The Business Objects Enterprise Management suite is comprised of multiple products for strategy, planning/budgeting, consolidation and profitability/cost management. The Profitability & Cost Management (PCM) product, sometimes referred to as the Profitability product, was acquired from ALG Software in late 2006. ALG had two main products, Enterprise Performance Optimization (EPO) and Metify. EPO is now PCM. Metify is still available, but not marketed.
PCM is a profitability and cost modeling application with a multidimensional calculation and reporting engine. Customers use this solution to provide product/customer/channel profitability, cost to serve, and shared services (e.g. IT) costing/charge-back information. The solution competes with Acorn Systems’ EPS, SAS Institute’s ABM & Profitability Management, Oracle’s old ABM solutions and it’s new Cost & Profitability Management solution, and several other activity based costing solutions. Learn more at http://www.pcsconsulting.com/index.php/services/software/abcvendors
The Profitability product was not pushed much by Business Objects the first year. As a result, outside consulting skills with the PCM solution have waned. However, the SAP acquisition now places a stronger emphasis on the product, which is good and bad news. Bad in that it is stressing the PCM skills within Business Objects. Good in that it provides consulting opportunities for those of us with these unique skills and knowledge.
I invite anyone with questions about the Profitability solution to participate in this topic. I will try to answer your questions. I invite other consultants and practitioners with PCM (aka EPO) experience to also participate in this topic. Collectively, we can help each other be successful.
We’ve recently started an effort to integrate PCM 7.5 with our BOBJ XI 3.1 system.
With the universes that were created by the integration toolkit, we are seeing some universe level prompts (specifically on Version) but those prompts are not showing up when in Designer for the specific universe.
Wh are trying to build BOBJ Universes over the PCM SQL db. Our problem is building hierarchies on Responsibility Centers. We use table PPLOAD_RESPCENT_DH to get the Parent child but because our hierarchy has 6 levels it is becoming very completed. has anyone actually managed to build a hierarchy in Webi? Would the universes that are populated if PCM is integrated with BOBJ resolve this issue. Is there a list or the universes and their structures?
Regards
juliet
I work as a BO report developer and I have a new requirement to build some reports over a customer’s new PCM models. I have no previous experience with PCM, but I have downloaded and read some docs from the sap help portal. May I ask your help with some basic questions?
I need to connect a BO BI (4.0 Platform, OS Windows Server 2003) to PCM (10.0, repository on SQLServer 2008 R2, again Windows Server 2003) so we can build some Web Intelligence and Dashboards (Xcelsius) reports. I’ve done a test BI & PCM installation following the manuals instructions but I haven’t been able to configure the OLAP connectivity. Several basic questions have arisen. That’s where your help would be highly appreciated. I need to find the correct documentation or guidelines to investigate and get in the correct direction.
How should I connect UNX to PCM & Dashboards to PCM? With OLAP XMLA MDX, with ODBO MDX or both? The manuals tell you can do it, but doesn’t tell how !
Is it a best practice to connect directly (SQLServer connection) and exploit the data with a relational universe? Or would OLAP be the best practice? Why?
I haven’t found the SAP manuals to be detailed enough or even accurate enough. If you know better references please tell.
In the “real world” (not what the manuals state) aparently the way sap provides to connect information design tool universes (unx) to pcm is via the XMLA connector. Do you have better references with detailed instructions to do so?
Hi,
We also had some issues recently with the export to Database and export to universe not working right when integrating BO3.1 with PCM7.
It turned out to be a bug with the child tables.
SAP is fixing it right now and it will probably be released in the next FP.
Regards,
(BOB member since 2009-10-13)
(BOB member since 2013-11-15)