In my previous blog about SAP Simple Finance I tried to give a high-level overview over this new solution launched at SAPPHIRE NOW 2014. Here is a short reminder that you can skip if you read my previous blog post and the associated comment trail SAP Simple Finance launched at SAPPHIRE NOW 2014
Summary: SAP Simple Finance is the result of a close collaboration with customers to identify the most complex functions and tasks in finance and make them simpler to consume and perform. SAP Simple Finance takes full advantage of the SAP HANA in-memory platform with new finance capabilities, offers a new user experience for easy access with SAP Fiori - all deployed in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud under a full subscription model making it easy for finance departments to adopt these solutions, accelerate their finance transformation and to deliver strategic outcomes to their business.
So now let's take a more detailed look at 5 concrete examples of innovations for driving simplicity:
(1) Intercompany reconciliations "on-the-fly"
With SAP Simple Finance, customers can replace the long running transactions and batch processes they might be using today for achieving intercompany reconciliations. SAP Simple Finance provides a unified, single general ledger that automatically achieves this reconciliation. This not only speeds up reconciliations, but also enables simulations and thereby enhances a company's ability to plan and stay ahead of the curve.
(2) Integrated Planning
SAP Simple Finance provides unified models for enterprise-wide financial planning and reporting scenarios on a single source of truth. This integration can eliminate any latency or discrepancies that might exist between operational systems and analytical or planning systems and it enhances a companies overall planning capabilities.
(3) New Cash Management
With the new cash management capabilities in SAP Finance, customers can analyse global bank balances and cash positions based on data from SAP and non-SAP systems so customers can take action to manage any risk exposures. This new ability is based on real-time connections to banks and local entities and minimizes any cash management risks that might be created by working with outdated, or manually updated spreadsheets.
(4) Single Source of Truth
SAP Simple Finance provides common source of information for transactions and analytics, regulatory and managerial accounting processes, eliminating the need for manual reconciliations. This eliminates any double work, costs and risks associated with running many, potentially redundant and separate systems and documents. Using a single source or truth minimizes complexity across Finance. It can eliminate lot of manual reconciliation efforts, and is a significant enabler for achieving a true real time enterprise.
(5) Reduced Data Footprint
With SAP Simple Finance, IT departments can drive massive simplification using the capabilities of SAP HANA. By removing data redundancies and pregenerated aggregates, customers can achieve a reduced data footprint and increased throughput. Eliminating the need for a large number of redundant aggregates, tables, indexes, and totals, etc. simplifies the overall system, minimizes the potential for latencies and errors and allows customers to respond to change faster and more consistently across the organization.
SAP Simple Finance is targeted for deployment in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to progressively add the simplified consumption and end to end user experience of cloud based applications. SAP, however, continues to provide our customers choice in terms of deployment models and speed of change for the overall finance solution portfolio. Customers can move their SAP HANA-based Finance landscape to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud or deploy the SAP HANA optimized Finance functions on top of their on-premise landscape leveraging the financials add-on for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA as an example. New customers can just go directly to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to consume SAP Simple Finance as a managed service in the SAP cloud, with some components of the SAP Simple Finance portfolio running in the public cloud, and other components running as a managed service in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. In this way we increase our customers’ ability to extend their existing investments with the cloud to achieve new levels of efficiency and to enable new financial processes.
I hope this short blog has given you some more useful detail about SAP Simple Finance, and I look forward to your questions and to our continued dialogue.
CHHO
