Tag: SAP S/4HANA

The pandemic put business challenges on an amplifier and made it look insurmountable. Here we all are though, crossing that barrier and making things work. Some challenges persist though. One area is the acceleration of the remote working scenario. Besides, sectors like manufacturing and Life Science have the challenge of accomplishing more tasks efficiently in less time.

This intimidating scenario drives the need for an intelligent enterprise. That’s exactly what SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) empowers enterprises in all sectors. But what is SAP BTP?

This article describes what SAP BTP is. It also explains all that you must know about SAP BTP and how you can leverage it to grow your business and remain resilient.

Read more: It’s time to transform your business for the new digital age: Rise with SAP!

What is SAP BTP?

SAP BTP is an open platform as a service. It can integrate SAP and third-party applications and extend application capabilities. It can empower an organization to exploit data to solve its business problems.

SAP BTP can provide in-memory capabilities, core platform services, and unique microservices. It can help develop the exact application needed quickly, easily, and economically. All this without investing in local infrastructure.

It is a business-oriented technology platform for your SAP and third-party applications. It can unlock value and drive growth for its clients. SAP BTP unifies a plethora of technology stacks.

SAP BTP covers a wide range of functionalities. These range from document management to globalization, to blockchain and ML. Organizations can leverage SAP BTP services to automate business processes, manage decision logic. It also allows them to gain end-to-end process visibility.

But what is SAP BTP made of?

SAP BTP consists of four building blocks:

• Database and data management: This includes SAP HANA and SAP HANA cloud.
• Analytics: Including SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAC, and Business Objects BI.
• Application Development and Integration: Includes SAP Integration and Extension suites and SAP Process Orchestration.
• Intelligent Technologies: Including AI, ML, and IoT.

How Is SAP BTP Revolutionizing Business Operations? 

SAP BTP can be used to build and extend SAP applications quickly. Here are the top three scenarios:

1. Integration

Most organizations prefer best-of-breed applications. With the journey to the cloud, the system landscapes are increasingly complex and business processes remain disconnected.

Today, most businesses have processes spanning from on-premise to cloud, and across multiple vendors. Plus, to complicate matters, some organizations continue to support their legacy applications along with various platforms and open-source technologies.  SAP BTP allows seamless integration by simplifying development and quickening deployment.

Read more: Improve business planning with SAP Analytics Cloud!

These complex environments can only be managed with proper integration. While the value of these landscapes is decreasing, the complexity and cost of such integration are increasing.

SAP BTP can help organizations to refine and enhance their business operations along the entire value chain. It can do this by connecting applications, data, and experiences across SAP and beyond.

SAP Integration Suite uses a set of connectors and APIs to securely connect and integrate business processes. This can accelerate an organization’s time to value in a secure, sustainable, repeatable, and cloud-centric capability.

2. Data management

Today, we live in the age of data. But most organizations fail to get value from it. They gather the data and store it in disparate mediums. This only leads to a disrupted flow of information.

Your business success depends on how you analyze your data and what you do with the results. SAP BTP allows you to transform your data into value quickly and efficiently.

Data management is all about creating value from the data. If a business wants to exceed in today’s global economy, it must act on real-time business data. However, both the structured and unstructured data volumes create challenges for organizations.

Instead of accelerating digital transformation, data has become the anchor that is holding businesses in the old way of working. This has led to data swamps putting them in a worse position than they were ten years ago.

SAP BTP solutions are designed to provide flexible and user-first data management. It allows organizations to discover, connect, orchestrate data with internal and external data flows. This enables business leaders to access near real-time data and drive insight and value back into their businesses.

3. Extensibility

Businesses must continue to innovate rapidly if they want to stay relevant. During the pandemic, most businesses had to innovate their business models to adapt to changed circumstances such as local lockdowns and shortage of distribution chains.

As new businesses emerged with their reduced innovation cycles, they posed a serious threat to established businesses. Organizations must thus be empowered to build, extend, and enhance their application landscape so they can stay relevant while rapidly realizing new opportunities.

SAP Extension Suite allows organizations to access prebuilt extensions through an integrated digital marketplace. SAP BTP empowers businesses to speed up integration, find real business value from data, and extend SAP landscapes to innovate.

For example, let’s discuss the SAP Workflow Service. The SAP Workflow Service is part of the SAP BTP portfolio. This service allows businesses to extend their business processes. These extensions allow organizations to adopt business process changes quickly and in a non-disruptive way.

It provides unique monitoring applications that help monitor deployed workflows and their instances. Additionally, it also allows REST APIs to read, create, modify, or cancel workflow and task instances.

Integrating SAP Workflow Management with SAP Conversational AI allows organizations to leverage digital support for their workflows, process cycle times, recommendations. Plus, it allows them to reconcile both structured and unstructured workflows.

This can increase the level of automation enabling businesses to better manage overall complexity, reduce manual effort, and associated errors.

Read more:Top 7 benefits of adopting SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

How can Fingent help leverage SAP BTP being SAP Silver Partner?

As SAP Silver partner, Fingent can apply design thinking and agile methods to develop industry apps on SAP BTP. We can help deliver innovative solutions with speed and agility.

When we combine our expertise at Fingent with SAP BTP, we can leverage disruptive technologies such as AI and predictive analytics and innovate across industries and business functions. This can help our clients extend capabilities, integrate intelligent technologies, generate actionable insights, and amplify results.

We can help our clients gain the flexibility of public or private cloud infrastructure to create an intelligent enterprise experience. Along with SAP BTP, Fingent can help your intelligent enterprise take a big step forward. Give us a call and let’s discuss how best we can help you.

Which transformation path aligns with your business objectives? This is a critical question to ask when designing your business transformation journey. This makes it vital to take the time to know all the available options. It is also important to consider all aspects of each option and their implications before you embark on your business transformation. This blog will explain all you need to know about the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 release. It will also describe how SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 helps in solving business issues.

What is SAP S/4 HANA Cloud?

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud is an intelligent Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. It has built-in intelligent technologies like ML, AI, advanced analytics.

It helps organizations smoothen their business transformation by assisting them in adopting new business models and managing business change at speed. Also, it can orchestrate internal and external resources while using the predictive power of AI.

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud can empower businesses to consistently outperform with instant intelligence and actionable insights. It can be implemented quickly and reduce support costs.

Now that we know what SAP S/4 HANA Cloud is, let’s understand what is the difference between the old SAP S/4 HANA Cloud version and the new version.

Read more: SAP S/4 HANA: Transforming CFO’s into a Business Value Creator and Role Model

Difference Between the Earlier SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Version And The New 2111 Version

Many think that SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 builds on the earlier version. In fact, the latest version exceeds the earlier version. It has increased flexibility in the consolidation process. This means users can now create additional customer individual consolidation unit attributes. These help in defining validation rules.

