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!

Performance, value and superior service…delivered in about 10 minutes!

I’m all for making things simpler. Why use one hundred words to say something you could do in just ten? That’s one reason I like this recorded presentation, which running at just under ten minutes is just enough time to give me the information that I need, without making it a laborious process. So, if you have ten minutes for a short break from your daily activity, then why not have a look at this new whiteboard describing how SAP solutions for LoB Finance can help organizations achieve financial excellence.

Improving reporting performance at Coca-Cola Enterprises

With Big Data being such a big topic I’d been wondering when we might start to see more customer stories about how software is helping them address their pressing business requirements. This story, which can be found on the SAPBPC channel on You Tube, concerns Coca-Cola Enterprises, and how their use of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, powered by SAP HANA, is able to handle the huge amounts of data required for their planning and forecasting processes, helping them to experience 7 to 25 times performance improvement in the speed of reporting, when running the same reports as they would have done in their existing environment.

Accelerated insight to profitability analysis

Colgate-Palmolive use the SAP CO-PA Accelerator

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Having profitability reports by a single dimension such as customer, product or channel is fairly meaningless as they do not reveal exactly what makes a customer profitable or not. It could be the prices they pay, the low margin products they purchase or the high cost channels they buy through – who knows? But manipulating multidimensional data that may have many thousands and potentially millions of records in each dimension has never been easy, so many organizations have struggled to gain full insight from data. 

Well those days are over. In this video, Michael Crowe of Colgate-Palmolive Company talks about how they they gain better insight into brand and customer profitability analysis performed at unparalleled speed with SAP CO-PA Accelerator, powered by SAP HANA, As they say in the video, they now analyze high volumes of data and benefit from improved productivity at month-end close – going live in just eight weeks.

SAP BusinessObjects EPM 10 ticks all the boxes for usability and productivity

One of the major themes in the upcoming SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management 10 release is usability and productivity which are addressed in two ways:

First is a new MS Office Excel client so that users can create reports faster and easier using drag and drop, populate ranges quickly using auto fill and auto completion capabilities as well as a new dimension member selector complete with rules functionality. It also provides better flexibility in using cell-based formulas to retrieve information – both data and properties – or to override existing data. Reporting is also much easier with the ability to create multiple reports from different EPM sources in a single worksheet and send back data to multiple systems at the same time – and the use new book printing and publication functions which can be based on re-usable templates.

Then there is a redesigned Web 2.0 user interface for the main applications. Functions like an improved web-based report designer that feature an easy to use member selector and a new Content Library that houses all reports, input schedules and dashboards in a central location will help reduce manual work and save time searching for content. There are also some new Workspaces that allow for faster navigation between related or grouped content that will increase the productivity of users working with multiple reports and dashboards.

Given that today’s business users expect business software to be as intuitive to work with and to look as attractive as the software they use at home, continuing investment in interfaces is now a hygiene factor for software vendors. If it doesn’t look damn good, you’ll never make the cut and get on the customer’s short list.  

If you want to see more, including SAP BusinessObjects EPM 10 on various mobile devices, then Sapphire is the place to go.

Deloitte detect that many CFOs are ready to grow revenue

(c) 2010 Deloitte Global Services Ltd

Shareholders wont put up for much longer with the meagre returns they have had in  recent years when the main strategy of most western companies has been to tread carefully, cut costs and run lean. Some sectors have undoubtedly done well, particularly commodities and mining, where stock prices have been driven by demand from Asia-Pacific. These company now make a disproportionate part of market indices such as the FTSE 100 that have seen a remarkable recovery in the last 18 months – even if momentum has somewhat run out at the 6000 mark. But most stock prices have been in the doldrums and are likely to stay that way if investors divert their attention to APJ and the BRICs.

There are signs there’s a change happening though. Deloitte have just published their latest CFO Global Insights that tracks CFO sentiment. Now while there is still pessimism in North America and the UK - and frankly anyone not at the bottom end of the scale is not reading the situation right given stagnant consumer spending, growing unemployment and the lack of government impetus - Deloitte do detect signs of shift. They report that many CFOs are now more confident about liquidity, debt and access to capital – and you can bet that it won’t be long before their boards start looking to use any growing cash piles, knowing that if they don’t they will be a sitting duck for a takeover. Deloitte report that many CFOs are already considering strategies to grow revenue and surmise that we may see a ‘birfurcation’ in the business world where companies that already have their costs under control  and access to cheap capital may well steal a march on others who may never be able to make up the lost ground. 

Deloitte correctly point out that it’s going to be a ‘blurry road ahead’ and my guess is that this shift to growth is going to be good for folk involved in the software industry as from what I’ve seen the downturn showed many companies that their performance management systems and processes weren’t up to the job. Many couldn’t re-forecast  as quickly as they wanted to and had limited and often inaccurate information on which products and customers really made money. That’s not a good situation to be in and it would be pretty risky forging ahead into growth with limiting performance  management systems. So I expect to see continuing investment in suites like SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management - otherwise we could find ourselves back in exactly the same place in another 15 years.

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation for Banking

In the current economic climate, banks face unprecedented challenges and extreme financial pressure. Issues such as margin compression, credit risk, liquidity risk, and profitability threaten to undermine overall bank performance. To address these challenges, the banking experts at SAP and Glenture worked together to develop a comprehensive performance management solution based on SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidations that integrates strategic planning, budgeting and forecasting, and profitability measurement processes.

Their goal was to identify best practice and leverage the functionality of the application to help banks achieve it quickly and cost-effectively. They recognized that producing more-accurate budgets and forecasts requires informative metrics that include both financial and operational measures, such as loan growth and efficiency ratio targets; that superior performance management requires budgeting approaches that incorporate your bank’s business model – for example, allowing for cash flow– based planning at the business unit, division, regional, and even branch or  loan center level. Know these approaches are critical to creating accurate net interest income projections they incorporated them into the packaged solution in order to increase the precision of projected yields and interest and support rate scenario modeling that can help budget administrators focus on controllable elements of the balance sheet rather than rote computational tasks.

Deliverables include a detailed data model, structured support for business processes, preconfigured models, and over 20 prebuilt reports. The general data flow and key features include:

• Data imports
• A data model that supports both income statement and balance sheet planning sourced from the general ledger (GL)
• Global assumptions using an integrated data model that enables forward-looking projections of growth adjustments and patterns to be made across multiple scenarios with automatic flow-through to balance sheet and income statement.
• Department-level and consolidated planning
• Budget administration and management reporting
• A central set of planning assumptions
• A metrics framework supporting improved performance monitoring, plan comparisons, and historical trends.
• Collaborative multidimensional balance sheet and margin planning
• Balance sheet planning at the account level
• Analysis of the net contribution of each center
• Global drivers (such as key rates) for creating what-if scenarios
• Planning on the product or hierarchical level
• Top-down and bottom-up planning

 All designed to get you up and running quickly and easily without reinventing the wheel. To find out more either read the solution brief SAP_BusinessObjects_Planning_and_Consolidation_for_Banking-Solution or click through to Glenture