Tag: SAP S/4 HANA

SAP Analytics Cloud: 7 proven ways it can help your business

From manufacturing to marketing, businesses worldwide face unforeseen challenges as they continue to meet the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many organizations are accelerating digital transformation, establishing variable cost structures, and implementing agile operations to emerge from the pandemic stronger.

While most companies believe that the pandemic will negatively impact their business, some businesses feel that the consequences will be short-term. Although most firms have been affected by the pandemic, a survey shows that two-thirds of micro firms are severely affected by the crisis than 42% of the large companies.

Amidst this uncertainty, companies must consider how the pandemic’s continuation or return in different regions will impact their recovery strategies. Businesses must face this uncertainty by reassessing assumptions, re-evaluating scenarios, and strengthening their ability to respond.

Read more: 11 Practices Followed by Leaders to Build Resilience and Ensure Rapid Business Recovery

Simply put, now is the time for businesses to focus on supporting critical areas of their business that will help them stay relevant in the new environment and plan new strategies for what’s next.

Critical areas for businesses to focus presently

• Workforce
• Finances
• Operations and supply chain
• Strategy and branding
• Tax, trade, and regulatory
• Crisis management and response

What can businesses do?

• Leverage their crisis management team to focus on efforts in the wake of the crisis.
• Shift your focus on bringing back employees to work, assess your company’s response efforts to date, and evaluate areas for real-time course corrections.
• Use the insights the crisis has provided to help chalk out better strategies and capitalize on the opportunity for transformation.

  SAP Analytics Cloud has changed the way businesses plan their strategies. It is a robust, agile analytics platform that helps firms arrive at faster and improved business decisions. Moreover, it delivers insights that can be used for enhanced decision-making and optimize resources across all processes.

Read more: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning 

Combining our functional and industry expertise with SAP Analytics Cloud, Fingent top custom software development company, delivers analytics solutions that drive your competitive advantage, reduce costs, and increase revenue. 

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

SAP Analytics Cloud or SAC is one of the best SaaS solutions that combines all the functionalities such as planning, predictive, business intelligence, and more in one user interface. It helps save time and effort while making improved decisions.

SAP Analytics Cloud comes in two modes: Private and Public. As the name suggests, the Private edition hosts only one customer while the Public edition offers multi-tenancy. Also, cost-wise, the public edition is less expensive than the private edition.

Also read: Fingent offers e-Invoicing integration for SAP ERP users in India – Stay compliant with GST India e-Invoicing

Top 7 business challenges solved by SAP Analytics Cloud

1. Planning and consolidating financial strategy in one solution

SAP Analytics Cloud puts together- planning, predictive, Business Intelligence, and augmented analytics competencies into a simple cloud environment that allows you to consolidate your finances, expenses, and revenues at a single source across your whole organization.

2. Discovering useful insights

SAP Analytics Cloud joins hands with machine learning and augmented analytics to help convert insights that deliver value across your business.

Augmented Analytics allows you to explore your data automatically, discover cycles and trends, and identify possible ways to effectively chalk-out your expenses and cost plans. These intelligent insights can be turned into an actionable plan using a personal sandbox environment that helps visualize your performance metrics and simulate potential budget outcomes.

3. Aligning plans across your business

There’s no denying that financial and operational planning is a must when working with multiple teams and stakeholders. SAP Analytics Cloud helps you make smart decisions. It comprises several collaborative enterprise planning tools that allow you to link and align your expense and cost plans across departments such as HR, sales, finance, marketing, IT, and supply chain in real-time. These benefits eliminate the need for sending out unnecessary emails enclosed with irrelevant plans and avoid collaborating without context.

SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to create and assign tasks with the calendar, communicate with your team in real-time with the discussion panel, and collaborate directly on your plans with the data point commenting tool.

4. Improving planning cycles with predictive analysis

Gone are the days of the tedious manual building of your expense forecasts. SAP Analytics Cloud includes exceptional machine learning and predictive analysis technology that can help you build accurate expenses and cost plans much faster.

You can use the predictive features to automate baseline expense planning forecasts based on previous data. You can then monitor plan attainment with real-time, up-to-date predictive forecasts. Its accuracy indicators enable data analysts (without any technical knowledge) to trust the data-driven predictions before including them into their planning process directly.

5. Enhancing strategic business decisions

With SAP Analytics Cloud machine learning technology, you can convert insight into action within seconds. Automated technology helps you avoid agenda-driven and biased decision-making as it provides you with insights that drive your business.

• Search to Insight – Natural language query generates visualizations to answer your questions instantly. Machine learning technology provides you with important trends quickly.
• Smart Insights – Machine learning technology helps you save time and focus more on high-value activities by allowing you to understand the significant contributors of data points without the need to pivot your data manually.
• Smart Discovery – This allows you to identify key influencers and relationships in your data to help you understand how business factors influence performance. Also, it can detect anomalies and help you take corrective measures. With machine learning projection, anyone can simulate the impact of strategic business decisions.

Case study: Automated Integration between SAP SuccessFactors-Employee Central and SAP S/4HANA – Find how Fingent helped the customer gain real-time insights for improved decision-making

6. Data modeling

SAP Analytics Cloud helps you plan and build the right model where your data is stored efficiently. With this end-to-end solution, you can immediately take action and start planning. The data modeling feature allows you to prepare your data for analysis. “Models” and “Stories” are the two key components of SAP Analytics Cloud’s BI function. Models allow you to enhance your data by cleansing, wrangling, establishing hierarchies, defining rules and conditions, and adding formulas. Stories give life to your data by letting you visualize your information through charts and graphs, which will help you gain valuable business insights. 

