While finance organizations must continue to meet regulatory requirements and process financial transactions with efficiency, the real opportunity is for them to become a more strategic partner to the business. Innovations such as SAP HANA put finance in a position to make this transformation.
As part of the SAPinsider Financials 2014 event in Nice, France, a new wave of innovations was announced this morning, read the press release here: http://www.news-sap.com/sap-accelerates-innovation-financial-management/
What are these innovations?
New Reporting and Analytics Capabilities
Role-based business cockpits and reports, based on SAP Fiori, provide every team member with the same user experience across any device, including the desktop. During Kai Finck’s “Financials 2014 and GRC 2014 General Assembly – A technology-driven transformation” session, an executive dashboard was highlighted that provides an overview of the holistic business performance, as well as news and alerts from a collaboration platform such as SAP Jam.
Of course, these dashboards are also available for more granular roles. Christian Rodatus’ opened the event with his “Keynote Address: Creating the platform for innovation,” which included Deloitte as one of the initial customers. In addition, the keynote showcased the SAP Receivables Manager as an example. Let’s take a look at this in more detail.
In this example, individuals working with receivables, collections, and disputes can choose the KPIs most relevant to them, such as outstanding receivables, collections and dispute amounts. These KPIs can be customized, for example limiting receivables outstanding to a number of days (e.g. 90 days) and for a subset of customers (e.g. the top 10); these parameters may be different for each team member. The same KPI can be added multiple times with different parameters.
For all dashboards, with the power of SAP HANA, all of these KPIs are calculated in real time, ensuring the most up-to-date information. For each KPI, team members can drill down into further levels of granularity to identify the root cause of issues and exceptions, so that it is possible to take action.
Common Source of Information
Today, many companies extract data from SAP ERP to SAP BW and to SAP BPC. This requires extraction of data from, for example, SAP ERP to the SAP BW database, and again from SAP ERP to the SAP BPC database. As shown below, with a common platform of SAP HANA, it is no longer necessary to extract data from one application to another. All applications leverage the same database, resulting in no lag time before transactional data from SAP ERP is available for analytics and planning purposes. Essentially, the same data is used for both transactional and analytic processes.
Finally, with the ability to aggregate information on the fly, aggregate and totals tables will no longer be necessary in the FI (Financial) and CO (Controlling) modules. The same transactions can support both regulatory and managerial accounting, including financial statements, account balances, cost center reporting, to name just a few, by calculating the totals in real-time.
Stay tuned for additional details about these exciting new innovations.
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