SAP Simple Finance Roadmap Webcast Part 2

This was an SAP webcast earlier this month – part 1 is here SAP Simple Finance Roadmap Webcast Part 1

Please note the usual disclaimer applies that things in the future are subject to change.  Also these are the notes as I heard them.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

New 1.0 product Cash Management powered by SAP HANA (Q4 2014) – focused on cash position, statement, liquidity forecast

Planned innovations uses Design Studio (see Figure above) using the BPC backend allows for liquidity planning (multiple) and cash flow analysis of the past (can be broken down by liquidity item)

Source of liquidity planning is the Exposure Hub that stores actual and forecasted amounts

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Exposure Hub a new element of the Treasury solution, store data in a single table in HANA

It combines cash management / core treasury deal

Exposure Hub collects information from other systems “single source of truth” for cash and liquidity

New Bank account management helps group bank accounts to define a cash pool (Euro bank accounts)

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Bank Account Management planned innovation is shown in Figure 3

Group banks – a common look – free style grouping of banks

House bank accounts won’t go away

Inventory process – some customers have thousands of bank accounts; verify owners

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Above is an example application of Fiori for Payables Management

“It’s all about efficiency”

Create postings, repost, save proposals to post later; feedback from customers has been good

New app is coming to analyze trial balance using any dimension with the new Universal Journal

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Licensing options are shown above in Figure 5

They started with on premise; customers can subscribe or BYOL to the HEC

They decided to go with standardized offering with standardized offerings with one subscription price

For each of the packages they have 1 price and one contract

Figure 6: Source: SAP

SAP Accounting Powered by HANA is now S/4HANA foundation promotion.  This includes fraud management, audit management, cash management

Figure 7: Source: SAP

Services for migration, tables and reports accessible

Technical upgrade time is a weekend

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Started 2 years ago with HANA accelerators focusing on the benefit of performance, then continued with full suite on HANA.  Then added Simple Finance, and now drive into more key value scenarios

Figure 9: Source: SAP

Updated per SAP:

SAP suggested to update the numbers according to their latest analysis. The number of SAP Business Suite on HANA customer scenarios has increased to >2180 (vs. 1700). The number of live customer scenarios has increased to 278 (vs. 227 shown in Figure 9).

“Live customer scenarios” means: SAP counts customer installations that are live and in production (i.e. ERP on HANA, CRM on HANA, SRM on HANA, …).”

Links, journey maps, newsletter for Finance (per SAP):

• Find more at www.sap.com/SimpleFinance
• Experience the Journey Map simplefinance.sapjourneymap.com
• Sign up to the Finance Newsletter www.sap.com/finance-newsletter

Question & Answer:

Q: Do you need to upgrade to new GL?

A: No; whatever SAP GL can go for SAP Accounting

Q: How configure SAP Simple Finance?

A: With Universal Journal now have just one table to extend

Q: When is Universal Journal coming?  What happens to BKPF/BSEG COEP tables?

A: Cannot commit to dates – today’s session is part of short-term innovations and universal journal is part of that

COEP line items of CO is going away – one exception if someone does a manual CO posting it is still there

Q: Activating Simple Finance – client level or company code?

A: system level – an add-on to be installed on top of EHP 7 of ECC 6.0

Q: Role of BPC in cash forecasting?

A: It is key – not invented new planning or forecasting functionality – it is the BPC

Cash forecasting – take into account current account – an idea about open items

Q: Document splitting & open items

A: In past had a table for new GL for document splitting – now that is done in the Universal Journal

BSEG is not gone; any kind of reporting will be from universal journal

Q: Simple Finance account-based CO-PA – future of posting with CO-PA with Simple Finance

A: No change in positioning compared to release 1.0

Costing based CO-PA continues – customers don’t need to move away – but no new innovation; suggest look at account-based in parallel

Innovation is in account based & universal journal

Plan to integrate material ledger into universal journal

Q: Is there a demo system available for Simple Finance?

A: Cloud system…link – working on improving data quality and data guides; off-line demo on iPad (sounded like this was an internal demo system – hopefully we’ll see one on SAP CAL soon)