7. End-to-end industry dashboards 

SAP Analytics Cloud offers business content packages tailored to individual analytic scenarios. Each package entails aesthetically built dashboards, stories, and data models carefully designed for specific lines of business and end-to-end business scenarios. Also known as Analytics Content Network, this business content library offers tried and tested best practices for leveraging your available data and accelerating your go-live. The content network is customized to work with existing SAP data sources such as SAP S/4HANA or SAP C/4HANA.

Read more: SAP Focused Industry Templates & Automation Solutions 

Today, businesses need to forecast changes ahead of time. SAP Analytics Cloud helps to anticipate and plan for the impact of the crisis on business. How a business responds to challenging situations determines its strength and potential to recover. 

Fingent is an SAP Silver Partner. With our expertise in cloud computing and SAP services, we can support you through this critical time and help stabilize your business operations and strategize for the future. Get in touch with our expert to discuss your requirements. 

How SAP S/4HANA Helps CFOs to Overcome The Slump and Steer Business Forward!

Unpredictable times such as these call for an “anytime, anywhere” finance function, and CFOs are expected to take the lead in accelerating strategic growth across the enterprise. Therefore, suddenly the CFOs found their organizations in a firefighting mode: gauging risks, preserving cash, and rapidly revising all financial plans and forecasting for the next month, quarter, and year. At this point, most CFOs found technology to be a key driver for improving transparency and efficiency. SAP S/4HANA is ‘the’ technology that supports the evolution of the finance function today and into the future. 

However, this journey is not easy. Companies must develop a business case for SAP S/4HANA that will support their strategic vision. By leveraging the right finance technology innovations and partnering with a trusted SAP solutions provider, companies can maintain global regulatory compliance and engage in efficient finance processes. 

Technology assists CFOs to control accounting and tax standards and engage with the business to jointly drive value. Having said that, technological trends that have been sitting in incubation mode have now emerged as real working models. This article discusses how SAP S/4HANA can leverage the CFO’s vision of becoming a value creation role model for the business.

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

Typical challenges for the CFO’s vision

Most often, a CFO’s agenda is held back by their organization’s complex technology landscape. This often renders efficient closing and reporting impossible within expected timelines. Such cumbersome systems hamper the management of working capital while making it difficult for finance departments to obtain reliable figures for profit and loss or forecasted budgets. 

Perhaps you find yourself in this situation: At the end of the month, you find that you could not meet the deadline for the period closure. To make matters worse, mistakes made during the month must be rectified, data from different systems must be imported randomly into an Excel sheet. That is not all! All this information must be manipulated into a decent report. You take a breath that eventually it all worked well. However, the same thing happens the next month, and this pattern keeps repeating itself month after month. That stress peaks by the year-end. Amidst all this chaos, you are left with little time to proactively steer the company based on those figures. You may wonder, is all this financial data gathering purely an obligation just to satisfy auditors? 

Companies can gain much profit by keeping admin up-to-date and proactively adjusting the business based on current financial data. That is the biggest advantage SAP S/4HANA provides. It gives the reins of business into your control. 

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

Three focus areas where CFOs can gain more control with SAP S/4HANA

1. Control system landscape

As a CFO, you must deal with various financial systems and programs that contain your financial data. All financial data must be collected continuously and loaded into a reporting tool. Apart from this, data must also be entered into an Excel program. Such a fragmented landscape with a jumbled interface leads to errors, data duplication, and the probability of inconsistent data. This translates into enormous amounts of wasted money and time. Replacing this complex structure with an integrated system saves a lot of time and money. SAP S/4HANA provides CFOs a simplified landscape that leads to more control.

Read more about our Case Study: How Fingent successfully automated the integration between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA. Click here to download!

2. Control over processes

Fragmented processes lead to many errors and waste much time. However, once your system landscape is integrated, you will be able to optimize your processes. This will save time, which you can use to proactively manage the company with critical decision making based on your current financial data. This is where SAP S/4HANA finds value. It offers possibilities to automate and integrate processes. It allows you to add smart KPIs. This, in turn, helps you decide which areas need your attention and avoid those that are less important.

3. Control transactions

Entering data several times on different screens and in various steps leads to incomplete data. Most often, no valuable information can be retrieved from such a system. Nevertheless, S/4HANA can ensure that the transactions are carried out correctly. This will keep the data informative and up to date.

How S/4HANA can transform the landscape to help embrace a CFO’s vision

The challenges faced by CFOs and finance professionals today are complicated, but S/4HANA can simplify them. CFOs can seamlessly unify their information landscape to remove gaps and ease pain-points by leveraging the in-memory data and processing capabilities of SAP S/4HANA architecture, and cloud deployment scenarios.

Instead of grappling with disparate pieces, this approach enables CFOs and financial professionals to see a holistic real-time view that encompasses all operational data sets and analysis capabilities within a single unified architecture. 

What is the impact of SAP S/4HANA on CFOs?

SAP S/4HANA improves access to information, and the ability to manipulate that information. Additionally, it can dramatically improve the real-time analytics performance. Thus, with the help of SAP S/4HANA, CFOs have more power to show the management board what they can achieve. 

