Tag: SAP Business Suite
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.
SAP Commerce Cloud: The Path to Delivering an Omnichannel Experience
The accessibility of the internet and various commerce solutions have broken boundaries to open up a global market. As a result, many businesses are looking for e-commerce solutions that are flexible, scalable, and provide highly targeted customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. Enter- SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris Commerce).
What is SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP Commerce Cloud connects the dots in a comprehensive commerce portfolio integrating all digital and physical activities of the customer, creating a smoother and more personalized shopping experience. SAP Commerce Cloud is one of the five key components of the SAP C/4 HANA suite. SAP Commerce Cloud, together with SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Customer Data Cloud form the entire CRM environment.
SAP Hybris Commerce was renamed to SAP Commerce Cloud since SAP shifted their technology from proprietary infrastructure to the cloud. SAP Commerce Cloud uses an open-source Kubernetes technology and runs on the Microsoft Azure Hyperscale platform.
Features of SAP Commerce Cloud
- Omni-channel Storefront – gives your customers a consistent view of your contents or end-products across all their devices – PC, smartphones, or tablets. Today, customers interact with a brand both online and offline before considering to purchase an item.
- Personalization – You can improve the average order value and augment gains by providing tailored content, based on the shopper’s behavior and buying history. SAP Commerce Cloud allows you to segment customers and provides relevant product recommendations based on preferences.
- Order Management – Managing global market channels lead to complexities, data fragmentation, and high costs, making order management a challenge for companies. SAP Commerce Cloud solutions can support any B2B, B2C, or B2B2C go-to-market strategy through a single commerce platform and simplify the process. You can have a single view of inventory, shipping, and returns throughout the organization thus streamlining order management. Customers can have complete flexibility without cluttering stock levels.
- Real-time Customer Support – The Assisted Service mode in Cloud Commerce helps you offer real-time sales support from your business website directly. If the customer gets stuck during an online purchase or needs help at a retail store, the Assisted Service mode immediately connects them to customer support to help them complete their purchase or answer questions. The customer service representatives get a complete view of the profile of the customer complete with their purchase history, preferences, and so on.
- Accelerators – The SAP Commerce Cloud provides industry accelerators that can address the unique requirements of your industry. SAP Commerce Cloud offers cross-industry accelerators for B2C and B2B sectors, accelerators that are specific to the Chinese market, and several specific accelerators for Telco and media, financial services, travel, and citizen engagement.
Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries
Integrations offered by SAP Commerce Cloud
In order to ensure the best customer experience, your commerce solution needs to be integrated with the other solutions in your ecosystem. While this can be complex and time-consuming, the prebuilt integrations offered by SAP Commerce Cloud help simplify and unlock efficiencies of this process. SAP Cloud Platform Integration service eases integration by using publicly available APIs and by using industry-standard protocols for managing data transfer.
Related Reading: SAP Focused Industry Templates & Automation Solutions
SAP Commerce Cloud offers pre-built integrations with SAP S/4 HANA, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, and SAP Sales Cloud portfolios, services from third-party providers, and various other solutions. These pre-built integrations permit end-to-end process management with the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Cloud Platform integrates the master data with business processes to create a single source of truth. It thus prevents the complexities arising due to siloed data. What’s more, the intuitive user interface gives control to your system administrators to manage data with transparency.
Related Reading: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-To-End Solution
Benefits of SAP Commerce Cloud
- Rapid onboarding by providing quick access to development, staging, and production environments
- Many self-service features that give you the power to control the working of your commerce solutions in the cloud.
- With the cloud-native capabilities, you also gain access to the latest releases and upgrade packages, code checks, and quality gates.
- The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory allows extension and integration of microservices without affecting the core application
- You can augment your market reach and organize data through marketplaces, search, social, and marketing channels.
- The platform is highly scalable and can easily handle your traffic peaks. In other words, it grows with your business.
