Paving the Way to the Digital Age (Part 4)
How SAP S/4HANA Enables Real-Time Financial Insights
Corporate finance departments are required to cut costs, minimize risks, and main-tain control of company finances at all times. And today, many enterprises also ex-pect them to support management in strategic decision making. How can SAP S/4 HANA help finance executives to live up to the rising demands?
The penultimate blog post in the series takes a closer look at how the next-generation business suite from SAP supports finance and controlling departments, helping them to adopt a more central strategic role within the business.
Managing Rising Complexity—Why Rapid Reporting Is Key
As companies expand and establish subsidiaries in multiple countries, the complexity of accounting processes rises considerably. The need to collect data from a large number of disparate sources can mean that financial teams have to ‘hop’ between multiple systems to obtain the data they require. This is very labor-intensive and time-consuming and means that information may already be out of date by the time it has been analyzed. To produce accurate financial reports, and to ensure compliancy with strict accounting standards, real-time information is a must.
SAP S/4HANA creates a single source of truth for financial information across entire organizations and all their subsidiaries. With all data consolidated onto one platform, reporting and analysis can be performed in real time. This means that finance de-partments can more easily access the data they require in less time. What’s more, they can be sure that this information is completely up-to-date. Processes in month-end and year-end closing are streamlined, cutting costs.
How SAP S/4HANA Supports Strategic Decision Making
By accelerating accounting processes, SAP S/4HANA frees up time for finance teams to focus on other important tasks. This extra time can be used to drive simulations that would have previously taken too long to be worthwhile. Finance and controlling departments are in a better position to support management by answering a wider variety of what-if scenarios. For example, they can run simulations to find out the true value and margin of individual sales opportunities and advise management whether to accept or turn down the offer. And, as all lines of business have a better understanding of the financial implications of strategic business decisions, companies become more flexible and agile in general.
With the SAP S/4 HANA Finance solution, businesses can also decrease their time to invoice and days sales outstanding. It improves operating cash flow—an important indicator of whether a company is able to generate sufficient cash to maintain and expand its operations. To effectively demonstrate how SAP S/4HANA can help your company stay on top of its finances, NTT DATA Business Solutions has compiled experience from past projects to invent the fictional company LaGarda. The story of this enterprise’s choice to implement the next-generation business suite demonstrates realistic challenges faced by many enterprises today and shows you how to overcome them.