How SAP S/4 HANA Finance
makes your financial planning more agile?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-sap-s4-hana-finance-makes-your-financial-planning-richard-thorsen
And what does it take?
Making a financial plan is at the core of finance
people, and our stakeholders rely on us to do it faster, better and sometimes
even more often due to events hitting us. Thus, to stay tuned as a true
business partner, we need to understand how new technology can support us.
Below are some examples of how new innovations – in this case SAP S/4 HANA Finance – support us:
Plan and actual data stored in the same table – not picked up from various
sources collected in a data warehouse and then reported:
This allows us to directly analyse and
understand actual data real-time. For instance drill down to lowest level
documents – and thus fast react on
changes and make corrective actions – or compile a new plan
based on real-time knowledge.
All dimensions are inherently available in the same table – not spending valuable time
on combining data:
This allows us to apply detailed planning on products,
customers, projects, etc. and thus making our plans more informative.
A positive side effect of this is that poor
maintained master data becomes more transparent.
Budgets consolidated on the fly – not awaiting scheduled jobs
to run and/or uploads from other ERP systems/SAP instances to happen
improving overall efficiency of the planning process.
Utilise improved predictive planning – allowing to generate fast
forecasts based on logic provided or trends in data.
Improving user experience and higher degree of users
accessing data themselves:
Readily deploy pre-packaged templates to users
with instant access to ERP data. New generation users are used to doing
things themselves online – not waiting 24 hours for a report or analysis.
What does it take?
Are you on the SAP platform, engage with your IT
department and discuss the plans on moving to the S/4 HANA database. By
now, organisations should already be establishing proof of concept and the
business case for S/4 HANA Finance.
As finance people, we need to understand the new
opportunities that the technology brings – the above gave a first glance – and then decide on how planning
can change for the organisation as a whole and then design the processes
accordingly and finally supported by IT.
If we execute on a thorough plan, we will
experience more agile finance processes and at the end happy stakeholders
better empowered to do their job.