SAP Central Finance (CFIN) - Business case evaluation

[nitin_gupta10]

This is not a technical blog rather it focusses on the planning for business case of Central Finance & justifying the investment

 SAP Brought in Central Finance popularly known as CFIN with S/4HANA as on of the deployment. Its actually an extra investment where you need to keep he existing ERPs up and running and implement S/4HANA and then CFIN for integrating transactions as central repository.

 Central Finance business case should be carefully evaluated based on the planned business strategy. Available options can be:

 

1. Decommissioning existing ERPs at later point of time (may be after 5-7 years from now)
   
   
   
   1. Jump to S/4HANA deployment without disruption now
   
   
   2. Replicate transactions from ERPs to SAP S/4HANA
   
   
   3. Keep building on the processes on SAP S/4HANA with more simplifications like today on ECC something is custom but that may be standard in S/4 or anything built as custom on ECC may not be of value today with new processes. It should be taken as opportunity to re-design processes
   
   
   4. Once the S/4HANA system have the processes built start using it as core ERP system in future
   
   
   
   


2. Implementing Central Processes to get the real value of CFIN investment and continuing it as part of IT strategy
   
   
   
   1. CFIN should not be just used as Data warehouse where replicated data is just used for reporting
   
   
   2. Processes should be built on CFIN system so that future processes and investments can be optimised
   
   
   3. Like Implementing Central Payments (AP & AR) will
   
   
   
   

                                                               i.      simplify the Bank integration/Bank communication and organization need not to connect all ERPs to bank but just one

                                                             ii.      simplify Cash application

                                                           iii.      simplify In House cash for working capital management

2. 
   
   
   
   4. Credit Management can be simplified and maintained in one system. All ERPs can be used to create Sales Orders but Credit management should be managed centrally
   
   
   
   

 So summary is that CFIN should not be used for collecting transaction data from various sources rather it should be used in a way that ROI is achieved and the real business case can be referred to.

 Hope that helps to the people who working on the business case for CFIN going forward.

# image above is borrowed from internet