- You get automatic weekly full database backups and hourly incremental backups.
The SAP Commerce Cloud is a hyper scalable, flexible, and high-speed omnichannel commerce solution that is delivered through a SaaS model. You can exploit the efficiency and speed of the cloud by using SAP’s shared cloud infrastructure. You end up having nominal IT costs, you don’t have to maintain servers, and to top it all you have the world-class data security that SAP provides. So why not make the move (if not already done)? Fingent can help streamline last-mile delivery and improve a number of business processes. Our team of specialists can help you successfully deploy SAP Commerce Cloud and become a truly global digital business. Contact us today.
Employee Experience Management with SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics
The spread of COVID-19 has advanced the need for a single workforce management system (Human Capital Management system) that assists people in managing their jobs, rewards, development, payments, and many such areas. It’s during such a crisis that we realize the need for our HCM system to be well-connected and tightly integrated with other enterprise systems such as IT, security, and financials. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Human Capital Management solutions join hands with Employee Experience Management solutions from Qualtrics. All these solutions come packed in the SAP SuccessFactors sales bag.
Related Reading: How Can SAP Help Manage Your Payroll Under The COVID-19 Crisis
How SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics transform workforce management
SAP SuccessFactors has transformed from an HCM vendor to an HXM (Human Experience Management) vendor with Qualtrics. Businesses have come to terms with the fact that human experiences matter and the organizations that focus on delivering the best employee experiences realize the most stunning results. While you get your operational data or O-data from HCM systems, Qualtrics brings in the experience data or the X-data that measures an individual’s emotions, notions and goals in specific scenarios. Thus, by analyzing your employee’s perspective both inside and outside work, you build a better relationship with them.
By combining the X and O data you can connect operational HR data with employee experience data. With these, you are armed with information based on facts as well as perception. Whether it’s for routine work events like performance reviews, role change, or for unexpected events like the outbreak of a pandemic, companies can continuously monitor and act upon the data collected. This, in turn, helps you to predict challenges, correct errors, and deliver meaningful results. Thus SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics allow you to win in today’s experience economy.
Three employee experience management solutions from SAP Qualtrics
SAP Qualtrics has introduced three employee experience management solutions that help HR leaders to gather insights by leveraging the data that is collected throughout the employee lifecycle based on feedback.
1. SAP Qualtrics Employee Engagement
This solution focuses on the factors that drive employee engagement and productivity enabling HR leaders to leverage real-time insights to attract, nourish, and retain the best talent. This solution records information through employee feedback which helps managers to use employee experiences to identify key focus areas and take necessary actions. The Qualtrics Employee Engagement solution uses powerful Text iQ analytics to scrutinize open text responses. It helps you to easily make out trends, scan topics, and track employee attitude. Managers can use the configurable and role-based dashboards to track the effects of any upgrades and drive results.
2. SAP Qualtrics Employee Lifecycle
This solution continuously gathers data from employees across their entire journey with the organization and manages their experiences to gain insights that drive improvements. These real-time insights help spot gaps and close them w.r.t expectations and reality. Expert onboarding and exit content, data related to workflow and automation– all these can be directly embedded in the existing HCM system. Using this solution, organizations can understand the key drivers causing attrition and take appropriate actions to retain the best talent.
3. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer
As global markets continue to tighten, organizations have to compete to attract and retain the best talent. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer takes the guesswork out of the process of determining what employees want in terms of benefits offered. You can easily recognize the most suitable benefits and compensation packages that are in tune with the unique culture and budget of your organization by leveraging the choice-based conjoint methodology that is a characteristic of this top-notch solution. You also become aware of the trade-offs that your employees are willing to make through ongoing surveys and analysis. HR managers, thus arrive at the most optimal packages even with changing preferences of employees and shifting market dynamics.
