#S4HANA 1709 use case series: 2a – Finance (biz view)

Welcome back to our well-known use case series. It is designed to offer a closer look at business value acceleration – driven by the design principles of SAP S/4HANA. The technology-induced implications of the digital economy are huge, though the technology itself is only a catalyst to achieve a fundamentally different business outcome.

The selected use cases, related to SAP S/4HANA Release 1709 are designed to emphasize and visualize the value behind this technological shift, that can be activated by you.

What creates a new value perspective for finance? We will explore this in today’s blog.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 innovation highlights for finance

The last release SAP S/4HANA 1610 focused a lot on process readiness for the finance function by providing optimized and robust business processes across all capabilities, highly integrated with the optimized logistics. Breaking down the silos was the theme. Now, with SAP S/4HANA 1709 we deliver on top additional embedded analytics, enhanced real-time accounting and closing capabilities, innovative cloud apps on SAP HCP and most important: first machine learning scenarios for finance.

Here is an overview of the key innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709 for finance:

Accounting and Financial Close deliver the perfect symbioses. For example, customers are now able to benefit from document split functionality which can be introduced subsequently together with the parallel ledgers to support parallel accounting principles. The advanced compliance reporting provides a new framework that help meeting critical compliance reporting requirements for the various accounting principles.

And the Financial Closing cockpit is now an integral part of SAP S/4HANA. It supports in planning, executing, monitoring, and analyzing financials closing tasks for the entities of your group and creates insights instantly. It can also be used for periodic recurring activities with the involvement of multiple agents.

The activities are performed within a process that has a defined sequence or is determined based on dependencies.

All of this is compiled in a uniformed interface for everyone involved.
Based on SAP Performance Benchmarking closing cycles are up to 15-25% faster – at increasing quality. If we map this to the value levers it’s drives positive impacts across all lever categories: accelerated execution and increased automation, but is also improves the speeding up signal to action. The underlying simplified data model also allows for faster adoption of new compliance requirements and therefore plays in the agility category.

Let´s consider two specific use cases of the SAP S/4HANA Financial Closing Cockpit together with SAP S/4HANA Central Finance as well as the SAP S/4HANA Shared Service Framework to see the potential at work.

Central Close with SAP S/4HANA Financial Closing Cockpit

To support a centrally managed closing task, the SAP S/4HANA Financial Closing Cockpit can be installed and setup as standalone instance, connected with the entity systems, to centrally manage the respective closing tasks in various source systems.

Or it can also be technically installed on a SAP Central Finance instance. In this case, it is not required to replicate the entity data into the SAP Central Finance instance – the SAP S/4HANA Financial Closing cockpit can perfectly operate without replicated data. Speeding up signal to action for the corporate closing processes is of the essence.

The second use case to be highlighted here is the SAP Shared Services Framework which is going to come with the next FPS01 in Q1/2018. This offers interesting combination perspectives because the SAP Shared Service Framework can help not only to communicate along the processes.

For example, the need to request certain postings in the closing process and receive feedback on these. But also, to meet the need for structured exception handling in the closing process by using the ticketing concept of the SAP Shared Service framework.

Lastly, the automation of repetitive tasks in the closing processes is key. To conduct accrual postings in the same way repeatedly requires a certain level of automation, the framework brings to you.

Mapped to be value levers you can see a jump on automation, digital out-tasking and signal to action – which increases efficiency and effectiveness.

Stay tuned when we explore the technical aspects of this use case and illustrate our upcoming use case blogs following over the next few weeks!

All blog posts of this series can be found here

For more information on SAP S/4HANA, check out the following links:

SAP S/4HANA release info: www.sap.com/s4hana

And follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA or myself via @BeSchulze