User adoption—and not missing functionality—is often the main issue associated with enterprise performance management software.

“It’s not the features and functions—it’s just that the users aren’t using them,” says William Jan, senior research analyst, financial management and GRC, at Aberdeen Group. “The learning curve is the biggest impediment.”

The enhanced applications in SAP’s EPM 10 suite, due out at the end of the year, should help ease that problem.

In EPM 10, the performance management applications (many of them garnered through SAP acquisitions) will be brought together under a common user interface. Workflows are much improved. For instance, risk-adjusted planning is embedded in workflows that make sense in the context of peoples’ jobs. Everything can be conducted from a single screen, Jan says, and users are presented with certain options based on their role.

In turn, the Microsoft version of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) has functionality that will automate variance analysis—a task most companies have to cull together from scattered sources and calculate manually, Jan points out. In EPM 10, they will be able to launch and calculate from a single portal.

At Sapphire Now 2011, SAP even plans to demonstrate SAP BPC running on a RIM PlayBook, to show that the applications will be easier to run on mobile devices, says James Fisher, SAP’s Vice President of Marketing, EPM and Finance Solutions.

“The user experience is a really key theme of this release,” Fisher says. “It’s really designed to help our customers increase the usability of the solutions and increase user adoption.”

SAP also says it’s working on another problem: finding skills to implement the EPM software, specifically, BPC. SAP’s currently finishing week two of BPC elite training, two weeks of deep-dives into the software for partners. It’s the second time it’s offered the course—and each session has been full, according to Bryan Katis, VP of EPM solutions. SAP’s also training an additional 100 resources in the field.

By the end of the year, SAP’s also aiming to use the in-memory database to make these applications run faster, says Katis. Many BPC customers integrate the software with their BW data warehouse, and there are well-known data latency issues.

By the end of the year, customers will be able to use HANA for real-time data availability—data from BW will be replicated into HANA using the Sybase Replication Server.

In turn, automated variance analysis functionality will be available in-memory; SAP’s building the logic and the calculations directly inside of HANA for it.

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