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 comes with enhanced core consolidation rules. These include more flexibility in source and destination rules. Companies can now benefit from an improved ‘import consolidation master data’ app. This new feature helps users gain time and makes maintenance easier.

Along with many other enhanced features, SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 now provides enhanced movement flow management. This means that SAP customers can have full control over the ‘default subitem’ field allowing them to edit and assign default subitems.

How Can Your Industry Leverage The New SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111?

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 brings many exciting innovations to various industries. Here are some examples:

1. Manufacturing

The newer version has revised the SAP Fiori app. The ‘Maintain Tim-Dependent Stock Levels’ option is specifically designed for the manufacturing industry. It allows its users to display, create, and update time-dependent stock levels for specific materials.

Manufacturers can define safety stock levels based on validity intervals. This enables them to react to varying demands dynamically. By ensuring sufficient stocking of products at all times, users can reduce deficiency risk.

2. Supply chain management 

To support supply chain management SAP Fiori app is enabled to support split valuations in the goods-receipt process. This allows users to create their own global valuation types.

3. Service companies 

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 has enhanced service order planning based on spare part reservations. This enables customer service managers to gain better insights into stock availability and to ensure that planned quantities of spare parts are always at hand. Such accurate service order planning ensures on-time delivery.

4. Finance 

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 provides SAP Fiori apps in ‘collections and dispute management.’ This modernized process offers extensibility options that help the app deliver a seamless user experience.

These new apps improve the process of collecting receivables and handling dispute cases. Along with several other features, it provides in-depth data insights to its users.

Read more: 6 Capabilities of SAP S/4HANA That Will Help You Become An Intelligent Enterprise

4 Top Challenges SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2111 Helps Resolve

1. Project management

The latest release SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 allows project managers to plan, trigger and monitor materials or services enabling them to ensure on-time delivery.

Here is how it helps resolve challenges in project management:

• Date alignment is accelerated by reducing manual efforts leading to more accurate planning of project demands.
• Purchase contract for specific demand.
• Automatic demand blocking prevents requesting for unrequired demands.
• It provides a comparison chart for improved monitoring.

2. Sales

SAP Self-Billing Cockpit allows users to receive and process self-billing messages, edit messages, and receive multiple order reasons and condition types in case of errors or differences. This latest feature offers a central entry and overview page to its users, leading to a more efficient sales process.

3. Product compliance 

Monitoring of substance volumes will help users to comply with chemical regulations. It is integrated with the logistic processes of purchasing and manufacturing.

Substance Volumes Tracking feature enables users to identify possible risk factors. It can track, calculate, monitor volumes for substances either imported or produced within the country.

This will help users to define legal entities and map production plants. Thus, it increases transparency by directly linking the aggregated substance volumes to the original logistic documents.

4. Asset management

SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 introduces four process phases:

• Reactive maintenance
• Proactive maintenance
• Improvement maintenance
• Operational and overhead maintenance

Process phases help in creating specific maintenance requests for technical objects like functional locations or a piece of specific equipment.

These requests allow users to store relevant information that will help the employees to identify and solve any problems that might occur. Such simplified work requests for maintenance reduce the unnecessary effort for logging maintenance issues.

Read more: How Fingent Helps CFOs Gain New Insights and Reliably Enable Key Decisions

How Does Fingent Smoothen Your Transit To SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111?

SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 can empower your business to stay relevant and competitive. Fingent is a leading SAP Silver partner. To be classified as an SAP silver partner there are certain rigorous criteria that a company must meet around SAP certification and dedicated SAP resources.

We offer a broad range of services under the umbrella of SAP. This includes business consultation, implementation, and post-implementation services and support.

Take a look at our Case Studies to see how we have implemented various aspects of SAP for our clients.

We work with our customers from pre-planning through to project execution and application support. We assure you that you will receive the best possible care in the long term. Give us a call and let’s discuss your project.

The greatest business challenge of our time is the steady acceleration of change in all areas of trade. The pandemic has only accelerated these digital shifts. Transforming your business is necessary to stay relevant and competitive.  The scale of digital challenges can be daunting to businesses. Understandably, some businesses may feel lost in the current digital maze. But, to stay agile and competitive, business leaders must strategically transform their business. Early this year, SAP announced a new service called “Rise with SAP.” This blog attempts to clarify what is included in Rise with SAP and how it can transform your business.

What is “Rise with SAP”?

Rise with SAP is a BTaaS (Business Transformation as a Service). The objective of this product is to accompany and accelerate business transformation step by step.

Rise with SAP is a single subscription contract. It provides access to a variety of tools and services that focus on assisting with your business transformation efforts. It is a new way to redesign processes for better business outcomes.

Rise with SAP can help your company to adapt business processes on your timeline and your terms. It helps them continuously unlock new ways of running businesses to stay ahead of the competition. It can speed up the otherwise sluggish adoption of SAP S/4HANA.

Read more: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-To-End Solution

How Is “Rise With SAP” Transforming Businesses?

Rise with SAP can holistically transform your business with a fast time to value, regardless of your starting point. Rise with SAP is like a moving company that provides a checklist, packers, containers, and services like replacing old appliances and installing new ones. It provides a blueprint that a company can implement on its own terms and at its own pace. What is the benefit? One contract and one responsible party for all services. It simplifies your journey in four simple steps.

Step 1: A business model redesign 

This step helps businesses redesign and optimize business processes and implement the best practices in their verticals. In other words, it is a way to analyze how your business processes perform and obtain tailored recommendations.

A successful digital transformation project requires IT and business leaders to work together. This is why this analysis motivates all in your business to adapt to new business models.

Step 2: Alignment with customer journey

This is the key element of Rise with SAP. SAP realizes that each organization requires a unique path forward. Here are four starting points for digital transformation:

• Digitally grown startups and other innovators that need to scale with speed
• Companies that began their journey into the new world of modular ERP cloud applications are now ready to go further
• Organizations that have started digital transformation at the outer edges, now need to focus on their core
• Companies with a long heritage and history with a complex on-premises system

Realizing the fact that each of these starting points requires a unique path, Rise with SAP provides a highly customizable, subscription-based model.

Step 3: A technical migration

Rise with SAP includes technical services that ensure painless migration to a standard, modular, and flexible landscape. Such a flexible landscape with a consistent data layer enables businesses to react faster to ever-changing business demands.

This includes essential services from SAP and their partners. These services help eliminate modifications and custom code. Besides, it aids in harmonizing and governing a company’s data layer. Such accurate data will help businesses make informed decisions and strategize their business processes for greater advantage.

Step 4: Build an intelligent enterprise

Each company’s roadmap to success may vary but the destination is to become a digitized and intelligent enterprise. Quickly adopting S/4HANA is the key to reach that destination. To that end, Rise with SAP offers a powerful solution to get there by eliminating roadblocks and enabling its customers on their journey.

