Customers Gain Improved Insight to Outperform Financial Expectations With SAP® BusinessObjects™ Planning and Consolidation

WALLDORF, Germany, Sept. 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Demonstrating how enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions help organizations align everyday decisions with strategic business objectives, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced CKE Restaurants and Freedom Group are two customers streamlining financial forecasting and budgeting processes with the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Planning and Consolidation application.

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Comprised of restaurant chains such as Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, CKE has more than 3,000 locations worldwide in 43 states and 13 countries. After a competitive win over Oracle/Hyperion, CKE now uses SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation to make timely, informed decisions that impact its global brands and respond quickly to changing economies and business environments. It previously took CKE days to aggregate data and produce forecasts, and sometimes weeks to consolidate data for the budgeting process. Today SAP helps CKE do all of this in hours, and its budgeting cycle has been reduced by one-third. By spending less time consolidating and validating large data sets and more time analyzing information, CKE now has a complete view of its organization with actionable data. Finance team members, for example, can assess the company's profitability while excluding certain factors and more easily gauge how individual marketing campaigns impact revenue.

A global innovator, designer, manufacturer and marketer of firearms, ammunition and other related products – including the Remington® brand – Freedom Group uses SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation to deliver sales and operations data to its field, which serves the hunting, shooting sports, law enforcement and military markets. By consuming the information in fresh ways, the field has gained a new perspective and is better equipped to make business decisions that drive profitability throughout the organization. Senior management is also able to track corporate-wide key performance indicators (KPIs) for shipments, bookings, open orders, production and finished goods inventory to evaluate its different companies in a consistent way. As a result, Freedom Group has cut the time it takes to report financials – including period-end closing – by five to 10 days while providing corporate executives with more financial insight than ever before.

SAP was recently named by Gartner Inc. as a worldwide market share leader in business intelligence (BI), analytics and performance management software, and it has continued its growth and innovation with the 10.0 release of its EPM solutions. For more information about EPM solutions and to learn how SAP helps CFOs and finance professionals transform their businesses, please visit www.sapcfo.com and the Business Analytics newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and SAP BusinessObjects at @businessobjects.

Media Contact:
Susan Miller, SAP, +1 (610) 661-9225, [email protected], EDT
Jeff Shadid, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (214) 224-8419, [email protected], CDT

SOURCE SAP AG