Automating the Last Mile of Finance (#6)
Five Reasons Customers Choose SAP to Help Transform their Financial Close-to-Disclose Business
"So here we are, we want to understand how to achieve faster implementation of an integrated solution", said Henry D. Morris in An IDC Analyst View. "Now in the world of buy of packaged applications, what vendors of applications are doing is combining a piece of their integrated suite with the learnings they’ve had from many, many implementations and define a package service, an implementation service that goes along with that. And that combination can result in a faster implementation. A key is to take the integrated suite and see how can we find those chunks, those pieces that can kind of go together and can be part of an initial phase, a later phase, a third phase, and so on, each combined with a package service, to provide a quicker implementation of that piece, and over time, a faster implementation of an integrated suite."
To achieve fast implementation of our close-to-disclose suite of products, we created SAP® Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution to help enterprises:
- Minimize cost and risk with a predetermined scope and time,
- Choose deployment, pricing, and financing to suit companies needs, and
- Quickly add new functionality as needed.
If you are not familiar with SAP rapid-deployment solutions, in the words of Jim Snabe our co-CEO: "We packaged the best practices in rapid-deployment solutions so that you can create the value, not two years later but weeks later, and with that evolve at the pace of your business but faster than competition."
Get the full financial close-to-disclose spectrum
The SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution will provide customers with a true, integrated, end-to-end close-to-disclose process as displayed below:
The solution includes:
- The ERP/EPM connector to automatically pull general ledger data in the financial close system,
- SAP Business Planning and Consolidation or SAP Financial Consolidation, starter kits for IFRS (Inter...,
- SAP Mobile Financial Close to review key financial indicators on an iPad during the critical days be..., and
- SAP Disclosure Management, starter kits for IFRS and U.S. GAAP to disclose financial results to regu....
Go-live in less than 12 weeks
Meeting the Office of Finance core business objectives and keeping IT projects on time and within budget are especially important in today’s challenging economy. "So here we are, we want to achieve fast implementation of this integrated solution", said Mr. Morris. This requires predictable costs and results, and a short time to business value. New close-to-disclose software can integrate with current functionality and provide a foundation that you can extend easily to address future business needs.
To help customers create the full value of our stack of applications, SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution includes content, preconfiguration and expertise derived from actual customer implementations and years of experience. These best practices help you quickly enhance your business processes to meet IFRS or U.S. GAAP – to implement and go-live with your close-to-disclose system in less than 12 weeks through a fixed-scope, fixed-price implementation (see the list of key deliverables below).
SAP benchmarking highlights
The SAP Value Engineering team conducts customer benchmark surveys focused on identifying which high impact strategies, business best practices and related key performance indicators / value measures are used by successful companies to achieve a faster "last mile of finance". Companies which aim at Financial Excellence tend to focus on value measures listed below as a vehicle to measure performance from revenue, cost, and/or strategic perspectives. By analyzing benchmark data, many customer used similar business best practices which SAP grouped under High Impact Strategies. From a methodology perspective, our performance metrics represent a comparison of results from companies that have high adoption of process-related best practices compared to companies that do not. SAP Finance and SAP Financial Compliance Benchmarking Surveys cover 500+ companies across 20 industries.
Five reasons customers choose SAP to help transform their financial close-to-disclose based on SAP benchmarking
- 61% reduction of the total cost of implementation of the financial close applications - Organizations where the financial system can support internal as well as external accounting requirements such as statutory, segment, regulatory and management views and that have high adoption of process-related best practices such as SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution have on average 61% lower costs (% of revenue).
- 88% lower cost of the financial consolidation process - based on our benchmark, companies where historical data can be easily accessed to facilitate year-to-year comparisons and that have high adoption of process-related best practices such as SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution have on average have on average 88% lower costs (% of revenue)
- 56% lower effort in person days to run the financial close-to-disclose process - Organizations where stakeholders are notified of pre-defined exceptions through alerts and/or exception based reporting and that have high adoption of process-related best practices such as SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution have on average 56% lower full-time equivalents to close-to-disclose books per billion revenue.
- 30% less time to audit financial data and statements - Companies where appropriate alerting capabilities are automated to comply with SOX Section 409 (enable notification of investors of financial results without delay) have on average 30% lower internal audit full-time equivalents per billion revenue.
- 13% less time to close-to-disclose quarterly books - Organizations where the financial system can support internal as well as external accounting requirements such as statutory, segment, regulatory and management views and that have high adoption of process-related best practices such as SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution have on average 13% lower days to close-to-disclose quarterly books. On average their time to close-to-disclose is comprised between 9.3 days and 10.7 days.
More information
Stay tuned for the general availability of the most recent release of the SAP Financial Close and Disclosure Management rapid-deployment solution. In the meantime you can find more information, including the above benchmarks, on our SAP Service Market Place on http://service.sap.com/rds-epm-fcdm.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Milne, SAP EPM solution marketing elizabeth.milne@sap.com
Kristina Henn, SAP rapid deployment solutions kristina.henn@sap.com
Stephane Neufcourt, SAP EPM solution management stephane.neufcourt@sap.com
Sources
IDC - SAP rapid-deployment solutions
http://www.sap.com/community/ebook/2011_rds_iview/en/index.html
SAP - From Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
SAP - Streamlining Compliance With U.S. GAAP
SAP - Combining EPM + BI + Mobile for the "last mile of finance"
SAP - Computing the reporting to regulators and investors including U.S. SEC
SAP Service Market Place
http://service.sap.com/rds-epm-fcdm
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