Do You Worry About Cash & Controls?

Introduction

As we are reopening the economy, a company would need to first and foremost focus on cash and controls to survive.  Finance will be instrumental in leading the road towards survival.

This is no longer business as usual! 

The world as we know it has abruptly changed both socially and economically.  Enterprises will have to adapt in ways they may not have imagined, perhaps even adjusting their business models to meet their customers where they are.

All disruptions across the business environment affect finance.  As such, the finance community is faced with consequential issues in navigating this new world and in maintaining their business infrastructure.  Finance will lead the focus on imperatives such as cost containment, simplification, automation, and cash preservation in light of the new economic circumstances and they will need to do it with empathy and with an eye towards protecting the talent in their workforce.  The ability of the CFO to react and respond quickly to current challenges will have a stronger impact than ever before.  CFOs need to minimize the economic impact of this crisis, find creative solutions to maintain business continuity and emerge from the crisis even healthier.  Therefore, Finance has an increasing need for real-time visibility, automation, security controls, and prospective and predictive analytics for optimal decision making.  With the economic uncertainty around the present and future conditions, CFOs desire one source of truth in order to make insightful, speedy decisions.

New World, New Drivers

Abrupt changes in the marketplace have created a need for swift action.  Our customers have always recognized the importance of Treasury analysis tools to secure cash liquidity, perform cash forecasting, optimize working capital, and analyze customer credit positions, among other things.  But the current circumstances have caused this to be the immediate point of focus due to uncertainty around cash and working capital positions for the business and for those customers they do business with as well as reduced access to capital needed to keep the business running.  The uncertainty around the timing and nature of the economic rebound has created a greater need for the finance organization to generate cash and debt scenario planning and analysis.  Now, more than ever, it is important to analyze the past, understand the present, and predict the future.  In the past, long term trends were always difficult to forecast.  Now, this seems like a luxury.  The need to model short term investment performance is of the utmost immediate importance.

There has been a sudden pivot in the way employees work.  This needs special attention to mitigate risk.  With so many employees now working remotely, especially in shared service centers around the world, there is a greater need to enable automation to support these employees in performing their activities anywhere and at any time.  The new normal with massive amounts of workers in remote locations now highlights the need for increased controls, compliance, and governance to achieve robust embedded security.  Our customers are exploring multiple technologies that enable process automation solutions and provide digital security to ensure their employees are given everything they need to navigate through these challenging times.   They are looking to improve the process experience for their employees so that they can achieve maximum success working remotely as teams.

What Differentiates SAP?

SAP offers solutions that can support your goals for agility, a single source of truth, greater transparency, increased security access controls, analytical insight, and robust predictive analysis.

SAP Treasury Management solutions provide timely and accurate cash information, allowing our customers to better understand their economic position and make accurate market decisions.  These tools enable finance professionals to drive strategic decision making by performing personalized ad-hoc analysis of cash and debt positions in real-time. They allow for simulation of alternative conditions to discover hidden trends and perform modeling scenarios.

SAP Governance, Risk and Compliance solutions enable customers to analyse their risk profile, manage regulations and compliance, monitor fraud activities, and remove any risk in managing their key operations. With the introduction of new and varied remote workplaces, Access Control, Single Sign On, and Identity Management are applications that are proving especially important to our customers who need to automate processes for governing access to business applications while maintaining an audit trail. This includes processes for requesting and approving access, developing and managing roles, as well as detecting, remediating, and ultimately preventing access risk violations in user assignments and role design.

Next Steps

The unique economic instability across the globe provides opportunities to upgrade your digital footprint.  SAP’s Finance and Risk Value Advisory would like to have a conversation with you to demonstrate the most important aspects of S/4HANA value and how you can accomplish your strategic objectives in this dynamically changing environment.

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