SAP believes that their customers can realize the value of their investment with up to a 20% reduction in TCO over five years as compared to a traditional ERP deployment. Definitely worth looking into, wouldn’t you say?

Read more: SAP for Business: 9 Ways to Maximize Business Performance

Components of Rise with SAP

An ideal business transformation process requires a selection of coordinated components. Rise with SAP consists of five such components that serve as the basis for transformation.

• Business process intelligence: It helps in understanding, visualizing, and transforming your processes.
• SAP Business Network “starter pack”: The intelligent enterprise “starter pack” includes SAP Business Technology Platform. This platform provides a single semantic layer across your organization. It serves as the basis for business transformation.
• Cloud credits: The “starter pack” also includes an ERP system with built-in intelligent technologies. This enables your business to transform with intelligent automation.  Plus, the starter pack also provides credits for accessing SAP Business Network. This allows companies to better manage their supply chains and react quickly to market changes.
• Embedded tools and services: Ensure pain-free business migration to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Rise with SAP provides access to the company’s modular cloud ERP solution.

How Can Fingent Help Leverage These Benefits?

Rise with SAP provides access to a comprehensive bundle that can help streamline your business transformation. However, for successful implementation, you will also need an experienced partner that can provide advisory, implementation, or application management services.

Here is where Fingent top software development company can help you. As an SAP Silver partner, Fingent has acquired a wealth of experience to provide you with a structured set of services that complement Rise with SAP.

1. Advisory services 

Before you embark on business transformation, you need to assess several aspects. These include trends in your industry, assessment of your business, your existing technology environment, and opportunities for future business growth. Working with an experienced partner such as Fingent can make all the difference. Our strategies can eliminate obstacles to unlock new business value.

2. Implementation services

As an SAP Silver partner, Fingent can provide a range of implementation services. We can tailor implementation strategies to help you achieve your business objectives quickly and efficiently.

3. Application management services

Fingent offers a full set of solutions that move beyond tactical efficiency gains. We provide flexibility and the latest strategic capabilities that smoothen business transformation and innovation.

Read more: How Fingent Enables e-Invoicing for SAP Users to Stay Compliant with GST India Regulations

Over to You

Rise with SAP is likely to galvanize the market to be the most cost-effective way to move to SAP S/4HANA. It will help overcome many hurdles that SAP ERP customers are facing. Give us a call today and let’s get talking on how to get you on to this new dynamic tool asap.

Streamlining SAP S/4HANA Migration with Selective Data Transition

Though the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates digital adoption among industries, the journey towards Intelligent Enterprise can be complex. Typically, this begins with establishing an intelligent core like SAP ERP. However, even migrating to a new system is more than just a simple upgrade for many companies. With several years of historical business data across complex system landscapes, companies will have to adopt a specific migration approach to SAP S/4HANA. A well-defined migration approach will help businesses ensure business continuity, embrace innovation, and stay relevant and competitive. This post will look at SAP S/4HANA Selective Data Transition Engagement and how this approach accelerates SAP S/4HANA migration.

Read more: Deploying SAP S/4HANA: Tools and Methodologies to Adopt

Two Popular SAP S/4HANA Migration Methods

There are two popular methods to manage SAP S/4HANA migration.

1. Greenfield migration

The first option is the Greenfield approach or a complete re-engineering (new implementation). However, the limitation of this approach is that you cannot migrate your historical data and so cannot take advantage of the latest intelligent features you need for your company’s historical data to work.

2. Brownfield migration

The second option is the Brownfield approach that allows migrating high volumes of historical data (system conversion). However, moving a vast amount of historical data could leave you with more data that could be non-compliant with data privacy laws. Also, this approach could leave you with a lot of irrelevant data in your newly configured system.

As both these options offer certain limitations, SAP formed a brand-new approach, the SAP S/4HANA Selective Data Transition Engagement, that makes your data migration to SAP S/4HANA a lot easier.

What is Selective Data Transition?

Selective Data Transition, also known as Hybrid Approach or Landscape Transformation, is an alternative to the New Implementation approach (Greenfield) or System Conversion approach (Brownfield). It allows you to consolidate several ERP systems to one central SAP S/4 HANA system. Selective Data Transition is vital for companies moving from an existing SAP ERP solution to SAP S/4HANA on-premise or SAP S/4 HANA cloud (private edition).

Just like an inland river delta flowing into the ocean, Selective Data Transition allows you to migrate only a relevant selection of your existing ERP data to SAP S/4 HANA. So, if you’re on SAP ECC planning for transition to SAP S/4HANA, then selective data transition is one of the best approaches to move to SAP S/4HANA.

Case Study: Thermo Pads partners with Fingent to migrate from ECC 6 to SAP S/4HANA. View Case Study

Business Benefits of Selective Data Transition Approach

• Selective data transition avoids business disruption when moving to SAP S/4HANA and enables you to go live according to your business needs. In general, this approach allows for a single go-live, moving several organizational units or roll-out in multiple phases, for example, by country.
• This approach enables you to migrate only your relevant historical data and retain a consistent process chain while leaving behind obsolete data, for example, outdated company codes.
• Selective data transition helps you define your speed and combine single projects such as a new go-live implementation, finance management, etc. while moving to SAP S/4HANA in a single step or a phased approach.
• With SAP S/4 HANA, you can introduce new business processes and manage your historical data while protecting good practices and previous investments.
• The near-zero downtime approach restricts the technical downtime to just a few hours.
• Selective data transition can help change your landscape by either splitting or consolidating existing systems.

Read more: 7 Tips to Ensure a Seamless Transition to SAP S/4HANA

Customize Your Selective Data Transition Approach with Fingent

Selective Data Transition Engagement is a great way to balance between redesign and reuse. It can happen across various scenarios for companies of different sizes to support a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA. This approach provides a suitable IT landscape for every company’s unique needs. Selective data transition goes beyond the standard implementation as it offers several options for customers to choose from, based on their current landscapes and future needs.

You can work with Fingent and define the appropriate structural changes that need to be considered during data migration, along with any business processes that may need to be modified or redesigned. Our tailored approach has helped many of our customers to increase their flexibility to adapt data and processes in just one step.

Read more: SAP S/4HANA journey: 8 ways C-level leaders and executives can derive business value 

With Selective Data Transition Engagement, companies can even take advantage of select innovation and modify their business processes to facilitate the use of the latest tools and functionality without the need to start from scratch.Companies having mature SAP landscapes can clean up their environments while retaining those investments that matter most and lower their transitions by bypassing preparation projects.

Selective data transition can even help split some of your projects between the cloud and on-premise. It also allows you to restructure and consolidate your environments as you want. But, most importantly, this approach helps you save time by combining all tasks in just one step.

