How SAP S/4 HANA Finance makes your financial planning more agile?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-sap-s4-hana-finance-makes-your-financial-planning-richard-thorsen

And what does it take? 

Making a financial plan is at the core of finance people, and our stakeholders rely on us to do it faster, better and sometimes even more often due to events hitting us. Thus, to stay tuned as a true business partner, we need to understand how new technology can support us.

Below are some examples of how new innovations – in this case SAP S/4 HANA Finance – support us:

• Plan and actual data stored in the same table – not picked up from various sources collected in a data warehouse and then reported:
• This allows us to directly analyse and understand actual data real-time. For instance drill down to lowest level documents – and thus fast react on changes and make corrective actions – or compile a new plan based on real-time knowledge.
• All dimensions are inherently available in the same table – not spending valuable time on combining data:
• This allows us to apply detailed planning on products, customers, projects, etc. and thus making our plans more informative.
• A positive side effect of this is that poor maintained master data becomes more transparent.
• Budgets consolidated on the fly – not awaiting scheduled jobs to run and/or uploads from other ERP systems/SAP instances to happen improving overall efficiency of the planning process.
• Utilise improved predictive planning – allowing to generate fast forecasts based on logic provided or trends in data.
• Improving user experience and higher degree of users accessing data themselves:
• Readily deploy pre-packaged templates to users with instant access to ERP data. New generation users are used to doing things themselves online – not waiting 24 hours for a report or analysis.

What does it take?

Are you on the SAP platform, engage with your IT department and discuss the plans on moving to the S/4 HANA database. By now, organisations should already be establishing proof of concept and the business case for S/4 HANA Finance.

As finance people, we need to understand the new opportunities that the technology brings – the above gave a first glance – and then decide on how planning can change for the organisation as a whole and then design the processes accordingly and finally supported by IT.

If we execute on a thorough plan, we will experience more agile finance processes and at the end happy stakeholders better empowered to do their job.