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Stephane_Neufco
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

SAP would like to invite you to engage with us throughout the definition and development of future functionality within the financial close area of our enterprise performance management (EPM) portfolio.

 

With our Customer Engagement Initiative (CEI) co-innovation program, customers have now the opportunity to actively influence SAP innovations and ensure they'll get the products they need to run their business better. The present article is about our "EPM IFRS Financial Close KPIs Through BI On Mobile, powered by SAP HANA" CEI initiative. By the end of your reading, if you're interested in co-innovating with SAP on this topic, you can register now on our CEI Portal under the Analytics product area. Please note that all screen shots you'll see below are taken from an actual prototype that will be the basis of our discussions and workshops.

But now let me take a step back and explain the rationale for this co-innovation topic. As you maybe are aware of SAP strategy is to leverage our core competency in solving business problems to make the world run better and improve people's lives addressing the World’s most pressing challenges of regulatory complexity. In the age of social media and tablet devices "organizations must redefine how they think about information management, control, and governance in ..." and we think today CEOs and CFOs need new ways to better explain their corporate financial results to Board members, investors, financial institutions and shareholders. With the growing use of mobile tablets within the enterprise we would like to provide them with an "anywhere - anytime" access to financial close key performance indicators (KPIs). In the past few months SAP has integrated mobile capabilities for the enterprise and we would like to explore with customers how best we will bring these innovations to our EPM financial close software as for us there is an opportunity to rethink financial performance management through a combination of analytics software, business intelligence and mobility.

We are looking foward to co-innovating with you on two major areas of this topic: group close business process and IT.

From a IT perspective our target is to use our business intelligence (BI) products to get data out of our EPM financial close software and populate tablet devices. We will leverage the seamless integration between our BI and EPM stack to ensure fast time to market. We will therefore focus on few but achieveable goals, starting with a "wave 1" scope of products. For EPM we will use SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0 for SAP NetWeaver powered by SAP HANA and SAP Disclosure Management 10.0.

For BI we've selected SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence 4.0 . And our final target is a consumption primarily through Apple iPad or Microsoft Surface tablets.

From a group close business process perspective our goal is to ensure SAP provides you - CEOs and CFOs - with the financial KPIs you need. From a regulatory standpoint we will focus on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) even though the outcomes of our initiative will also apply to other generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The main reason for this choice is that we will leverage our financial close starter kits for IFRS in order to make sure the EPM data we start from is accurate, compliant, realistic and comprehensive.

A series of KPIs has already been developed in our app prototype but we would like to factor customer feedbacks in to ensure all critical KPIs are being captured, each KPI is associated with a specific graphical representation for immediate, insightful visualization that improves decision making, and a consistent consumption model of the KPIs within the enterprise organization is set-up.

 

The project will start in Q4. Here's what participating customers can expect.

The co-innovation is planned to be a 6-month project culminating with a planned mass shipment / release to customers in Q2-2013. Under SAP Feedback Agreement, participating customers will be able to preview our early-stage prototype and provide feedback on SAP future direction for EPM financial close on mobile. Customer engagement would likely mean at least one workshop either at SAP or customer site, as well as two calls per quarter to clarify follow-up questions. Provided they would be interested, participating customers would also possibly be invited to share their co-innovation experience on-stage at SAP events such as SAPPHIRENOW, SAP TechEd or SAP Financials.

 

Registration is open until December 31, 2012

If you're interested in co-innovating with SAP for the "EPM IFRS Financial Close KPIs Through BI On Mobile, powered by SAP HANA" CEI initiative, you can contact our CEI leader Marco Dorn - see below - until December 31, 2012. The engagement usually takes place in virtual webcasts but as well face-to-face interaction at your company site or at an SAP location. Please note that your registration is only for a first phone conference per project - after a discussion with the project lead, you can decide to join the full project.

Contact

Stephane Neufcourt, SAP Analytics stephane.neufcourt@sap.com

Marco Dorn, SAP Customer Engagement Initiative marco.dorn@sap.com.