Read more: 6 capabilities of SAP S/4HANA that will help you become an intelligent enterprise 

So, if you are interested in learning how the SAP S/4HANA Selective Data Transition Engagement can help your organization accomplish successful migration, don’t hesitate to contact Fingent. We are an SAP Silver Partner and have the expertise in this area to expedite your intelligent enterprise journey.

What are the benefits of implementing SAP ERP software into your business?

With businesses transforming themselves digitally, SAP ERP systems saw a rise in popularity for the past few years, especially since 2019. What makes the system so unique? For one, SAP ERP can be implemented by all businesses, big or small, and reap the benefits of the software. That said, SAP software is providing solutions that are helping businesses adapt to the ever-changing technology landscape.

Read more: SAP for Business: 9 Ways to Maximize Business Performance 

What is SAP ERP?

SAP stands for Systems, Applications, and Products in data processing. SAP is the market leader among ERP software providers. SAP ERP comprises several modules that help companies gather, maintain, store and interpret data from functional areas such as;

• Sales and distribution
• Financial accounting
• Manufacturing and material management
• Logistics and warehouse management
• Supply chain management
• Business intelligence

In other words, the SAP ERP system produces a precise process that offers a complete perspective (internal and external) of your business.

Read more: 8 Ways Business Intelligence in SAP Serves as Your Centralized Suite for Data Reporting

What are the uses of SAP ERP software?

With over 230 million cloud users and more than 100 solutions covering all business functions, SAP is the largest cloud portfolio provider in the ERP market.

SAP facilitates effective data processing and information flow across organizations. Also, software like SAP S/4HANA leverages in-memory computing to process vast data volumes and simultaneously supports advanced technologies such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Read more: 6 capabilities of SAP S/4HANA that will help you become an intelligent enterprise

SAP software connects different parts of a business, such as finance, accounting, sales, supply chain, assembly line, HR, etc., into an intelligent business suite that is entirely digital. You can purchase or customize any module based on your business needs.

Simply put, SAP software can manage almost all your departments, revolutionizing the way your business operates. Also, it helps organizations eliminate the redundancy and duplication in data. This can help organizations to run even more efficiently.

If you’re new to SAP and looking for an SAP consultant, get in touch with us, and we will assist you further.

Case Study: Fingent helped a real estate giant reduce manual work, improve TAT, and increase profitability by integrating multiple role-based mobile apps into their SAP ERP system. Download now!

Business benefits of implementing SAP ERP software

1. Offers innovative technology

SAP ensures you are equipped with the right tools and technology that will help you prepare for the future. SAP software also provides you with future-proof cloud ERP solutions that will power the next generation of your business.

Read more: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

2. Improves cost-efficiency

SAP ERP software reduces the administration and operation expenses by using accurate and real-time information. In addition, the software enables manufacturers to control operations and avoid delays in production and break up information, which eventually allows the management to make decisions effectively.

Additionally, SAP offers complete power to the administrators over the breakdowns of crucial company processes and future disturbances.

3. Advances data management

Performance metrics and measurements help businesses assess their performance and set future objectives as well. However, as the business expands, it will become difficult to manually measure the profit ratios, sales margin, and other metrics.

SAP ERP helps automate processes and allows the staff within the organization to view shared data without retaining manual records. It also helps in generating synchronized reports on essential company metrics. Immediate access to such information will augment decision-making.

Read more: What are the benefits of adopting SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (IRPA)

4. Avoids duplication and upgrades transparency

As all your business information is stored in a single database, the possibility of duplicate records and data entries is reduced. In addition, the system will automatically report the present system records. It improves the quality of the data and lets you create exact pictures in most cases.

Additionally, SAP software upgrades the transparency of your business to a new level. The ERP system will screen and monitor every marginal operation and task from an inventory product level, purchase orders, or billing and delivery. This will provide a clear view of the performance of all the tasks.

5. Integrates other members of the value chain

SAP ERP helps bridge the gap between the suppliers and customers by integrating other value chain members. This allows your organization to gain a competitive edge by engaging in the design and development of new products that add value to their experience.

SAP ERP is a great tool that helps you get more information and improve quality. For example, the availability of up-to-date data lets you adjust production orders and purchase according to your requirements. Also, you can get a segmented database of your customers, making it easier to carry out your marketing campaigns targeting specific segments.

6. Enables better analysis and forecasting

In most cases, it is difficult for a person to provide accurate information evaluation along with reports. SAP ERP system eliminates information risk as there is no duplication of data. In addition, the system provides real-time reports of even the minor business tasks that serve risk assessment and generation of performance reports.

The ERP system reviews purchases and changes in the inventory as they happen. It provides customers and, most notably, managers with the tools and resources needed to make accurate forecasts.

Read more: Why is SAP Commerce Cloud a Complete Digital Business Solution 

7. Allows effortless scaling

If you are a prospective start-up organization and aspire to become a more prominent and successful company in the future, you will have to handle the expansion. It is required to extend your company operations.

Right from the development stage, you will have to consider the machinery, workforce power, and extensive data. SAP software is designed to suit all the fundamental market criteria. Initially, you can do some simple integration and then scale up according to the precise industry specifications.

8. Enhances data security

The SAP ERP system improves data quality and security. The software provides better data protection using built-in security systems and firewalls. 

Additionally, SAP allows you to access the relevant information to allocate and limit data usage to every employee or a group of individuals.

Read more: What is business process expertise in SAP and why you need it

Fingent offers SAP ERP consulting and implementation services

SAP has an extensive portfolio of programs designed for all major roles, including project teams, IT administrators, key users, and end-users. Fingent is a certified SAP Silver Partner authorized to deliver a broad range of ERP services across the wide spectrum of solutions offered by SAP. We enable our clients to customize and implement SAP ERP solutions to accelerate their digital transformation journey. We also provide continuous support, SAP AMS, and quality management services to monitor your ERP environment.

Feel free to contact us for any SAP consulting requirements. We are committed to quality and innovation to help deliver optimal results for your business.

How Business Intelligence in SAP Helps You Become a Data-driven Organization

Business Intelligence is the data powerhouse essential for the survival of your business. BI can help organizations evaluate and transform complex data into meaningful, actionable information. This information allows organizations to generate operational insights and supports effective, strategic, and tactical decision-making. Business Intelligence in SAP makes data-driven decision-making better, faster, and more effective. This article helps you understand all you need to know about Business Intelligence in SAP.

Read more: SAP for Business: 9 Ways to Maximize Business Performance

Business Intelligence in SAP

Business Intelligence in SAP is a centralized suite for data analysis and reporting. It allows you to gain data from multiple data sources and distribute it to different Business Intelligent systems. In essence, Business Intelligence in SAP can work as a target system for data transfer or a source system for data distribution.

Business Intelligence in SAP allows an organization to share information in real-time with all involved, from the CEO to lower-level employees. It offers a panoramic view of data to all those with appropriate credentials. Business Intelligence in SAP can be customized easily to your specific needs. This would also mean that you can access the information much faster. 