With SAP transforming HCM into HXM, HR systems are shifting towards micro-experiences. HXM systems let you manage all HR, IT, scheduling, and all work-related activities making it an integrated employee platform. With HR leaders struggling to find effective ways to move forward in the wake of the COVID outbreak, SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics enables you to manage your total workforce holistically.
Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning
We’ve been supporting managers and leaders to expertly run, use, and maintain various SAP solutions. Get in touch with us to understand how you can leverage SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics Employee Engagement to improve your workforce engagement and experience.
Transforming Healthcare with Predictive Analytics powered by SAP HANA
Predictive analysis has been helping businesses like Uber, Amazon, and Netflix to best serve their customers. They use it to predict what shows viewers would like to watch or what items they’d like to buy. It’s altogether a different story when it comes to healthcare.
The stakes are higher when you recommend care based on predictive analysis. That’s why many healthcare organizations prefer prescriptive analytics over predictive analytics even now. However, the rewards are potentially much greater if organizations buy into this risk balance and ensure that predictive analytics is incorporated in an appropriate way to deal with the complex operations of a healthcare organization.
The Healthcare Data Challenge
Healthcare data doubles every three years and the $7 trillion industry is unable to keep up with the staggering rate at which information is produced. The ever-increasing medical data generated/ collected in real-time from numerous medical records, clinical trials, research, personal fitness bands, wearables, implanted devices, sensors, and health apps will be equivalent to 300 million books. That means the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime (source: IBM Research).
Related Reading: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry
So, we require smart tools to use these massive data efficiently and derive clinically actionable results from them. While treating patients, we need to gain insights faster to provide specifically tailored treatments that are based on biological, genetic, and physical information.
SAP HANA Helps Unlock Massive Health Data
SAP HANA is the platform that integrates disparate and fragmented biological, clinical, and lifestyle datasets, helping users to analyze them and gain insights from them. SAP HANA enables users to conduct predictive analysis to examine and identify patterns across healthy as well as patient populations.
Predictive analytics powered by SAP HANA combines the depth and speed of in-memory analytics with the potential of native predictive algorithms to process huge amounts of healthcare data on a real-time basis. In industries such as healthcare, most of the data is unstructured. Whether you use Enterprise systems, data warehouses, data marts, spreadsheets or Hadoop environments, Predictive Analytics solutions from SAP HANA combines both structured and unstructured datasets from any source.
Leveraging SAP predictive analysis for visualization, R’s extensive library of statistical and data mining techniques, and SAP HANA predictive analytic library, data scientists get everything they need to predict the future in real-time. For instance, you’ll be able to predict the “patient footfall” in a hospital in a given period of time. Once you have the expected number of patients walking in, you can easily make arrangements to meet their needs like adjusting the bed capacity, maintaining stocks of critical protective devices, medicines, and so on. These proactive decisions can be extremely helpful in the current COVID-19 crisis situation.
Related Reading: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Know The Difference
Implementing SAP HANA Solutions in Healthcare
Does this sound too futuristic and hard to deploy?
Well, you’ll be pleased to know that using SAP HANA for Predictive Analytics is also easy. You just have to use a drag and drop visual interface for data selection, preparation, and processing. You can create models by using native predictive algorithms as well as algorithms from R. So it’s not only for the experts. With SAP BusinessObjects and business intelligence integration, you can unlock predictive insights. Moreover, the stunning and advanced visualizations help to reveal valuable, hidden insights. The Mitsui Knowledge Industry has successfully used SAP Predictive Analytics to provide a one-stop-shop for genomic data analysis of cancer patients and support personalized therapeutics.
Today, global healthcare industry experts are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized and preventive medicine is taking the center stage so that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time. This, in turn, paves the way towards improved clinical outcomes and cost savings. Genomic research is gaining importance as it not only helps predict the signs of diseases even before they occur but also helps learn their physiologies. This can enable healthcare providers to determine the treatment plan on an individual basis thus greatly improving the efficiency and standard of healthcare.
