Financials 2013 – the first, “Major” for 2013 is about to begin

From: David Williams, Head of Product Marketing, EPM Solutions, SAP

If like golf or tennis, we had “majors” in terms of events pertaining to SAP’s solutions for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), “SAPinsider Financials” would be one of them – our spring opener on the circuit held where else but Las Vegas (March 19-22) . And like years prior, this year will not disappoint with a packed agenda covering EPM and financial applications topics. You can find a list of sessions here as well as read a good overview of the keynote/some of the sessions on CFOKnowledge.

From an EPM perspective, content will span managing financial performance (strategy management; planning, budgeting and forecasting; and profitability optimization) as well as accelerating the financial close to disclose (close, consolidations and disclosure management). In fact, two Pre-conference Workshops on March 18 will cover these areas in more depth: A step-by-step guide to execute a faster financial close and disclose process and I’ll personally be co-presenting The 2013 guide to SAP functionality for planning and financial performance.

There will also be deep dive sessions and customer presentations on key solution/product areas such as SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver, powered by SAP HANA, SAP Strategy Management, SAP Profitability and Cost Management, SAP Financial Consolidation and SAP Disclosure Management. One thing I want to highlight in particular is new SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver, powered by SAP HANA exercises that will be featured in the SAP EPM Solution Lab at the event. These new exercises will walk business users through loading data into the system, creating dimension member formulas that will be calculated by the SAP HANAMDX engine later this year, and a guided tour for technical folks. Based on first-hand customer experience, we’ll also compare the time it takes to perform these activities using SAP HANA versus a traditional relational database to help articulate the business value of running SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver on SAP HANA.

There will be a number of subject matter experts at the event so don’t hesitate to come down and visit us at the SAP stations in the vendor showcase area/or in the SAP EPM Solution Lab. You’ll also be able to catch vBlog highlights from each day and make sure to follow the conversation on @SAPEPM, @daveswilliams and @BusinessObjects twitter handles as well as #Financials2013 hashtag for real-time updates on what’s happening at the event.

Looking forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Lessons in building out the ‘closed-loop’

With more organizations looking to gain agility – the most pressing need according to an audience poll that was taken during a webinar I particpated in last week – one of the things they should examine is linking their performance management applications together to form a ‘close-loop’ – budgeting, costing, dashboarding etc.

I’ve captured my thoughts on this in article in the current edition of SAP Insider magazine which includes a couple of interest case cameos from leading edge customers who have gain considerable benefit from their implementations. 

Click here to read the full article

Zions Bancorporation enjoy the benefits of ‘closing the loop’

Walter Young, Zions Bancorporation

As yet few companies are using performance management solutions in tandem to deliver closed loop performance managment and those that do, such as Zions Bancorporation, are well ahead of the curve and gaining benefits that their peers have yet to enjoy. Zions Bancorporation uses the SAP^® BusinessObjects^™ Planning and Consolidation application for planning and budgeting and the SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management application for modeling costs. It feeds the costs, together with interest spreads calculated in the bank’s funds transfer pricing solution, into the “profitability mart,” and calculates net profits at the individual account level. Knowing how different products and different types of customers create value for the bank is critically important to many commercial decisions that executives and managers have to make. It helps them determine, for example, where best to spend marketing dollars and how to price individual loans.

But the bank gets much more from its implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management than simple best-of-breed deployments. It can take trended volumes and activity unit rates from the latter application and combine them with data on interest spreads and fee income from its shareholder value model, which summarizes the data in the profitability mart. It can then auto-populate many of the important line items in its budget. This means that business managers no longer have to forecast expenses themselves and can simply review and amend the figures generated for them.

This has resulted in budgets that are both quicker to produce and more accurate. But a specific transformational benefit is enabling the bank to keep resources and capacity tightly aligned with demand during the current period of uncertainty. That benefit is the ability to manage the business with quarterly rolling reforecasts rather than the traditional annual budget and half-yearly review.

Click here to read the Zions Bancorporation Business Transformation Study Zions MFP

Click here to view the video