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IT professionals get very excited about the latest innovations, but business professionals know that nice-to-have or ‘cool’ is not going to cut it.  Any changes in technology must produce real value, by making a process easier for instance or faster.  But innovations are not developed in a vacuum – they are developed to address business needs.  Taking advantage of those innovations can mean a change in mindset as well as a change in platform.

Businesses may have multiple ERP systems due to acquisitions and expansions that have led to complex balance sheets and lack of overall transparency.  Many of those ERP systems have been built over time and transitioning away from complex, traditional landscapes with outdated modifications may seem hard to justify. The price of maintaining the status quo could be higher in the long run.

Naturally, businesses have many challenges that can be addressed with modern technology.  Monthly closing, repetitive tasks, payment mis-matches – all these items can cause a drain on resources, delaying revenue or incurring costs. Needing to switch systems to see financial data instead of one central journal and having reams of data to manage make analytics difficult and time consuming.  SAP S/4HANA Central Finance offers a solution.

When considering Analytics and Central Finance to transform your business, you have certain expectations:

  • Financial transparency to steer Corporate and LoB strategy by eliminating financial data silos

  • Gain strategic business insights and better understand business needs for quick and confident actions

  • Advanced segment, entity and group reporting: Get real-time insight on a line-item level across relevant SAP sources

  • Enable insights driven actions to spend less time on transactional work and more time on delivering business value

  • Bringing the financial process to a next level by integrating data science (Machine Learning) powered by SAP cloud technology

  • Scalable local and central process execution: Move selected processes to central system, enable shared service centers



California based tech giant Hewlett-Packard Enterprises had these expectations as well and faced some challenges:

  • Complex legacy IT landscape with 10 different ERP systems and 800 applications

  • Significant technical debt and high total cost of ownership for IT and operations

  • Different systems and processes across regions that prevent a consistent customer experience


They turned to the SAP MaxAttention™ program to provide design validation, planning and execution services, and in-depth testing to help ensure project success and implemented a standardized platform on SAP S/4HANA® . The project led to tangible benefits:

  • Decreased quote time from 3 hours to 15 minutes

  • Increased on-time delivery from 90% to 99.5%

  • Reduced recommitments to orders from 25% to less than 5%

  • Reduced month-end close from 11 days to just 5 days


Read more here.

Decreasing the month end close on average, reducing to one chart of accounts, and getting real-time analytics are the types of things that have real value.  Other items that can be achieved from SAP S/4HANA over a traditional ERP system is machine learning.  Repetitive tasks like matching invoices to payments when there are exceptions can take up too much time in manual processing.  Intelligent systems can be ‘taught’ to recognize and resolve the most frequent reason for these issues freeing up valuable resources.  So those payments you receive from your customers who may have multiple open items can be resolved more frequently without the need for manual follow up.

Existing SAP MaxAttention customers as well as potential customers have access to the guidance needed to leverage new analytics as well as SAP S/4HANA for Central Finance.


The trend toward more automation and transparency starts with a good foundation.  Be sure to partner with SAP MaxAttention to meet your business challenges.

 
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