However, the challenge is to store the growing data. Only the genetic sequencing data would amount to approximately 5PB for 6 billion humans on the planet! Analyzing and interpreting this data is another challenge. Using SAP HANA researchers can analyze this data almost instantaneously. What once took 48 hours to analyze now takes only a few minutes with SAP HANA. This ultimately means a faster and precise diagnosis, better care, and fewer visits to the hospital.
With SAP HANA, medical researchers and clinicians can integrate genomic data with clinical data to find associations with genetic markers and certain types of diseases. Once a doctor accesses this data in real-time, he can provide personalized treatment that is specific to certain genetic markers of the patient.
Uncover hidden trends, take proactive actions, conduct new research on pharmaceuticals, and plan for future needs with Predictive Analytics from SAP. Fingent’s SAP experts help you take advantage of your SAP investments. Talk to us to know more.
Understanding the Significance of SAP Support and AMS
Any SAP user can vouch for the fact that the SAP plays a significant role in their company. Since business operations depend upon the reliability of the SAP system, any flaw can develop into a major problem hampering business operations. The effectiveness of your SAP support functions will determine how quickly your organization can restore operations. Choosing the right SAP Support model is, therefore, critical. So let’s dive right in and understand SAP support functions.
Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it
Types of SAP Support Functions
SAP support functions can be divided into 4 types:
- Business Process Support
- SAP Functional support
- SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support
- SAP Basis or Technology Support
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Business Process Support:
The role of this team is to assist in various business processes and streamline them. Since the best role is played by the internal staff who are well versed in the workings of the company, you’ll see external consultants in this capacity.
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SAP Functional Support:
This team assists you with how to use the SAP software in the most effective way. Every now and then situations may arise where you require help. Your business may also demand frequent reconfigurations to handle new scenarios. The functional support team handles all these requests. This team needs to have an in-depth knowledge of the SAP system and a working knowledge of business processes.
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SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support:
This support team is also called as the technical team. While implementing SAP, the team that configures the system gathers business requirements and tries to meet them. Ideally, the ERP system should cater to all business needs. Of course, the business processes are re-engineered to meet best practices, but in the end, the role of SAP is to support business processes; not the other way around. While doing so, you realize that there are gaps and the ERP is unable to handle everything that your company does. This is where the ABAP and Interfaces Support team comes in. They go under the hood and modify or extend the software to meet the needs that could not be realized before. Similarly, if you want your SAP system to communicate with another ERP system or software, you’ll need help from the technical support team to write programs that enable the smooth flow of data between the two.
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SAP Basis or Technology Support:
This team maintains the health of the infrastructure. They make sure that the SAP software is up and running on various environments such as production, testing, development, and training. Additionally, for each environment, you may have multiple machines. Thus the SAP software is running on multiple machines that host the database, operating system, hardware, and network. Depending on the size of your company, you may require a larger team to manage more number of machines. Of course, if you’re going on the cloud then you won’t need all this. The PaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the software as well as the infrastructure.
Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA
How SAP Support Works
All four support teams interact with each other based on requirements. Most SAP users have a team called SAP CCOE or Customer Centre of Expertise wherein the IT and (Line of Business) LOB collaborate with each other. The IT department takes care of the infrastructure and supports the technical part (SAP ABAP and interfaces), whereas the SAP configuration and business procedures are owned by the LOB.
The SAP CCOE aims to promote transparency, efficiency, and innovation to drive continuous improvement. The CCOE program starts with the Primary Customer COE and allows customers to gradually mature into certified Advanced Customer COE(s). Advanced Customer COE(s) help by providing a clear definition of the IT service portfolio and cost models. Apart from service provision, they leverage their knowledge of business processes, objectives, and technical feasibility to implement innovative ideas using leading technologies. Advanced Customer COE(s) thus provide competitive business advantages by including both IT and business in decision-making processes.
Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company
SAP AMS (Application Management Services)
All said and done, internal SAP support teams have to face many challenges like :
- Providing and maintaining competencies for all business areas covered by the system
- Strategic talent management to meet the dynamic demands of ERP support
- Ensuring that all problems will be solved within the allotted time frame
- Ensuring efficient work-load planning
- Maintaining cost-effectiveness
- Maintaining effective contingency plans
While SAP keeps adding new and valuable features and functionalities to their software at regular intervals, even in the current gloomy market, SMBs are forced to upgrade in order to maintain vendor support. All these challenges have led many organizations to look for third party support or SAP AMS providers for support.
You can considerably reduce the support and maintenance costs of your SAP software by opting for Shared Team Delivery Model offered by Fingent. With shared services, you have a larger pool of resources to support multiple customers. Collaborating with various team members in a shared team enables the team members to learn about industry best practices thus enhancing skillsets. Customers can enjoy the benefits of improved scalability and flexibility.
With support from an AMS provider, you get continuity of support in accordance with the SLA. However, you have to take care to avoid setting simple SLAs for support. You need to focus on getting more value from the SAP AMS provider.
Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries
Choosing an AMS provider that fits seamlessly as an extension to your existing staff can help your organization to deliver desired business outcomes. Of course, every company may have unique processes that call for unique SAP support. With Fingent, you get solutions that are tailored to your needs. Our service delivery structure is designed to manage costs and improve service levels. Thus you are freed from vendor lock-in, empowering you to focus on improving agility and innovation. Contact us to learn more.
How SAP Solutions Help with Business Continuity Challenges
Every organization needs a business continuity plan to carry out its critical business as usual, especially when the area where it operates is affected by a crisis like COVID-19. That’s where enterprise resource and business planning suites like SAP comes to your rescue. SAP solutions are designed to help you meet your business continuity goals and ensure that your establishment survives and recovers from a disaster efficiently.
“SAP Help Portal describes business continuity as the efforts to ensure that critical business functions will be continuously available for clients, customers, suppliers, and other entities.”
Business continuity planning, however, is not free of challenges. Varying business requirements can shoot up your investment costs. Consider scenarios such as the installation and maintenance of hardware, software, and data center infrastructure. A simple and cost-effective way to address these requirements will be to use efficient cloud computing solutions instead of massive physical servers. This is where SAP solutions can come handy. SAP Cloud Platform, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Analytics, SAP Leonardo, SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things, etc. are only a few of the key services offered by SAP.
How SAP Solutions Help with Business Continuity Challenges
SAP is an efficient technological framework that can be easily incorporated into your existing business structure to maximize the productivity of your business functions. This helps boost the overall growth of your establishment.
SAP offers impressive ways to manage your clients, customers, and business interactions. With the right SAP solutions, you can fast-track and automate your routine processes and dedicate your skilled workforce to attend the core functions. Minimal workforce retention and lower equipment maintenance costs are two of the key benefits of deploying SAP into your business.
Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it
You will gain a high degree of flexibility by integrating SAP in your business structure. This way, you can adjust to the existing as well as imminent changes in the industry smoothly. That helps your establishment to adapt and evolve as per the varying market trends. By storing massive amounts of data on the cloud, you can also significantly reduce the operational and management costs of your business.
Business continuity plans can be very complicated to employ and execute. Traditional ways of managing the recovery infrastructure and testing the solutions can be very challenging and time-consuming. With reliable SAP solutions, all that can be managed flawlessly.
Below are some examples of how SAP solutions can help to solve different business continuity challenges.
Identifying Alternative Sources of Supply
Maintaining the supply chain is one of the most critical aspects to ensure efficient business continuity. Using SAP Ariba allows you to create smart connections with your suppliers so that you can communicate and collaborate with them adequately. The spend management solutions of SAP Ariba also ensure that your business is responsive and responsible, no matter what the crisis is.
SAP Ariba solutions help simplify the procurement and supply chain processes. It enables you to find new sources of supply for better management of your resources in the event of a disaster. At the same time, you can find profitable customers too, and scale your client relationships for superior sales cycles and cash control.