Empowered with SAP S/4HANA, CFOs know that they can respond impromptu to the management board’s questions. With that power, they can just tap for details and input from the live business. Usually, the management board fires off questions after the CFO delivers the company report. Such questions could be linked to newly acquired subsidiaries or similar activities. SAP S/4HANA gives CFOs instant access to all data and processes of the company. Thus, a CFO is now able to include outcomes of the newly acquired business. Also, SAP S/4HANA allows you to model the efficient integration of identical operations and product hierarchies. This allows CFOs to join key drivers in their simulation model with new business planning and get instant combined results. In turn, it will help board members to figure out the impact of global cash flows and financial position. 

CFOs can pull real-time cash and liquidity data of all business systems. With the analytics in SAP S/4HANA, they can advise the board confidently if the venture would be profitable. Evidently, CFOs do more than just crunching figures. They give the board a preview of what the business could look like after a merger or with an investment. To that end, SAP S/4HANA enables CFOs and financial professionals to predict potential market growth in addition to current operations. 

How can SAP S/4HANA help CFOs achieve their prime objectives in an agile manner?

1. Financial planning, data processing, and analysis

Proper financial planning is a strategic objective for organic business growth. However, proper financial planning depends on the availability of financial data for profitable growth. Financial planning must be aligned with the growth strategies of the organization. It must be analyzed to explore new products, channels, and markets.  With an embedded BPC solution for planning, SAP S/4HANA provides agility, flexibility, and accuracy in the planning process. Since it is available in the enterprise core system, no time is wasted in data loads and data reconciliation. It makes previous years actuals available for making plans. Financial data can be churned easily to simulate various growth strategies and help the organization make informed decisions. 

2. Support corporate growth

Businesses expect CFOs to support them in driving growth strategies, both organic and inorganic growth. Mergers, acquisitions, and decisions to expand business in various geographies play an important role in growth strategies. To that end, SAP S/4HANA provides real-time financial reporting that reduces the time-consuming reconciliation process. This results in a quick closing. Since it is supported by analytical dashboards with simulations, it can help CFOs make strategic decisions with accuracy and agility.

3. Gain a competitive advantage

CFOs want to keep an eye on regulatory changes and changing domestic and international economic conditions because it gives an opportunity to drive competitive advantage. They can do this with the support of SAP S/4HANA. Since it is an innovation platform it can help CFOs to reimagine and reinvent their processes. Thus, it can bring agility to their decision making.

SAP S/4HANA upholds agility and accuracy of financial information 

An ongoing concern for CFOs is the lack of agility in getting financial reporting.  Additionally, manual data reconciliation results in inaccurate data. However, SAP S/4HANA provides financial reports in real-time. Its universal journal feature brings in simplicity and flexibility. Since it allows you to store data in a single table, slicing and dicing the data is made easy. This makes reporting at multiple dimensions simple and real-time. 

Most CFOs realize that managing evolving technology such as SAP S/4HANA is not just about streamlining operations. It is also essential for managing fraud detection, regulation, and compliance. Compliance requirements have become stringent globally. SAP S/4HANA provides a comprehensive solution for fraud and risk management. 

Laser focus on your core competency

CFOs and finance professionals do not view themselves as bookkeepers. They are business outcome-focused leaders and business partners who are stewards of the company’s profit and resources. They are innovators and strategists. CFOs are those who can overcome economic uncertainty and use financial data for growth. Hence, they must be trusted advisors to the management board while overseeing the job of managing cost and profitability. In short, a CFO must be a multitasker! SAP S/4HANA provides the platform and tools for efficient multitasking. It supercharges a CFO’s vision of becoming a value creation role-model for the business.

As CFOs grapple with new disruptive business models, SAP S/4HANA Finance can help them in their decision-making process at a tactical and strategic level. Being an SAP Silver Partner, we are helping CFOs to gain new insights and reliably enable key decisions. 

Talk to an expert to understand how we can enhance your organization’s ability to pivot quickly and adapt to dynamic business scenarios. 

Empowering CFOs to Derive Crucial Insights and Implement Strategic Decisions with Confidence 

The role of the CFO is no longer restricted to fulfilling traditional financial duties. With advances in technology, the CFO’s responsibilities are also growing as today’s CEOs and boards demand the finance function provide real-time, data-enabled decision support. The present-day CFOs and their teams serve as gatekeepers to critical data that is required to generate forecasts and support business leaders to make strategic decisions that have a lasting impact. 

With that said, what are the challenging areas for CFOs where they can perform better with the integration of the right technology? We’ve tried to list out a few here.

Key Challenges Faced by CFOs

1. Insights

• Acquiring self-service analytical capabilities to garner strategic and operational insights for reliably enabling key decisions and enhancing visibility through the board-room to the shop floor. 
• Addressing big data requirements is another challenge. Embedded data analytics that connects transaction executions with immediate insights and analyses is a must-have weapon in the CFO’s armor. With automatic matching capabilities, finance professionals can reduce the time taken to gather data.      
• Predictive insights are essential to assess future outcomes. CFOs equipped with predictive analytics capabilities empower organizations through powerful budgeting, planning, and forecasting that will drive the business on the right path. 