Read more: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning 

Advantages of Business Intelligence in SAP

According to Statista, the global market size for business intelligence (BI) and analytics software applications is forecast to touch USD 17.6 billion by 2024. Such an increase is a clear indication of the wide range of benefits Business Intelligence in SAP can offer organizations. 

Here are a few advantages of Business Intelligence in SAP:

1. An entire range of BI-related products

SAP offers all the BI tools necessary for your company to leverage a data platform. Business Intelligence in SAP allows you to deploy these tools according to your requirement. The BI tools can be used for querying, analyzing, and reporting. You can also use them to identify trends in the data and discover any underlying issue that adversely affects the business. 

SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to centralize your BI tools. From this central point, you can provide permission-based data access to the employees according to their job requirements. Additionally, ad hoc reporting tools enable you to formulate questions and find instant answers. You can gather these answers and data into valuable insight, which can be shared with the rest of the relevant employees.

Read more: 7 Crucial Business Challenges Solved by SAP Analytics Cloud 

2. Information at your fingertips

Business Intelligence in SAP comes with an enterprise-wide sharing functionality. It simplifies the data to be understood easily in common business terms rather than complex semantic language. Simplifying data makes it easy to search for critical information and gain valuable insights. 

Moreover, data simplification and insights generation allow you to share your findings and insights with other users across your organization. For good decision-making, businesses need valuable insights into various business modules such as finance, sales, operations, and human resources. Business intelligence combines all the views from these modules to provide more accurate information. Now, each decision-maker is armed with relevant information to make critical decisions that affect your organization.

3. Self-service visualization capabilities

Dragging data from vast storage and introducing it to a user is a gigantic task that requires data-specific knowledge and engineering skills. SAP offers several self-service tools for BI users. The self-service visualization capabilities of Business Intelligence in SAP allow its users to view and analyze data more efficiently. With this capability, you can aggregate data, conduct trend analysis, and uncover valuable insights. This can reduce maintenance costs while considerably shrinking the time spent on reporting-related tasks.

Read more: How Fingent Helps CFOs Gain New Insights and Reliably Enable Key Decisions

4. Ability to create interactive BI dashboards 

Business Intelligence in SAP enables you to create interactive BI dashboards that can be customized for each user. Additionally, decision-makers can access and view these dashboards from anywhere and at any given time. 

You can access the dashboards via smartphones. The dashboards are also accessible through browsers, applications, or desktop widgets, even when you are offline. It means that all users can remain connected to the company’s server at all times. 

5. Integration with MS Office application

You can realize the true value of the data you possess if only you share those insights and reports with other users. Since most reporting and dashboard modules are integrated with sharing capabilities, your employees can easily share valuable insights. Integration with the MS Office application allows users to perform data analysis in multiple dimensions. It enables them to manipulate and filter data dynamically. 

Business Intelligence in SAP allows you to import large amounts of data to MS Excel, enabling you to analyze and forecast effectively. You can also embed information into MS PowerPoint. This feature is helpful when you need to present business insights to stakeholders and colleagues. 

6. Easy to use interface

Business Intelligence tools can be very complicated, with a complex interface designed mainly for skilled programmers or data analysts. However, Business Intelligence in SAP comes with a good instrument that allows for an intuitive user interface. With a bit of time and skill, it is easy to master the interface. Onboarding a new business user becomes more convenient as they can access all the instruments from a single web-based interface.

7. Greater flexibility and scalability

Business Intelligence in SAP is easy to integrate as it offers deployment options for most of its products. As Business Intelligence in SAP is service-oriented, it is easily scalable. Based on the need of the hour, businesses can either increase or decrease. Though you begin using business intelligence for a single project, later, you can expand to the rest of the organization. It means that both large enterprises and small businesses can benefit from Business Intelligence in SAP.

8. Allows your IT department to engage in more meaningful work 

Business Intelligence in SAP can automate mundane and time-consuming tasks. It also ensures that the employees in your organization have all the resources they need to perform their tasks. It reduces the dependency on your IT department and helps your IT professionals focus their time on more productive and relevant jobs. 

Read more: Top 7 Business Benefits of Adopting SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation 

Bottom line

Easier access to data, smarter insights, better business – you can’t go wrong with Business Intelligence in SAP. It helps you run complex queries and provides you with a highly scalable solution. What more can you ask for? 

Fingent is an SAP Silver Partner and is well-placed to help you get started with your BI journey. Get in touch with us and transform your business into a data-driven organization. 

How Can Your Business Gain Value from SAP S/4HANA Implementation?

Companies need a digital core to overcome complexity and drive digital transformation. SAP S/4HANA is a digital core ERP that can help companies overcome complexity and thrive in today’s disruptive market.

Businesses are growing by the minute and are moving faster than ever before. Thanks to the innovative developments and improvements of the digital world! 

However, today’s unprecedented disruption calls for more. Businesses need unique ways to emerge stronger from intense challenges that they might never have encountered before. C-level leaders and business owners are looking for ways to become more resilient. They understand that to keep up with ever-changing customer needs, they must invest in automation, analytics, and cloud technologies. The key priority has consequently been the move to SAP S/4HANA. 

S/4 HANA is an intelligent ERP software that helps you reinvent your business model by providing easy access to real-time data.

Read more: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-To-End Solution  

C-level leaders and executives need to understand that the journey to SAP S/4HANA is not just an IT exercise. It is an integral part of their broader digital transformation. Business owners need to review their business processes, end-to-end data, and system integrations. Such a review would assist them in developing an overall business value to guide their journey. This blog explores eight practical ways to raise business performance with your SAP S/4HANA journey. 

What makes your SAP S/4HANA journey complicated? 

Before we get into how to get your business booming with SAP S/4HANA, let’s look at why some C-level leaders and executives find this journey challenging. 

Planning and delivering your SAP S/4HANA journey is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for transformation and generates significant investment returns. Today, C-level leaders and executives struggle to answer these three hows:

• How to articulate the business value case to generate substantial returns on investment?
• How to ensure that the program remains business-led?
• How to leverage the power of the cloud?

Leaders and executives must consider creative ways to harness the power of SAP S/4HANA. It includes the design phase, building phase, and running phase. Business value can only rise when new sources are developed that enable the business to react quickly to recover from disruption. 

Read more: 6 Capabilities of SAP S/4HANA That Will Help You Become an Intelligent Enterprise 

8 practical steps to gain business value from SAP S/4HANA journey

Here are eight practical steps that answer the ‘hows’ and more:

1. Articulate the business value case

You may have already set aside a significant amount of resources, both in terms of finances and staffing, to embrace the journey to SAP S/4HANA. Beginning this journey with a holistic, business-led value case will help you realize its full potential and make the best of these resources. Thankfully, there is a distinct and compelling business case for every digital function. What does this mean for C-level leaders and executives? 

