILLABLE 4 1 � �

FULL TIME/PART TIME 4 1 � �

MANAGEMENT 3 1 � �

DATA SOURCE 149 1 � �

TAGROUPID 1404 1 �

TAID 307 1 �

TAFROMTO 2 1 �

Applications

Dimensions

# of

members

# of

hierarchies Metrics Rate

CATEGORY 153 - � �

ACCOUNT METRICS 271 1 �

TIME 217 2 � �

BUSINESS UNIT 47 2 �

PRODUCT 42 2 �

DISTRIBUTION

CHANNEL 28 1 �

NETWORK

TECHNOLOGY 20 2 �

CUSTOMER TYPE 15 1 �

REGION 15 1 �

POSTPAID/PREPAID 4 1 �

DATA SOURCE 149 1 �

RATE 2 - �

RATE ENTITY 1 - �

INPUT CURRENCY 20 - �


Implementation challenges

Under estimated change management efforts

Willingness of users and process owners to let go of the old tools

Incorporating needs from diverse groups

Offering users the same flexibility as the previous manual process

Training was conducted before each planning cycle, and various techniques were used:

F2F, tips & tricks, e-learning, clips, desk guide

Main planning cycles were conducted in parallel so that users could reconcile results

between the two tools

Created a monthly forum for BU coordinators to voice their needs and include in project

feedback

Provided access to the BU coordinators to run specific data manager packages to facilitate

their processes


Lessons learned

Finding skilled resources to help with development was a challenge

Underestimated the integration efforts with SAP BW

Creating two applications with exactly the same dimensions is not a best practice

BW environment impacts the performance on your BPC platform

• Brought in experts for specific development items

• Built the expertise internally, including training material on scripting

• Issue with data stored at parent nodes in BW• Many BW dimension members had to be

renamed• Work-around required since BPC 7.5 does not

handle time-dependent hierarchies

• The administrative effort to maintain the two applications outweighs the benefits of ownership and performance

• We refined our governance around when a new application needs to be built

• BW Accelerator available in our BW was a MUST to meet performance expectations

• Dependency on BW jobs/processes impacts predictability of BPC – issue to address as part of our BW/BPC roadmap


Transfer process

• For financial reporting purposes Bell aligns budgets, forecasts and historical actuals to current organizational and reporting structures.

• Transfers eliminate the 'noise' associated with year-over-year variances and allow for better decision-making

Purpose

• Organizational changes: people, teams, or functions moving within the organization

• Transfer of functions to a subsidiary from Bell

• Company wide re-organizations (budget reduction)

Triggering events

• The data that is most often restated via the transfer process are Revenues, Expenses and HeadcountData

• Transfers never impact financial results previously reported externally.

• Headcount transfers need to be processed at the individual employee level to keep HR data in sync

• Transfers impacting reported LOBs and accounts require approval

Complexity


Transfer process

A solution was introduced to track individual transfers and control the approval process. It combines: - Input schedules validations and

controls- BPC validation rules- Additional intelligence via SAP

BADI (ABAP)


What’s coming up for Bell’s BPC platform?

Compensation, commission and other driver-based models

BW upgrade to 7.3 and BPC upgrade to V10 (on HANA)

Migration of consolidation functionalities from Hyperion Enterprise to BPC 10*

2013

2015

* Equity Elimination, Cash Flow, Full Balance Sheet, Notes to Financial Statement


Driver based models

Compensation Model

- Models headcount (FTE and EOP) needs at the individual employee level

- Calculates salary expenses based on each employee’s hourly rate

- Calculates other employee related expenses (benefits, taxes, bonus, etc.) and allocates across valid cost centers

- Performs variance analysis against actual at the employee level and waterfall reports

- Allows planner to add new headcount using “master data on the fly”

Commission model

- Models commission payment made by our Wireless business unit to the various retailers

- Leverages subscriber activation assumptions and contractual commission rates

- Determines Cost of Acquisition (COA) and Cost of Maintenance (COM)

- Performs variance analysis against actual and Marketing assumptions


Our rationale for upgrading to BPC 10

Removes dependencies between BW and BPC, improves predictability of the BPC system (by deploying a separate BW 7.3/HANA instance)

Improves performance of the BPC system and avoids performance deterioration during peak usage period or during processing of month-end activities (by introducing HANA in-memory database)

Introduces a toolset that is simple for users to use and adopt, is easy to administer by the support team and is easy to find an expert to assist with new development activities (by upgrading BPC to version 10)

Enables the migration of the Consolidation processes from the obsolete Hyperion Enterprise (by leveraging the advanced consolidation functionalities available in BPC version 10)


Future landscape – BPC upgrade

SAP BPC V10

PLANNING

BEx AnalyzerEPM Excel Add-in

/ Web client

BWA

CONSOLIDATIONS

HANA

SAP BW 7.3

SAP BW 7.0

BPC BW (Unicode)

Corporate BW (Non-Unicode)

NEW


HANA proof of concept with SAP

ScenarioBPC 7.5 NW with

BWA

BPC 10 SP9 on

HANA

Copy Budget from CORPORATE app to BRS * 17-21 minutes 26 seconds

Copy TAFI to Corporate DMP - Calling custom logic (65,000 record generated and submitted) *

1 hour 54 minutes (on busy workdays)

46 seconds

Intercompany eliminations (consolidation) 3 years of data

7 minutes(100,000 records)

6 minutes **(2,478,082 records)

Lite optimize of Corporate app 26 minutes 54 seconds

Input 12,000 records via input schedule 2-3 minutes 10 seconds

Process cost center dimension (43,000 members) 18 minutes 3 minutes, 10 seconds

Report EVDRE multiple full expansion 20 minutes N/A ***

* Issue with invalid members, required notes 1803288, 1810979, 1815456, 1835293 to solve issue

** Issue identified with hierarchy selection box not working (fixed in SP14 Patch1 of EPM 10 add-in)

*** EVDRE report did not complete with memory error - Scheduled to be fixed in EPM 10 Add in SP14

• SAP migrated our live application set from 7.5 to 10 using UJBR

• SAP ran program BPC_HANA_MIGRATE_FROM_10 in TC SE38 to make a standard BPC 10 infocube HANA optimized

• SAP used a dedicated BPC 10 system to perform this proof of concept

• A number of issues were uncovered during the proof of concept and subsequently addressed

Questions?

Documents

BPCX Montreal May-2013 Bell Canada