Concept card

BARC — The Planning Survey

As of 2026-09-27

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

What is BARC?

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.

The structural advantages the Survey typically surfaces for SAC Planning: native integration with S/4HANA actuals, the ability to combine planning and BI storytelling in one tool, and Joule-assisted predictive planning as a 2026 differentiator. Structural challenges: the learning curve for business users relative to Anaplan or Pigment, and the ecosystem maturity gap versus Oracle EPM Cloud in consolidation-heavy verticals.

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.
"Joule-assisted predictive planning" conflates two different things: SAC's mature, pre-2026 Smart Predict statistical engine, and Joule's genuinely new (2026) natural-language 'just ask' layer on top of the planning model — separate them before citing either as the differentiator.
Joule's analytical-insights integration with SAC requires SAP Build Work Zone as of the 2506 release — verify the client's tenant meets this prerequisite before promising the AI-assisted layer.
Survey respondents are self-selected existing users, which structurally skews away from churned or dissatisfied customers — pair any Survey citation with a direct reference call in the same peer group.

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.
Selection bias: The systematic skew in a self-selected survey sample — Planning Survey respondents chose to participate, which over-represents engaged existing users and under-represents churned or dissatisfied ones.
Shortlist filter: The Survey's most defensible use: narrowing a wide vendor field to a small, evidence-based shortlist for a proof-of-concept, rather than substituting for the proof-of-concept and reference calls themselves.
Smart Predict: SAC's mature, pre-2026 statistical forecasting engine (time-series and classification/regression). Distinct from Joule's newer natural-language 'just ask' layer — the two are frequently conflated under the umbrella term 'AI-assisted planning'.

Sources

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Guides that answer with this page

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EPM Financial Planning in the SAP Stack