2. Ensure agility to respond, adapt and survive

• It’s always at the top of a CFO’s agenda to optimize risk management and establish a sustainable cost-effective control environment. A sustainable compliance program (compliance-first approach) can free up to 30% of the function’s capacity while keeping the risks low. 
• Structure finance to make the most of tight budgets and provide financial support for corporate initiatives by ensuring discretionary expense management and operational costing optimization.
• Increasing adoption of “Shared Services model” (service delivery models under centralized and decentralized structures) for enterprise operations allows businesses to expand to several domains, customers, products, geographies, and channels. For CFOs, this translates to more challenges w.r.t. strategic pricing, customer and product profitability modeling, and profitable growth target setting. CFOs also need to cater to multiple businesses and stakeholders while supporting all the current and evolving business models.  
• Embedded localization requirements to best-balance the risk and efficiency and implement best practices supporting operations across segments, industries, and geographies.
• Flexible deployment models allowing the optimal combination of cloud and on-premise solutions.

3. Optimize costs, digitize finance, and other functions

• CFO and other finance professionals are expected to offer more value-add solutions that provide strategic direction for the enterprise. Automation of repetitive, rule-based finance functions enables CFOs and financial professionals to focus more strategically.  
• CFOs need to gain improved visibility across all cost components that allow them to take quick actions such as cutting unwanted costs and justifying new costs in a tangible way. 
• Integrate and unify all corporate processes allowing for a higher level of standardization. This can only be achieved with an intelligent enterprise technology like SAP S/4HANA. 

Why is SAP S/4 HANA ideal for CFOs?

Traditional ERP systems store data in many different tables. As a result, financial teams struggle with isolated and inconsistent information from many sources. They end up spending hours sifting through data and compiling reports manually. Despite this, they are unable to provide the desired financial insights. On the other hand, SAP S/4 HANA stores all financial information in a single Universal Journal. It is a powerful concept that eliminates redundancy and creates a single source of truth. This gives you easy access to accurate, timely, and qualitative information. Your business processes become transparent and reliable. 

The broad portfolio of new technologies and innovations in SAP S/4 HANA Finance empowers CFOs with responsive decision-making tools. These tools give you instant insights into all the company’s data and systems. You can perform end-to-end analyses right from the boardroom to the shop floor. 

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

(Click to enlarge the image)                            Source: SAP

Embedded Analytics

Organizations using ERP systems have always found that while it’s easy to enter data into the system, getting interesting information from it is tedious. SAP S/4 HANA Finance enables direct reporting without the need for a data warehouse for specific analytic requirements. This is possible because of the Universal Journal. However, this alone does not deliver the right insights. This is where Embedded Analytics in S/4 HANA comes in. 

Embedded Analytics allows not only the intuitive navigation through graphical views but also the close integration of analysis capabilities within the operational transactions. This makes it easy to act directly on the right information without having to switch between screens or systems. It has business planning, consolidation, and forecasting capabilities which can help you gain new insights from different perspectives. 

The embedded analytics in S/4 HANA is also helpful to determine the best course of action when unprecedented disruptions occur. Thus, the role of the Office of Finance transforms from mere historical reporting to analyzing business performance.

Read our case study: Find out how Fingent automated integration between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA

Predictive Capabilities

Organizations need accurate financial insights to steer their business in the best path. In the past, decision-makers requested information through month-end reporting. That practice is long gone. Today, continuous delivery of relevant information is the minimum requirement. More insights are requested on what the future would bring. This is where Predictive Accounting can help. 

For example, when a sales order is confirmed in the system, it is not recorded in accounting until you deliver the goods and send an invoice. With Predictive functionality based on the sales order, a predictive invoice is registered. When the actual invoice is sent out, the predictive posting is back-posted, reducing the predicted amounts. This predictive accounting logic can help you simulate financial postings based on the confirmed incoming sales orders. You end up getting an accurate and futuristic view on your margin.      

Read more: How SAP Helps Manage Your Payroll During COVID-19 Crisis

Transforming Finance into an Intelligent Portfolio

The S/4 HANA digital core offers predictive analytics combined with machine learning across various lines of businesses (LoBs). SAP Cash Application is the first Lighthouse application that is based on SAP Leonardo Machine Learning. It analyzes the customer’s historical data, learns which matching criteria are important, how to prioritize them, and how to best apply them using machine learning. This helps to intelligently match payments to open receivables and automatically clear those items minimizing manual effort. Thus, we process cash faster, improving the days of sales outstanding. 

Read more: Unlock the Potential of Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo

In other words, finance teams can scale as the business grows and save time to focus on strategic business tasks like growth and planning. The machine learning application is cloud-based and non-disruptive to the system-of-record. As it is tightly integrated with SAP S/4HANA, you can easily adapt innovations without having to resort to costly and time-consuming IT projects or any risky activities in your back-end system.  

(Click to enlarge the image)                         Source: SAP

Take Your Next Step with Fingent

SAP S/4 HANA supports CFOs by using business processes that are already available within the S/4 HANA environment. As CFOs grapple with new disruptive business models, SAP S/4 HANA Finance can help them in their decision-making process at a tactical and strategic level. Leveraging these technologies can enhance the organization’s ability to pivot quickly and adapt to dynamic business scenarios. 

Making this big leap is definitely challenging, but Fingent’s extensive knowledge and expertise on SAP S/4 HANA Finance can get you going. Connect with our SAP expert to learn more.

What are preconfigured solutions?

