Traditionally, IT has not played a big role at leasing industry. Certainly, most of the companies have in-house applications in place, but typically, systems have grown in a fairly piecemeal fashion over the years-or the decades. And those systems worked well enough, for their time. So the systems are not integrated enough to support the complete leasing life cycle.
There may be lot of processing and reporting that is supported by the in-house system and is therefore executed off-line through use of office tools. The presence of multiple systems also requires duplicate data entry which can cause of errors and loss of productivity.
In order to scale the business to the levels required by the Company business plans, while at the same time providing acceptable levels of Customer Service would require putting in place a new system/implementing a new product that has the ability to scale up, yet provide the flexibility required by the business.
Product Fitment: The product should support the full Leasing life cycle with data integration between contract management and accounting systems. Starting from Quotation creation, then generating the contract, incepting the contract, billing, applying change process, CIC to End-of-term processing and lease accounting it should support all the processes.
SAP has provided the solution called Asset Finance Leasing (AFL) which supports all the above process and to be known as a one of the best solution for the leasing Industry.
This is my first blog in the SAP community forum but it’s my pleasure to be part of one of the SAP-AFL implementation project. So, I thought to share my thoughts about the product.
Why AFL?
Some of the highlighting product features are:–
- Full leasing life cycle is supported – starting from contract origination, billing, payments, contractual changes to termination, remarketing – the entire lease life cycle is supported
- Supports lease, loan as well as service contracts – Unique feature is the FIMA (financial mathematics) which is provided to do all sorts of financial calculations accurately
- Dealer Program management handles the concepts of subvention, participation and residual guarantee
- Contract classification as per GAAP, IRS or Sales Tax rules can be handled simultaneously for a Lease Contract
- All kinds of change process is supported, the standard change process supplied by SAP could be easily copied and configured with according to the requirement
- New Leasing (CRM) is extremely open and flexible: Custom development is much easier to perform and maintain. The user interface of SAP CRM 2007 has been completely redesigned to meet the specific needs of business users in the front office - sales, marketing, and service professionals. The intuitive and dynamic UI provides an exceptional web-like user experience and is easy to use
SAP is also in the process of providing more functionality in the standard product to eliminate the industry GAPs.
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