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.

Integrated Reporting CFO roundtable – April 26, Walldorf, Germany

Integrated Reporting  – “a new approach to corporate reporting that demonstrates the linkages between an organization’s strategy, governance and financial performance and the social, environmental and economic context within which it operates”- is becoming a hot topic and later this month SAP and the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) Board and Governance Committee are holding a CFO roundtable all about the topic on 26 March in SAP’s hometown Walldorf, Germany. At the meeting business leaders will have the opportunity to exchange ideas and provide feedback to IIRC from the CFO’s perspective on:

• Why Integrated Reporting? – Why corporate reporting is changing and the case for Integrated Reporting.
• The Future – The vision for Integrated Reporting by 2020; how do we make the vision a reality and what are the risks and barriers to be overcome?
• Information Technology – How do we leverage IT to innovate the reporting process, provide greater insight, and increase efficiency?
• The proposed Integrated Reporting framework – What are the implications for regulatory integration?
• The overseeing body – What should be the role of IIRC and other organisations in overseeing the further development and adoption of Integrated Reporting?

Follow this link for more information and joining instructions Integrated reporting CFO roundtable

Finance clearly not a strategic advisor to businesses in Ireland

There’s an increasing amount being written about the Finance function automating the transaction functions in order to free up time to become a strategic advisor or business partner to executives and managers.  All good stuff and surely the right way to go – we endorse it ourselves in the Financial Excellence theme. I first encountered this trend a couple of decades ago when the marketing team that I was then a member of were assigned a ‘Marketing Accountant’ supposedly to help us make better decisions etc. In reality they spent most of their time reconciling the marketing budget with the monthly management reports to stop our boss getting a roasting at the board meeting and helping the less numerate members of the team prepare their budgets. So not much value was added there.

But what happened in Ireland which this morning has announced that is has accpeted a multi billion Euro loan to keep its banks afloat after their property bubble burst?  Clearly everyone was getting carried away with the excitement of making a quick profit rather than looking at the easily available numbers and making a balanced judgement. Builders were borrowing from the willing banks that ramped up their loan books dramatically and throwing up new houses all over the place. A quick Google search leads me to the the Central Statistical Office of Ireland and some disturbing figures that were hindsight should have set the warning bells ringing years ago. In 2007 Ireland had 1.47m households that number having increased by about 7% in the previous 5 years fuelled by the then Celtic Tiger’s buoyant economy.  Yet I read an article in an national newspaper yesterday reporting that today the country has over 300,000 empty or abandoned new houses – rampant overcapacity that would have taken another 8 or 9 years to find occupiers had the population continued to grow like it did during the boom years a decade or so ago. But it’s not; the bubble has burst, unemployement is at 17% and its talented young people are leaving in droves.     

So if finance is there to be a strategic advisor and to ensure effective risk management, shouldn’t they have been urging caution and waving a red flag five or so years ago?  Perhaps they were and just got shouted down. But crises only happen because people take poor decisions and are cavalier when it comes to risk, so if and when Finance does finally fulfil its role as business partner and strategic advisor will we see less boom and bust? Somehow I doubt it. Meanwhile anyone want a new house at around 40-50% of the asking price a few years ago. Lovely country, great people and fine beer.

Building a Best-Run Finance Function

Following on from an earlier posting on the topic of Financial Excellence this week, I was drawn to the diagram below that succinctly sums up what this is all about.

The diagram shows that as finance teams free themselves from the drudgery of transactional processing, through automation and investment in more efficient shared services teams, they are able to spent more time working with business managers on value adding activities – and that research shows that this typically results in improvements in financial results as well as a substantial reduction in the cost of finance as a % of revenue – the accepted metric for measuring the efficiency of the finance function.

The diagram and an equally erudite discussion of what operating characteristics help companies become best-run finance functions and what measures to apply  is contained in a new Executive Insight that my colleague Birgit Starmanns has just had published.  It also includes some cameos of companies that are on the road to financial excellence together with some of quantified benefits they have enjoyed.

 

 

Rock Bottom – drinking the success of financial excellence

Before we became part of SAP, I used visit our US office based in  Buckhead, Atlanta regularly and would always drop into Rock Bottom for dinner and a beer or two. It was clearly a company that had got a good business model with the economies of scale of being a big chain while still retaining something of the artisan skills of small scale brewing. And frankly, although the beer is not quite up there with my favourite British brews such as Timothy Taylors (the beer Madonna called the ‘champagne of ales), it comes damn close.    

So I was naturally drawn to an article in this quarter’s Insider Profiles on how Rock Bottom is well on the way to achieving financial excellence, by driving efficiencies that free their finance  folk from the heavy lifting of doing the numbers that allows them to work alongside the business and add value. They’re clearly a forward thinking company with CFO Brian Armstrong having the dual role of SVP of Corporate Performance Management – always a sign of change happening when finance have titles with the word ‘performance’ in them to my mind. But they were still struggling with spreadsheet based planning and budgeting for their 145 owned and franchised chain of restaurants and this took up most of their time from September throught to December and sometimes beyond. By implementing SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, which went live in August 2009, they certainly found some efficiencies that enabled the desired transformation: 

• Reduced the number of budgeting templates from more than 300 to “low double-digits
• Replaced a 15-minute template-updating process to an instantaneous one, saving 500 hours of “hourglass watching” each year
• Cut the month-end package creation process from several days to as little as four hours
• Reduced the budgeting process from four plus months to about two-and-a-half months in the first year of use

The net result is they are now producing higher-quality work with fewer people - a great acheivement in anyone’s book. But financial excellence is not a goal; it’s a never ending journey and Brian clearly recognize this when he says, ”You can’t just focus on what you’re doing at your desk. You have to understand the impact that your job has on the performance of the business. And once you make that connection, you can change your workload so it’s not just a task, but it’s a value-add.”  

What can I do, but raise my glass to such sentiments!