Financial Modeling and Managing Cash Flow
Financial modeling is key to make certain that your business continuity plans are authoritative and adequate. With the help of SAP S/4HANA Finance solution, you can easily manage your financial planning and accounting jobs. The ERP system also allows you to use real-time operational data and end-to-end planning for avoiding redundancy and time lags.
SAP S/4HANA Finance solution also supports accounts payable and receivable, so that you can keep an eye on the cash flow as well as create ad hoc simulations to see new business models or organizational changes. The treasury and financial risk management solutions of the ERP system allow you to integrate cash flow analysis and business planning, including the liquidity planning lifecycle. This is highly beneficial for effective accounts management.
Related Reading: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-to-End Solution
Employee Training and Certifications
Staff involvement is another vital element of a successful business continuity plan. However, holding a meeting to train and educate your staff members on the essentials of the business continuity and disaster management plans may not be possible always. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS) emerges as a productive alternative. The online learning solution can simplify the process and adequately instruct your employees about the business continuity plan.
SAP SuccessFactors LMS can make sure that everyone is on the same page through proper training and emphasis on critical business functions. You can create easy-to-understand content for your employees and incorporate personalized and innovative elements to help them get a clear idea of the business continuity plan. You can also manage certifications and documents easily using the LMS software.
Download Our Case Study: Check out how Fingent automated integration between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA.
With a robust business continuity plan laid out using the right SAP solutions, you can have all the critical business data secured and accessible. This helps you recover from the disaster quickly and manage important business functions without affecting your customers or business reputation.
Fingent helps enterprises to frame robust business continuity plans leveraging SAP, S/4, and intelligent enterprise platforms. Our team includes members who are part of SAP’s core engineering team, who can provide consulting, advisory, implementation, integration, support, and monitoring services to ensure business continuity. Get in touch with us to learn more about our services.
Today’s organizations require flexible ERP solutions for capturing new growth opportunities and embracing new business processes and models that allow them to reap the benefits of digital transformation. Faster adoption of intelligent technologies has become the new norm as organizations have increasingly started to look at their business from an integrated “end-to-end” perspective.
The end-to-end implementation helps ensure efficiency in terms of cost, performance, compliance, and insights through which process owners can improve the quality of service and speed up the execution time. Companies can become more agile, make faster acquisitions, meet high-level business objectives, and streamline processes by implementing the end-to-end process. It enables businesses to visualize duplicate efforts and eliminate them quickly.
Related Reading: Unlock the Potential of Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo
This article discusses how SAP S/4HANA can transform your end-to-end business process for enhanced efficiency.
What is an end-to-end business process?
An end-to-end business process is a process that is capable of addressing all your business requirements and processes in one centralized hub. It is a complete process cycle including all its various phases like project kick-off meeting, gap analysis, blueprint, realization, finalization, go-live, and after support.
In simple terms, the end-to-end business process starts with a customer’s request and ends with the successful fulfillment of that request. For businesses such as trading or manufacturing, end-to-end software has tools that can manage eCommerce, process orders, control stock, and manage warehouse and accounts.
It provides businesses with all the necessary components while managing the installation, integration, and maintenance of the process. The end-to-end process ensures that a business enterprise gets everything they need to function effectively. It can help minimize software costs as well as operational costs.
How S/4HANA transforms the end-to-end business process?
Since its launch in February 2017, SAP S/4HANA has been used extensively to provide “next-generation intelligent ERP”, enabling businesses to achieve digital transformation. With its three pillars, digital assistant, machine learning, and predictive analytics, S/4 is all set to transform the end-to-end business process.
