FollowOperating across a distributed environment has become a way of life for a large percentage of businesses today, even smaller ones. In fact 80% of all survey participants in the 2015 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study had more than one operating location served by ERP (Figure 1). Even small companies (those with annual revenues lower than $25 million) average 2.87 operating locations, and that number grows steadily as revenues grow.
Figure 1: Environments Are More Distributed and Remote
Source: Mint Jutras 2015 Enterprise Solution Study
This proliferation of operating locations often results in a proliferation of enterprise applications in general and ERP solutions in particular. In days gone by, these different operating sites were often left on their own to select the enterprise applications that would help them run their individual businesses. Yes there was a corporate accounting system, and financials needed to be rolled up. But those corporate financials were overkill at the divisional level, and often didn’t have all the functionality needed to manage operations, particularly in manufacturing sites.
As long as these different operating sites operated quite independently, this proliferation wasn’t too much of a problem. But today the likelihood of divisions operating completely autonomously has dramatically shrunk. Whether you are a services organization working on projects that span the globe or a manufacturer striving to manufacture closer to your customer, leaving each operating location to do their own thing just doesn’t cut it anymore. Standardized processes and corporate standards for the enterprise applications that support those processes have become the norm.
The majority (87%) of multi-location companies today have created standards that govern which enterprise applications are used across the enterprise (Figure 2). However, a fair number (14%) are still in the process of migrating to these standards, which means they are faced with the challenge of rationalizing existing solutions that are functioning today. Typically this means a long process of ripping and replacing solutions and many years before they see the benefits.
Figure 2: Have you established corporate standards for enterprise applications?
Source: Mint Jutras 2015 Enterprise Solution Study
For SAP customers, SAP Central Finance might just be a shortcut to some of those benefits. It provides more than just the typical kind of consolidated reporting that is done at the aggregate level. Central Finance taps into the power of SAP HANA and replicates all journal entries in a Universal Ledger, while preserving the source of those entries, whether the source is an SAP ERP solution or not. Of course it takes a bit more effort to map the data from nonSAP solutions, but SAP has tools to help and it is quite do-able.
What this accomplishes immediately: Centralized reporting across the organization, beyond the typical financial reporting, and also the potential for more informed centralized strategic decision-making.
- Reporting based on harmonized master data
- Central journal for balance sheet and P&L reports
- Central profitability analysis
- Overarching views on customer and vendor accounts
- Liquidity forecasts based on payables and receivables
- Central overhead analysis
- Reports for selected cost object categories
… All this without ripping or replacing anything. Of course, some might stop here, centralizing finance and leaving disparate ERP solutions in place, while others might move on to rationalize solutions. … or some combination of the two. Mint Jutras finds there are several different flavors of corporate standards (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Is this a single or multi-tier standard?
Source: Mint Jutras 2015 Enterprise Solution Study
Although those all running a single ERP solution won’t need to rationalize solutions, they are still likely to need to consolidate financials, especially those that are multi-national. Central Finance could also be used to absorb a new acquisition, incorporating the new entity into corporate financials. Today Central Finance can be used for corporate reporting and planning, but as SAP continues executing on its planned roadmap, in the future, customers will be able to use it for central operational processing
To sum up both approaches….
Central Finance as a corporate reporting and planning platform:
- Establishes central financial system as a single source of truth
- Across entities and units
- With harmonized master data
- Using the flexible data model of Simple Finance (now called SAP S/4HANA Finance), with the possibility of adding new dimensions for reporting that might not even be available in source systems
- With new reporting tools
- And the speed of HAHA
- Cross-entity insight with limitless detail. You can even click on a document ID in Central Finance to navigate back to the source system (think traceability). This is done automatically when the source system is an SAP product. Doing the same for nonSAP systems requires additional effort.
Central Finance for operational processing
- Simplify and standardize processes
- By centralizing financial processes
- By standardizing, harmonizing processes across units
- Move processes to central execution models while streamlining processes based on harmonized data
- Possibly simplify work in shared service centers
- Simplify your IT landscape
Whether you need to consolidate financials only, or entire ERP systems, if you are an SAP customer, you owe it to yourself to investigate how Central Finance could make your life easier.
