Concept card

BARC — The Planning Survey

As of 2026-07-23

Edited by Cédric-Olivier Mâry, sole editor and publication director — 27 years in the SAP ecosystem. How these pages are produced, and where automation is used.

What is BARC — The Planning Survey?

SAC Planning ranks differently depending on peer group — strong where S/4HANA integration counts, weaker on usability against Anaplan and Pigment in operational planning.

What it is

The Planning Survey is the CPM/EPM sibling of The BI and Analytics Survey — BARC's annual user-experience survey of planning, budgeting, and forecasting tools. Same methodology as the BI Survey: thousands of end-user respondents rate their planning tool on dozens of KPIs (satisfaction, performance, innovation, support, business value), results are segmented by peer groups (enterprise financial planning, mid-market, operational planning), and vendors are ranked within those peer groups.

For SAP analytics consultants, the Planning Survey is the most-cited third-party reference in CFO-level planning RFPs. It ranks SAP Analytics Cloud Planning and, historically, SAP Business Planning and Consolidation against the field: Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, Oracle EPM Cloud, OneStream, Board, Jedox, Pigment, and others. The peer-group structure matters: SAC Planning consistently ranks differently in the enterprise financial planning peer group (where S/4HANA integration is a differentiator) versus the operational/business planning peer group (where standalone usability and modelling flexibility are weighted more heavily). A presales consultant who knows which peer group the customer belongs to can frame the BARC reference precisely rather than citing a generic ranking.

Why it matters

A presales consultant who knows the customer's peer group (enterprise financial vs operational planning) can cite BARC precisely instead of a generic ranking.
SAC Planning's structural edge is native S/4HANA actuals integration plus combined planning-and-BI storytelling, sharpened by 2026 Joule-assisted predictive planning.
Its structural gaps are the learning curve versus Anaplan/Pigment and ecosystem maturity versus Oracle EPM Cloud in consolidation-heavy verticals.

Key points

CPM/planning sibling of The BI & Analytics Survey — same methodology, planning scope.
Ranks SAC Planning, BPC against Anaplan, Workday Adaptive, Oracle EPM Cloud, OneStream, Board, Jedox, Pigment, etc.
Peer-group structure: enterprise / financial / business planning.
Cited in CFO-level planning RFPs as the neutral reference.
Full rankings paywalled.
BARC — The Planning Survey is mastered only when it changes a named buyer decision.
Start with the semantic contract and control model before demonstrating the tool.
Use current SAP, analyst, study, KG, and news signals as evidence, not decoration.
Separate verified facts from directional trends and modeled assumptions.
Define owner, metric, threshold, support path, and rollback before scaling.

Terms used on this page

Peer group: BARC's mechanism for fair comparison — planning vendors are grouped by deployment profile (e.g. enterprise financial planning, mid-market planning) before scoring. A vendor strong in one peer group may rank differently in another.
OneStream: US-based EPM vendor (acquired by PE, then IPO'd) competing directly with SAP's consolidation + planning suite. Known for unified platform that collapses BPC-style consolidation and Anaplan-style planning into one product.
Pigment: French-founded SaaS planning challenger (2019) that entered BARC's Planning Survey field by 2024-2025. Known for visual data modelling and finance + ops integration. Competes with SAC Planning in greenfield deals.
Decision owner: The accountable person who accepts the trade-off and funds the next action.
Semantic contract: The shared definition of business terms, metrics, entities, and access rules used by tools and teams.
Control plane: The layer that applies policy, access, lineage, monitoring, and escalation across the operating model.
Evidence grade: A label that separates verified fact, directional signal, modeled assumption, and field observation.
Adoption metric: The measurable behavior proving that the concept changed actual work after go-live.

Sources

Full card available to members. What the full card adds: the full decision framework · the SAP vs Snowflake / Databricks / Fabric comparison · the common pitfalls and their fix · the cheat sheet · the architecture schemas · the code blocks.

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Guides that answer with this page

These guides cite this page as one of the sources their answer rests on.

EPM Financial Planning in the SAP Stack