It would mean that they must take the time to create a fact-based business value case that can be used as an anchor throughout the SAP S/4HANA journey. Why? Because a well-defined business value case will help you fund all digital transformation efforts, including SAP S/4HANA.

Read more: SAP S/4HANA: Transforming The CFO into a Business Value Creator and Role Model 

2. Avoid a ‘technically configured’ approach

A technology-led approach might not deliver the expected results. Why? In most cases, C-level leaders may find it daunting to understand their role in the digital transformation journey. So they prefer to delegate the responsibility to others. Such delegation instantly turns the digital journey into a secondary priority. Since others may not understand the business as you do, it will become challenging to configure the transformation to be truly business-led.

C-level leaders and executives must realize the potential and take an active role in the transformation. You can then think strategically to create a clear path to a more agile and insight-driven business. 

3. Unleash the power of cloud solutions

To make quick and informed decisions, combine your internal and external data sources. Cloud-based applications and infrastructure will help you create a data strategy to deliver real-time insights. A well-defined cloud strategy will enable you to align the data, identify the best data sources, understand how to measure and maintain quality data, and manage your data. 

Read more: Why It’s Time to Embrace Cloud and Mobility Trends To Recession-Proof Your Business? 

4. Integrate suppliers before it is too late

For specific industries such as automation, supply ecosystems are strategically important. Though it may seem expensive, ensure to integrate your suppliers before SAP S/4HANA is well advanced. Such integration can be less expensive where custom developments are not warranted. 

5. Leverage AI to boost your current and future business models

Businesses worldwide face extraordinary challenges and disruption today. Automation-driven growth will be the only constant during this period of uncertainty. Though SAP may not provide everything you currently need to build your business, it allows you to integrate non-SAP automation for various goods and services. Marrying historically siloed data with AI techniques can thus contribute to demonstrable ROI.

Read more: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning 

6. Integrate third-party content into SAP S/4HANA 

SAP S/4HANA has been the backbone of most IT strategies. It provides critical infrastructure to support a variety of use cases. Most organizations know that connecting to third-party content is crucial for their ongoing success and competency. Such integration can help you create unique sector-specific use cases, so do not hesitate to integrate third-party content. 

Read more: Deploying SAP S/4HANA: Methodologies and Tools to Adopt 

7. Use available data to speed up innovation lead time

Intelligent data management can help you break down information silos and provide you with the insight and control necessary to make tactical business decisions. When organizations collaborate to share and manage data, both parties can create tremendous potential value for their businesses. 

However, tapping into the value of data ecosystems can be a challenge. You can overcome this challenge by starting small and scaling later and involving partners early on. SAP S/4HANA allows you to effortlessly harness their data by breaking down your corporate strategy into different streams. Thus, businesses can dramatically lower risk and accelerate implementation.

8. Leverage SAP Cloud Platform

SAP S/4HANA cloud database allows you to make faster decisions. Since you can integrate data from across your enterprise, you can develop applications and tools required to store volatile data. SAP Cloud Platform allows you to avoid repeating failures and minimize cost. 

Manage the change impact

The SAP S/4HANA journey brings in a significant change. Treating this journey as a minor upgrade can lead to missed opportunities to leverage its full potential. This makes it extremely important to partner with the right service provider to guide you.  

As an SAP Silver Partner, Fingent has the expertise and experience required to help you make your SAP S/4HANA journey a success. Let’s talk. 

SAP S/4HANA: The Torchbearer in Intelligent Enterprise Journey

In the present digital age with cut-throat competition in every sector, businesses must offer compelling and consistent customer experience and innovative products and services. Your organization will be able to create a superior, personalized, and enriched customer experience only when you leverage intelligent technologies such as SAP S/4HANA.

Intelligent Enterprise can empower organizations to grow faster in an ever-changing digital environment. As your organization battles with an excess of data from various systems, you may feel overwhelmed. You know you need that data to be doing so much more than it is right now because the ability to make decisions based on accurate and appropriate data is critical to gain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic world. With SAP S/4HANA, organizations can use data, people, and enterprise assets in an aggregated manner that best suits their business. 

Read more: How SAP S/4HANA transforms the end-to-end business process

This article explains how SAP S/4HANA can be the torchbearer on your journey towards an Intelligent Enterprise. Before that, let us consider the reasons why you must become an intelligent enterprise.

Top 5 reasons why your company must become an Intelligent Enterprise

An Intelligent Enterprise leverages intelligent technologies to enable the workforce to focus on higher-value outcomes. Here are the top 5 reasons why your company must become an Intelligent Enterprise.

1. Allows your organization to be more agile with a clear chance of sustainable growth
2. Achieve breakthrough outcomes in redefining the end-to-end customer experience
3. Makes your business processes more effective and reliable
4. Delivers a step-change in productivity
5. Helps your business to stay ahead of the competition 

6 capabilities of SAP S/4HANA that will lead your path to becoming an Intelligent Enterprise

All businesses can become intelligent enterprises by transforming their business models to become more flexible, customer-centric, and responsive to market demand. Here are six capabilities of SAP that can help transform your organization into an intelligent enterprise.

1. Intelligent suite

SAP intelligent suite is a carefully curated ensemble of solutions that address challenges faced by different business functions of an enterprise. This suite helps every aspect of your organization, including employees, clients, customer experience, products, supply chain, IT, and more. It also allows stakeholders to take advantage of in-depth business insights. In short, it enables you to have a 360-degree view of your business. 

Read more: How Fingent Helps CFOs Gain New Insights and Reliably Enable Key Decisions

2. Experience management

To understand why things happen, you must understand the thoughts and sentiments of the people involved. Experience management solutions of SAP are aimed to help businesses improve customer, employee, product, and brand experiences. It is a process of monitoring each interaction stakeholders have with an organization in real-time to spot the problems. Experience management solutions provide insights into the thoughts and feelings of your employees, customers, and stakeholders. 

3. Business technology platform

SAP’s business technology platform helps modernize business processes and turn data into action. This digital platform makes it easier and quicker for companies to become intelligent enterprises. It offers more options with one unified business-centric platform for data, analytics, and intelligence. Best of all, it supports application development and integration.

4. SAP industry cloud

As a service, the SAP industry cloud enables organizations to undertake application management work while the platform allows users to access data in real-time. SAP cloud is one of the most popular services today. Its key functionalities include analytics, transactions, security, integration, and more. Thus, SAP cloud empowers your business to discover and deploy vertical solutions leading to industry best practices and extend the current business process. 

5. Sustainability management

The SAP suite of sustainability management solutions addresses various sustainability needs. It can integrate compliance and safety activities while improving the sustainability performance of an organization. It enables businesses to understand and manage their impact on people and their environment. 