SAP Preconfigured solutions are implementations featuring standard functionality or common patterns. Since they include common enterprise features such as supply chain, finance, and inventory management, preconfigured solutions can be deployed rapidly. In simple terms, SAP preconfigured solutions are simple, ready-to-consume solutions that adapt to your business needs.

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions allows the development of preconfigured solutions for specific functional areas, complete with pre-built reports, preconfigured content, and predefined best practices. Such suites enable enterprises to deploy software easily, with accelerated implementation times, and predictability in cost and scope.

Each preconfigured solution is a complete, end-to-end implementation. Enterprises may adopt it as such, or use it as a base for developing a full-blown customized solution. Open source solutions allow enterprises to download the source code and customize the solution.

Traditional preconfigured solutions came on-premise. The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud heralds the cloud version of preconfigured solutions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

How preconfigured solutions enhance industry operations?

Preconfigured solutions spare enterprises from “rediscovering the wheel.” When solutions exist for standard requirements, it avoids the wastage in development efforts. Preconfigured solutions save time, trial-and-error, and labor. The in-built accelerators allow rapid implementation and configuration. The shortened time to market delivers a competitive advantage to firms.

A preconfigured solution offers a working model with glitches removed. These solutions connect key functional areas, to streamline operations and improve communication flow across departments. It automates routine and repetitive functions and offers well-structured content that improves visibility into key fields.

SAP offers built-in support for industry best practices. Solutions developed using SAP combines the latest technology, industry best practices, and processes in a single package.

Developers using SAP to build preconfigured solutions can adopt a modular and scalable approach. They mix modules to create targeted solutions such as CRM, field management suite, ERP and more. Clients may choose the most relevant reporting tools for their reports using SAP Business Intelligence Adoption rapid-deployment solution. SAP Predictive Analytics Content Adoption rapid-deployment solution helps to implement a predefined predictive analysis use case.

Transforming various industry verticals

Preconfigured solutions deliver efficiency improvements in several industries and verticals. Five of them are mentioned below:

1. Real Estate

Unstandardized information, inefficient processes, and weak communications often affect the real estate industry. Preconfigured solutions enable enterprises to streamline data and workflows. 

Developing preconfigured solutions for key functional areas of the real estate industry allows business owners to access information in real-time, prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks, and remain in control of the business. Here are a few key functional areas where pre-configured solutions can come to the rescue of real estate enterprises:

• Document management with powerful search and sort functionality.
• Process automation functions to streamline operations.
• Contact maintenance to keep track of customers and upcoming tasks.
• Reporting and analytics to generate and share data and other critical information.

2. Supply Chain and Logistics

Preconfigured solutions make the complex supply chain relationships simple and easy to handle. SAP’s Model Company for supply chain planning offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution, complete with relevant business content, accelerators, and enablement services.

The suite co-opts:

• Demand planning to manage demand streams and increase productivity.
• Response and supply planning.
• Supply and allocation planning.
• Deployment planning.
• Sales and Operations planning.

The inbound and outbound integrations with SAP S/4HANA ensures seamless integration with other functional areas, such as sales. Businesses gain improved visibility to the upstream and downstream business value chains and can visualize the entire supply chain network. The preconfigured solution aligns demand and supply plans with financial targets and key performance indicators.

Related Reading: Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

3. Healthcare

The healthcare industry is under pressure to innovate while keeping up with regulations. Preconfigured solutions automate regulatory concerns and compliance. Ready-to-run process models and scenarios enforce standardization with tight quality controls. It improves efficiency in research and development. Accelerators support rapid design and implementation.

The most popular modules of SAP’s preconfigured solutions in healthcare are meant for:

• Research and development
• Production
• Regulation
• Quality and traceability
• Logistics and transport
• Purchases and provisioning
• Marketing and commercial

4. Sales and Marketing

SAP preconfigured solutions infuse efficiency to customer-facing functions and increase customer satisfaction. Its most popular implementations in the sales and marketing domain include:

• Predicting customer demand based on real-time data.
• Tracking sales history.
• Automating sales operations. The solution tracks all processes, from ordering of raw materials till the delivery, and takes care of auditing, notifications, and reporting.

5. Financial Services

The SAP Model Company solution for Financial Services offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution to support the core financial processes, including:

• General accounting
• Cash and treasury functions
• Planning and forecasting

These preconfigured solutions come with relevant business content for a specific use-case, accelerator, and enablement service. These solutions enable gap analysis, address resource bottlenecks, and support lean implementations.

Today’s enterprises seek efficiency improvements and cost savings without compromising quality. Fingent uses SAP to build pre-configured solutions that enable enterprises to realize such goals. Implementing these custom-built pre-configured solutions helps you transform your processes across various business areas and improve your customer relationships. 

Contact us to get a free consultation with our SAP Experts. 

What is SAP Leonardo?

Though businesses are flooded with Big Data, IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and other latest technologies that support innovation, many of them are unaware of how to bring these technologies together for enhanced business results. This is where SAP Leonardo comes in. SAP Leonardo brings these technologies together by integrating the key features of innovation to drive business outcomes. It is a “digital innovation system” that allows you to innovate at scale, thus rethinking your business models.

SAP Leonardo uses a rapid innovation process that embraces design thinking by utilizing the power of core technologies like Big Data, Analytics, IoT, Blockchain, and Machine Learning. SAP Leonardo is built on the SAP Cloud Platform. It is the first digital enterprise platform that gives you the freedom to choose any infrastructure provider you want: SAP, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform. So, whichever IaaS provider you choose, you do not have to compromise on agility and ownership costs.  

