Growth through Business Network Transformation: Profiting from the Knowledge of Others
Look across even the most sophisticated finance organizations today and you’ll still find many financial processes that are excessively manual. Consider the closing cycle, which for many companies is fragmented and anchored to error-prone spreadsheets. Disjointed processes like these are inhibitors, and they prevent finance from becoming a strategic partner to the business.
Finance departments have a unique set of skills and expertise that can guide an organization strategically by analyzing performance and identifying new business opportunities. And with the revenue and margin demands facing businesses today, many companies need finance to step up into that more strategic role sooner rather than later. To get there, finance priorities must shift from the traditional back-office model of processing transactions to focus more on business value creation.
In this interview, Katharina Müllers-Patel, Senior Principal of Value Engineering at SAP America, Inc., describes how any finance organization today - and by extension, financials systems - must optimize transactional performance, be fully integrated into the business, and enable business value.
Q: SAP has been giving a lot of attention to its financials functionality lately. SAP ERP 6.0 provides the most enhancements in years. What is driving this renewed emphasis?
A: Like anything, we are responding to our customers’ needs. And what they are telling us lately, particularly in the finance area, is that they are ready to become more than just a department that generates sales reports or general ledger statements.
Within any finance organization, there are three types of activities: process and transactional support, expertise-based business support, and strategic decision support (see Figure 1). Process and transactional support includes accounts payable, payroll, fixed assets, and the cash cycle; expertise-based business support would be budgeting, reporting and analysis, and the general ledger; and at the strategic level, you would find activities such as risk management, strategic planning support, and regulatory and compliance management.
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