6. Business network

Across all industries, businesses have reported disrupted supply chains and effects on day-to-day business operations because of the pandemic. SAP’s business network helps enterprises adjust quickly and responsibly to disruption and fast-changing market demands. It enables companies to reinvent business methodologies with the help of interconnected value chains and flexible networks.

These six capabilities can help your business achieve the best possible results as you embark on the intelligent enterprise journey.

How do you know if you need to become an Intelligent Enterprise?

Answering the following questions will help you understand if you need to embark on the journey to become an intelligent enterprise:

• Is your company focused on customer experience?
• Do you employ an experience management platform to understand all the people involved?
• Does your company leverage intelligent technologies such as ML, AL to provide the agility and speed required for growth?
• Does an SAP cloud platform connect your business process to provide you real-time updates?

If your answer is ‘no’ to any of the questions, you know you need to get on to the path of becoming an intelligent enterprise TODAY.

Read more: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

Are you ready to implement an Intelligent Enterprise strategy?

The intelligent enterprise is a strategy that uses the above technology to turn data into actionable insights. This strategy enables your business to be more agile and increases the opportunity for sustainable growth. An intelligent enterprise is an approach or a strategy that your organization adopts by leveraging SAP S/4HANA. Now that you know what an intelligent enterprise is and how you can leverage SAP S/4HANA to become one, you must think about implementing it for your organization. 

Though every industry is different, and the outcomes may vary, a common link across sectors is “customer experience.” Hence, it is vital to remember that the journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise starts with defining your business goals across the organization with the customer experience at the forefront. Once you define your goals, your organization must implement the essential capabilities of SAP S/4HANA at the highest level. 

Read more: Deploying SAP S/4HANA: Methodologies and Tools to Adopt

Become an Intelligent Enterprise ASAP

SAP S/4HANA is a vital blueprint to becoming an intelligent enterprise. SAP solutions can empower you to become a leader in your industry. SAP S/4HANA provides you a risk-free approach that allows for a seamless transition into an intelligent enterprise without business disruption. 

Read more: 7 Tips To Ensure A Seamless Transition To SAP S/4HANA

Fingent offers SAP S/4HANA custom implementation and migration services. 

Let’s get talking!

SAP IRPA (Intelligent Robotic Process Automation) enables businesses to hyper automate their mundane processes to achieve process excellence, improve operational efficiency, and augment human intelligence. 

How businesses can successfully attain hyperautomation with SAP IRPA

The concept of hyperautomation has created a buzz across the business landscape. As more and more businesses turn to hyperautomation as a solution and adopt RPA, you must be eager to know what it is and if you need to implement it in your business. RPA, IRPA, SAP IRPA … It can get a little confusing, so this blog will aim to decode all this for you and help you on your journey to hyperautomation. We have compiled a list of advantages of embracing hyperautomation with SAP IRPA along with industry use cases for your benefit. 

What is IRPA? 

IRPA (Intelligent Robotic Process Automation) refers to software programs that can be easily programmed to perform repetitive, tedious, or mundane tasks. One typical example is data manipulation, such as filling in forms, updating spreadsheets, and more. SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation powers this automation through SAP’s Business Technology Platform. 

Read more: Top 7 Business Benefits of Adopting SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

Advantages of SAP IRPA

By 2020, 53% of enterprises have already started their RPA journey. Interestingly, according to Grand View Research 2020-2027, the RPA market size is expected to reach USD 25.56 billion by 2027. However, just RPA is not enough. Gartner puts it this way: “Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders lack a defined strategy to scale automation with tactical and strategic goals. They must deliver end-to-end automation beyond RPA by combining complementary technologies to augment business processes. Gartner calls this hyperautomation.”

It is a clear sign that starting your hyperautomation journey is worth all the effort. Thankfully, hyperautomation with SAP IRPA brings together multiple components that stimulate the ability to automate work.  

SAP IRPA: Accelerating the hyperautomation journey of businesses

Here’s how SAP IRPA helps enterprises with hyperautomation:

1. Automate interface monitoring

The application interface helps complete all transactions on any given day. However, the feedback from a transaction failure may not be apparent immediately. Users tend to realize transaction failures only when they check the interface. Checking the interface to ensure that there are no transaction failures is a repetitive and mundane task. Automating this task can save a great deal of time lost in checking for an error within the system. Hyperautomation with SAP IRPA can be used to automate interface monitoring. 

Read more: How Automation Ensures Businesses Stay Afloat During COVID-19 Crisis

2. Source-to-pay (s2p) and procure-to-pay (p2p)

Procure-to-pay involves extracting invoice and payment data from multiple systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), supplier email, CRM, banks, vendors, and so on. However, not all these systems provide easy integration methods. There will be some form of repetitive tasks on the part of an employee. Thankfully, this is one area SAP IRPA can be an enabler. Hyperautomation with SAP IRPA can fill integration gaps. Since SAP IRPA bots work on the front-end, automating integrations is made easy. 

Companies receive information from various sources like invoices, estimates, and quotes. It is crucial to extract the data from these forms and validate them. Hyperautomation with SAP IRPA automates the entire process of procure-to-pay. This will ensure that you are following procurement’s best practices and that there is a single source of truth for all transactions. 

SAP IRPA Case Study: Villeroy & Boch

Villeroy & Boch was initially set up as a pottery company in 1748. Currently, it operates internationally, which requires impeccable operational efficiency and seamless workflow across all business functions. Villeroy & Boch thus decided to embark on their hyperautomation journey with SAP IRPA. They chose to rapidly automate simple, mundane tasks such as responding to starred email queries using SAP IRPA. This paved the way to create a fully automated invoice error handling process. IRPA bots increased the efficiency of the workflow while freeing their employees to focus on strategic tasks. SAP IRPA also enabled the organization to assist their wholesale customers in improving Villeroy & Boch’s top line. 

3. Purchase order follow-up

A company will have to follow-up on purchase orders sent to their vendors, and the business has to make numerous follow-ups. However, the process of each purchase order remains the same, and it can be very costly. Companies can make their follow-up system much more efficient by embarking on a hyperautomation journey with SAP IRPA. An SAP IRPA bot can be programmed to hunt down and categorize these disparate points into a single report, saving a lot of time and precious resources for the company.

Read more: How Fingent Enables e-Invoicing for SAP Users to Stay Compliant with GST India Regulations 

4. Improve user experience

Businesses that see lasting organizational change prefer to start small and eventually progress to change their organization’s entire culture. SAP IRPA can provide a great foundation to begin the hyperautomation journey. It allows you to transform one department or process at a time and then pick momentum. Such gradual momentum will have a positive impact, and your staff will be more inclined to embrace hyperautomation. Such implementation enables businesses to begin their hyperautomation journey with a small budget and in less time. 