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP Leonardo: The future of intelligent ERP   

SAP Leonardo offers a basket of features intended for transforming organizations into intelligent enterprises. 

1. Rapid innovation process: 

SAP Leonardo’s rapid innovation process is a combination of innovation services and design thinking methodology. It helps companies to move from concept to blueprint by driving the process of picking the best projects that are more likely to succeed while minimizing risks. This process encourages users to think about big ideas or challenges by taking small steps at a time. Design thinking being the core of the process will help you amplify your human-centric activities with the help of technology. This is done by embracing empathy and collaboration in a rapid and iterative environment.  

2. Automated innovation: 

SAP Leonardo empowers companies to innovate based on real-time information. Fiori apps can directly interact with IoT systems located on-site through the SAP Cloud. Thus the IoT system can learn and adapt automatically to the ongoing processes that can impact its performance. However, the company will always hold control and can accept or reject the recommendations made by the system. Thus, SAP Leonardo enables companies to gather and process data most efficiently.

Six core technological domains: 

SAP Leonardo combines 6 core technologies and builds solutions on that foundation. 

Following are the six core technologies:

1. IoT: With SAP Leonardo you can connect people, processes, and things based on real-time data received from IoT services. You end up with enriched IoT data on a unified semantic model. Thus you watch your insights turning into business outcomes.

2. Machine Learning: Though machine learning has been around for some time, these projects always existed in silos. With SAP Leonardo, machine learning is made available to everyone and everywhere by embedding it into enterprise applications. With this integrated intelligence, users can solve common problems and also facilitate the deployment of deep learning models for continuous improvement of business processes.

3. Blockchain: With Leonardo, SAP has moved into the BaaS technology accompanying giants like IBM and Microsoft. These companies have incorporated blockchain as the core of a secure transaction-based business. The SAP BaaS is ready-to-use and allows you to experiment on the distributed ledger technology with minimum risks.

4. Analytics: Analytics is crucial to all business processes and applications. With SAP Leonardo, embedded analytics is combined with machine learning, enabling you to create new processes and applications based on insights. Using Predictive Analytics you can leverage machine learning to take proactive actions and improve transparency across your team. 

5. Big Data: The SAP Data Hub, which is a part of Leonardo, helps to turn your chaotic data into context. It combines business with IT and simplifies data sharing. Thus, you can easily promote complete data transparency in your company.

6. Data Intelligence: SAP Data Intelligence combines the salient features of SAP Data Hub and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation into a single integrated service in the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Data Intelligence helps you to monetize your data and leverage open source technologies.

SAP Leonardo comes with a set of industry accelerators: 

In order to maximize ROI, you have to innovate quickly at scale. SAP Leonardo makes rapid innovation possible as it is delivered with a set of industry accelerators. They combine software and services that reduce the time of implementation considerably. In other words, the digital innovation system capabilities of SAP Leonardo are wrapped in a set of industry best practices gained from years of experience. All these accelerators combine industry knowledge, data intelligence, and software needed on an open innovation path.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

SAP Leonardo has powered SAP’s own digital transformation: 

SAP is using Leonardo throughout the SAP portfolio to make its business suite and system of applications powerful. SAP Leonardo powers everything from SAP Ariba to SAP S/4 HANA, making them more intelligent.

In addition to improving reliability and efficiency, today’s ERP solutions have to be the foundation on which future business models are built. Rather than just making profits, businesses should focus on altering customer experiences and gaining new market shares. To become an intelligent enterprise, you need an intelligent ERP and SAP Leonardo is definitely the future!   

Contact us if you have a query on how SAP Leonardo can benefit your business. Our consultants will be able to assist you. 

Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

Digital transformation or innovation has become the topic of discussion in every boardroom and LOB agenda. However, many business leaders find that the complexity associated with digital innovation is a major obstacle preventing them from realizing any true value. Companies need a digital core to overcome complexity and drive digital transformation. SAP S/4 HANA is such a digital core that can help companies overcome complexity and thrive in today’s disruptive market. S/4 HANA helps you reinvent your business model by providing easy access to real-time data.

Related Reading: 7 Tips To Ensure A Seamless Transition To SAP S/4HANA

S/4 HANA implementation Methodology

Let’s jump ahead and have a look at the ‘new implementation’ scenario with SAP S/4 HANA. SAP recommends the SAP Activate Methodology for SAP S/4 HANA implementation. It succeeds the ASAP and SAP Launch methodologies and combines 3 core pillars – SAP Guided configuration, SAP Best Practices, and Methodology. SAP Activate Methodology offers both Cloud and on-premise solutions. It is a modular and agile framework that accelerates migration or implementation to S/4 HANA. 

SAP Activate consolidates the knowledge and accelerators to help you innovate faster than before. Throughout the project life cycle, SAP Activate follows 6  phases: Discover, Prepare, Explore, Realize, Deploy, Run. 

The SAP S/4 HANA Roadmap provides detailed information on implementation and specific methodologies. The Roadmap Viewer Tool is based on Fiori and aims to guide you on your SAP S/4 HANA journey by providing you project accelerators, templates for key deliverables and other relevant information on the product implementation. The methodology content is divided into the following hierarchy: Phases, Deliverables, Tasks. Additionally, companies can make use of the Value Assurance Packages for SAP S/4 HANA projects that follow the SAP Activate methodology.

Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

Tools for S/4 HANA implementation

Data Migration is an important aspect of any system implementation. After moving to the SAP HANA platform, your data has to be of high-quality and should assist your business in achieving organizational goals. SAP provides tools to simplify this process. These tools do not require any programming by the customer and help you to reduce test effort and minimize downtime. 

• SAP S/4 HANA Migration Cockpit: This is a web-based tool that helps to migrate Legacy data into S/4 HANA. It is packed with a set of pre-existing objects that are updated with every release. Apart from the set of standard objects, you can also develop new objects or enhance the existing ones based on your specific needs. Migration Cockpit is available for S/4 HANA Cloud and on-premise from the S/4 HANA Release 1610.
• SAP S/4 HANA Migration Object Modeler (MOM): As mentioned earlier, the standard objects that come with the Migration Cockpit don’t always meet customized requirements. For such cases, SAP has provided another tool: SAP S/4 HANA Migration Object Modeler (MOM). Using this tool, you can create new source structures, manipulate existing ones, change field mappings, add rules to manipulate data and create totally new objects. The Migration Object Modeler consists of global data, source structures, target structures, structure mapping, and field mapping.  
• SAP Rapid Data Migration with SAP Data Services: SAP Rapid Data Migration with Data Services allows you to safely migrate your data within SAP systems. With SAP RDS, you can cleanse, transform and load data into new SAP applications easily and quickly.  
• SAP Readiness Check: SAP Readiness Check is a self-service tool to check the pre-requisites in software, requirements in infrastructure, functional implications of SAP S/4 HANA, custom code adaptations that are required and data migration requirements. This tool helps you to analyze whether your existing ERP system is ready for S/4 HANA adoption. You can find valuable information on sizing, add-on compatibility, use of Fiori and other details.  
• Guided Configuration for SAP S/4 HANA: In a cloud-based system, customers prefer pre-configured solutions for fast ROI. Hence, SAP provides a guided configuration for S/4 HANA which provides easy-to-use, web-based activities for personalization. With Guided Configuration you won’t have to define parameters in tables as you did in ERP systems. Thus you can greatly simplify the implementation process.   
• SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) software: SLT is an ETL tool that helps to migrate and align any type of data in your current SAP landscape. This tool can steer you through business reorganization of any size. It automatically supports non-Unicode and Unicode conversion during replicating or loading. Thus the SAP LT tool allows easy and fast deployment.  

SAP has notified that from 2025, they will stop supporting ECC. So migrating to S/4 HANA is inevitable, to keep your business running. Since the clock is ticking, you need to make your move soon. The digital core that powers S/4 HANA combines CRM and traditional ERP and also enables a whole slew of cloud applications like SAP Ariba, Successfactors, C/4 HANA and many more. Get in touch with our SAP expert to get free guidance on migrating to SAP S/4HANA seamlessly.

SAP Model Company: Understanding the Significance and More!

With changing business requirements, you need IT systems that support rapid business transformation. Your company needs to focus on innovation that is result-driven. Traditionally you had an on-premise style of implementation where you spent around 6-18 months implementing a solution. But this approach is not feasible in today’s ever-changing environment. If only you could find tried and tested solutions that could speed up your digital transformation. Here’s where SAP Model Company comes in.

What is SAP Model Company?

The SAP Model company is a set of pre-configured, ready-to-use, end-to-end business solutions that focus on ramping up the company’s digital transformation process. These solutions are customized for a particular industry or line of business. There are many teams working to outline the core processes of an industry or LOB. They combine the best practices of various successful business transformation projects which are powered by the most modern applications. In other words, you get prepackaged reference solutions that are based on what other companies have done successfully. Thus, the SAP Model Company is so much more than the older typical environments like IDES. 

SAP Model Company is an industry solution that helps companies in their move to SAP S/4 HANA. Apart from SAP S/4 HANA, the SAP Model Company also contains SAP C/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and many other SAP solutions. It can be used in both Greenfield and Brownfield applications. 

SAP HANA Technology – The Game-Changer

Why you need SAP Model Company?

• The complexity of SAP solutions overwhelmed users and hence they demanded guidance.  
• SAP users had little or no knowledge of how to use or implement industry and LOB-specific processes using standard practices.
• Changing times demanded rapid innovation. Companies required accelerators that helped to reduce the time of implementation and also reduced the risks of failure.
• Enterprises spent a considerable amount of time on the blueprint phase just to find out that their concept could not be implemented using current technologies.  

Significance of SAP Model Company

The SAP Model Company is a true reference solution. In other words, you are to use the Model Company as a dictionary. You look into it for the terms and definitions and choose what you would like to take into your landscape. If you find a 100% fit, you can directly import the processes from the Model Company into your development environment. 

However, the Model Company focuses only on really important processes. For instance, a Model company in oil and gas has a very limited scope on how to manage a pipeline, whereas in a real-life scenario you have more than hundreds and thousands of pipelines. You can refer to the configuration guides in the Model Company and then scale out as required. 

SAP Model Company is Future-proof!

In the words of Stephan Klein, SVP and SAP Model Company Lead, the Model company is set to become the baseline for the entire SAP product portfolio. It spans across all SAP solutions for on-premise, single-tenant, multi-tenant cloud and hybrid platforms in industries and LOBs and is completely interoperable. 