Here is an example:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was able to do more with less and efficiently remove costly and ineffective work processes with SAP IRPA. The company achieved proof of concept in just 55 days and deployed the full portfolio in as little as four weeks. 

Read more: Top 3 UI Offerings from SAP: Fiori, Screen Personas, and Lumira

5. Customer relationship management

Level 1 of the customer contact desk processes a high volume of simple repetitive tasks. When a customer approaches a company with a query or complaint, a customer rep will have to perform the necessary actions by switching between various systems and applications before answering the customer. This has several disadvantages. Besides, this tedious search process may increase customer dissatisfaction. SAP IRPA can help avoid this as you can deploy intelligent RPA bots to manage repetitive tasks. 

6. Data consistency monitoring 

Most manufacturing companies rely heavily on live production data to make slight adjustments. Inconsistent data can lead to malfunctions across the company’s processes. At the same time, tracing data inconsistency is a mammoth task. However, it is a necessity to find the inconsistency and fix it. With SAP IRPA, a business can schedule automation to handle most of these issues. It can help collect and export the data stream details periodically. This will help in highlighting anomalies before they break the system.

Read more: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning  

Are you ready to hyper automate?

Is your company ready to set about the journey of hyperautomation with SAP IRPA? Let’s find out together. Fingent works with clients across the globe, helping them understand and implement SAP IRPA in their business. Our experts understand the nuances of different industries and will help you on your journey to success with SAP IRPA.

Leveraging SAP solutions with a Silver Partner of SAP will help you realize the full potential of SAP IRPA hyperautomation. Fingent offers custom implementation and migration services to SAP and can help you move quickly and make the best use of this technology NOW when you need it the most. Let’s get talking.

Right ERP software helps CFOs contribute to organizational decisions more logically.    

Selecting the Right ERP Solution: Crucial Points a CFO should Keep in Mind 

The CFO is one of the most significant decision-makers in an enterprise today. CFO is the protector of your business’s financial records and has an ultimate say while making financial decisions for the company. However, in this digital age, the role of a CFO is evolving. A CFO takes a more holistic approach in the current scenario and guides the organization towards success by leveraging digital intelligence. CFOs must be equipped to keep their company afloat during an unexpected crisis such as the pandemic, identify new investment opportunities and help the business prosper in the face of intense competition. A tall order but not impossible. 

To achieve this, CFOs must look at their existing systems to upgrade or replace those slowing down the organization. CFOs are responsible for ensuring that any new technology they adopt has what it takes to turn the business into an effective market disruptor. 

This article covers a CFO’s top 5 considerations when choosing an ERP solution.

Read more: How Organizations can Gain a Competitive Edge by Implementing Digital Core ERP

1. Obtain hands-on knowledge on the process

CFOs might find it tempting to leave the ERP process knowledge to technical teams, but this could mean that they miss out on learning the crucial aspects of the ERP that will affect the organizational costs. Technology assists CFOs in controlling accounting and tax standards and in engaging with the business to drive value jointly.

Read more: SAP S/4HANA: Transforming The CFO into a Business Value Creator and Role Model

Technical jargon can be overwhelming for CFOs. But they need to clarify their questions with their ERP service provider. 

To get you started, here are some important software concepts related to ERP implementation.

• Installation: Know what is required of your current server.
• Customization: Make sure the ERP software suits your organization’s specific requirements. Compared to other ERP systems, SAP requires minimum customization. It has many customizable solutions that are suitable for all types of businesses. 
• Configuration: Ensure your software is in harmony with your workflow. Thankfully, SAP is suitable for any size organization. 

Apart from this, confirm the ERP is hosted on the cloud because it is easier to handle and more secure to manage. Those who have migrated to cloud-hosted ERPs reap the benefits during the pandemic, where remote working is the only option to ensure business continuity. Making sure the solution is rewritten for the cloud will help CFOs keep up with any future changes.

2. Invest in a service provider with vision and efficiency

Your ERP solution’s longevity is determined by your service provider’s efficiency and capability. Do not hesitate to clarify certain aspects of your service provider and the services they have to offer you. Find out if their financial situation makes it a viable option for a long-term contract. 

You also need to identify if your service provider can give you access to all the information you need for years to come. Additionally, consider if your vendor is relevant to the current market scenario and can stay relevant in the future. To that end, it may be helpful to enquire about their research and development plans to ensure they will provide you with high-end products now and in the future. 

Read more: Why Choose Fingent as Your Odoo ERP Partner

3. What are the aspects of integration?

ERP is one of the multiple systems that determine your organization’s performance. To achieve optimum results, you will have to enquire about integration with other aspects such as EPM, SCM, HCM, and CX, to make way for a smoother workflow. How? When you have various platforms working together harmoniously, you can avoid data inconsistency between two systems. 

Read more: 5 Reasons to Integrate Your E-commerce Application with Odoo ERP

To avoid cumbersome processes after ERP implementation, you must consider if the vendor you are planning to hire can provide you the best support required. Talk to them to ensure that all the different platforms function as one unit. The most relevant integration for a CFO is integrating ERP with EPM (Enterprise Performance Management). Picking the right vendor will help you with such critical integrations.

4. Choose the right ERP                      

ERP that fits one company does not match the other because each company has its own unique needs. Whether a business is small, medium, or large, a CFO must be aware of the need for financial planning tools. Hence, as a CFO, you must confirm your ERP caters to the size of your business. Additionally, your current ERP must be scalable to accommodate employees from various departments. In other words, you will need a scalable ERP system for your entire operation to work smoothly.

Read more: 5 Tips For Getting The Best Out Of Your ERP System

5. Identify the needs of all departments to ensure teamwork

The ultimate aim of a CFO is to ensure that the ERP they select is delivering excellent results. Hence, it is crucial to have all your employees on board and understand the ERP system. 

To achieve that, you need to identify the needs of each department in your organization and make sure that ERP meets all those needs. This allows for an enhanced workflow among all employees. Include your organization’s CIO and other leaders during the planning and implementation of ERP software. They can spread a positive outlook toward the new system among the rest of the employees.

Read more: How Fingent Helps CFOs Gain New Insights and Reliably Enable Key Decisions

Are you ready to steer your business to success?

Understandably, implementing ERP will take time and effort. Besides, as a CFO, you will have to identify the potential and tangibly justify the cost of ERP. However, choosing the right vendor can make implementation hassle-free and result-oriented. 

It is no surprise that successful implementation and deployment of ERP hinges on the right partnership with the right vendor. 

As an Official Ready Partner for Odoo and SAP Silver partner, Fingent is the right provider to assess and understand your unique business requirements and help you become a cloud-powered enterprise. We offer dramatically shorter implementation timeframes. Our ERP allows for rapid configuration, customization, and deployment, significantly reducing the implementation cost. We provide both cloud and on-premises ERP solutions. So, do you feel ready to steer your business to success? Give us a call!