The planned portfolio for 2020 constitutes more than 30 model companies for industries and LOBs. The industry model companies include Consumer Industries, Service Industries, Discrete Industries, Public Services, Energy and Natural Resources. These industry model companies are structured on top of the LOB model companies such as Digital Supply chain, CRM and Customer Experience, Financial Services, HR and People Engagement. The very baseline of the portfolio is built on S/4 HANA Best Practices or on SAP S/4 HANA Multinational Corporation. 

Accelerate your business growth and intelligence with SAP Model Company

The SAP Model company contains market standard business processes together with their configurations. It aims to transform business processes by enabling enterprises to adopt industry best practices and incorporate innovative technologies wherever possible. 

Here are a few benefits of SAP Model Company:

• Faster time-to-value, freeing up your resources for further innovation.
• Accelerate your digital transformation by reducing costs and risks of implementation.
• Choose the right solution based on the industry reference architecture.
• Lower ratio of service costs compared to software costs. 

In the case of a cloud environment, Model Company services can be accessed immediately, within hours. If you want to use the Model Company on-premise, then you can start with your business users, fit-gap analysis or even your business blueprint design right away. You thus accomplish value-based outcomes in weeks rather than in months. Along with greenfield implementations, you can also use the Model Company as a sandbox system to facilitate back to standard discussions with your business. The end-to-end LOB-proven processes allow you to minimize customizations and benefit from the latest innovations with proven standard practices. 

Need help with your SAP Model Company implementation? Why not ask the pros? Contact us now!

Accelerate Your Transition to SAP S/4HANA With These Tips

Increasing digitization has caused businesses to face a multitude of challenges in their working environment. In order to map business processes and forecast better business decisions, your data and work processes to be analyzed in real-time. SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent ERP software designed to cover all your day-to-day enterprise requirements. It integrates crucial functions from various lines of businesses as well as industries and incorporates parts of SAP Business Suite Products. 

SAP will be offering its support for its ECC ERP software until December 31, 2025. Any business that seeks continued support from SAP will need to migrate to SAP’s flagship ERP software, SAP S/4HANA. Prior to performing SAP S/4HANA implementation or migration, you need to define your business needs and priorities. Having an appropriate migration strategy is crucial for achieving your goals with minimal disruption. 

Here are a few tips that will help you ensure a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA. 

Tip 1: Analyzing The Right Platform That Addresses Challenges

Switching to SAP S/4 HANA successfully requires businesses to first analyze their requirements and budget. 

With the on-premise deployment of SAP HANA, the user gets to manage the entire HANA database, applications, OS, middleware, servers, networking, data centers, and virtualization. On-premise deployment of SAP S/4 HANA thus ensures control in addition to maximum risk reduction. This requires choosing a certified SAP HANA appliance from a hardware partner of SAP. Additionally, SAP HANA’s TDI (Tailored Data Center Integration) helps in reducing infrastructure costs.

Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud integration which is the SaaS version of S/4 HANA can function without the need for hardware, databases, or IT personnel. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is SAP’s very own cloud offer and provides improved flexibility, and scalability. 

TIP 2:  Providing User Support For Improved Decision-Making Process

The simple data model provided by SAP S/4 HANA makes it easier for decision-making and performance improvement. Hence, analyzing and identifying master grids in the system, specifically the key values that were not being used even after a key date provided by the user. This will prevent errors happening in the future. These benefits and necessary changes need to be provided to the users for better support to enhance the decision-making process. 

TIP 3: Real-Time Insights From Prepared Data To Ensure Reduced Down Times And Costs

Real-time insights are crucial for businesses to be able to optimize various processes involved. SAP S/4HANA platform involves a simplified data model that makes data migration quick and simple. SAP HANA provides advanced analytical tools that help in analyzing large chunks of data in real-time. A preparatory activity of cleansing data is crucial to avoid risks of licensing, downtimes, and so on.

TIP 4: Creating A Deployment Group Of SAP Experts

A proficient group of SAP experts is the key to ensuring a successful transition to SAP S/4HANA. The deployment requires conducting workshops on functional planning, which can be performed by an SAP partner or can utilize internal resources with adequate training as well. Getting the deployment group of experts on board might even require prototypes and test systems to be installed. This can be done quite inexpensively with the cloud.

Related Reading: SAP HANA Technology: The Game Changer

TIP 5: Creating A Detailed Road-map For Business

Mission-critical applications can now be separated from peripheral LoBs (Business line applications) with the SAP BIModal IT. These applications are developed on the SAP cloud platform and allow SAP S/4HANA to perform as the digital core of organizations. Additionally, SAP business services provide technical support services during implementation.

TIP 6: Planning Migration with High Industry Standards

All actions from the planning phase to migration are critical and require to be methodical. The SAP must be in its latest version for a smooth transition. Also, it is equally important to have backups and archive points to avoid unnecessary risks.

TIP 7: Create SAP Sandpit Environment Initially As A Proof Of Concept

Implementing a proof of concept is vital before performing the actual migration process. This helps in identifying various issues and resolving risks if any. It also supports the decision-making process and improves the overall performance of the project. 

SAP S/4HANA is the future of SAP. Ensuring a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA is crucial for outcomes concerning data processing, analytics, overall performance improvement, and improved profitability. Get in touch with our SAP expert to get free guidance on migrating to SAP S/4HANA seamlessly.