Here are some ways how S/4 can transform end-to-end business processes:
1. Automation with intelligence
The ever-changing business infrastructure requires integrated, mission-critical, end-to-end processes. The intelligent ERP in the S/4 cloud caters to that very need. By further automating the process, it allows businesses to become more intelligent and agile. S/4 end-to-end processes are designed to work without interruption, thus improving agility. Since the cloud uses real-time embedded analytics, the processes function intelligently and automatically with nominal user input.
2. A game-changer
As the next-generation business suite, S/4 is designed to redefine how enterprise software creates value across industries with real-time insight. It also personalizes the user experience regardless of the device in use and eliminates batch processing by running end-to-end business processes at unprecedented speeds. The icing on the cake is that it can connect to IoT, Big Data, business, and social networks in real-time to create endless possibilities.
3. S/4 enables digitization
SAP S/4HANA is a business suite designed to help enterprises run uncomplicated end-to-end processes in today’s digital and networked world. Since S/4 can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise, it can drive instant value across lines of business with ultimate simplicity. It provides a guided configuration with the goals and value-realization plans for digitization activities that are part of the end-to-end implementation.
Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company
4. One system
With S/4 in place, employees do not have to spend time learning multiple systems. This ensures that the end-to-end process can be up and running as soon as possible. It minimizes disruption and results in a faster return.
5. Competitive edge
The source-to-pay solution is a decisive end-to-end process, which can improve the performance of an organization. This strategy covers the entire process starting from spend management through to accounts payable. By integrating SAP S/4HANA into source-to-pay, businesses can make better-informed decisions that translate into positive business impact and greater efficiency and productivity. Thus, streamlined source-to-pay processes give a competitive edge to businesses by helping them make intelligent procurement decisions.
Transform your business with S/4 for enhanced efficiency
Managing the end-to-end process can be challenging, but SAP S/4HANA can help businesses to stay ahead of the game by helping their customers to gain the most value through such interconnected processes.
By implementing S/4, businesses can experience greater automation to drive accuracy, efficiency, and better streamlined end-to-end processes. It can not only reduce time spent and risk of human errors but can also enhance data security. SAP S/4HANA can integrate strategy, process, procedures and policies, people, and technology into one cohesive effort ensuring that the organization is process-driven.
As discussed earlier, SAP S/4HANA is key to integrating end-to-end solutions into your business. To find tips on how you can seamlessly transition to SAP S/4HANA, click here.
If you are ready to get your business on to this revolutionary business suite, get in touch with us.
Focused Industry Templates and Automation In SAP
Focused industry templates and automation in SAP can radically cut the time and effort required to transform the systems of various industries. Modern solutions that integrate business functions, data management and financial management can facilitate various industries. Recognizing this massive potential, both big and small industries are adopting industry-specific solutions. This article discusses in detail how industry-specific templates can benefit verticals such as healthcare, retail, logistics, utilities, and media.
Understanding Templates for Industry Specific Verticals
A standardized, industry-specific vertical approach is a fast and cost-effective way to implement an ERP solution.
Related Reading: Unlock the Potential of Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo
When Do We Need Templates?
You need templates when your work is repetitive, such as filling in a monthly report. This speeds up mundane tasks and ensures accuracy and uniformity across all the reports. A business that performs the same functions across different locations would benefit from an industry-specific template.
How Does It Work?
Building an industry-specific template would require a typical implementation approach: gather, analyze and document the requirement. This is done in phases such as planning and blueprinting. Then it is tested and confirmed by the business before it is deployed across the organization.
If different parts of the organization work differently, there is no need to create a new template from scratch. SAP industry-specific templates allow you to create a version of the existing template to handle the task.
Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company
What Are the Benefits of Industry Focused Templates and Automation?
- Allows businesses to achieve quick return on their investments.
- Minimizes ERP implementation expenses.
- Minimizes or avoids risks such as budget overruns.
- Allow you to control projects more accurately and easily.
- Give you the ability to repeat and refine processes.
- Enables you to apply the best practices to the next project.
Five Specific Industries That Facilitate Focused Industry Solutions
Many industries are looking for expert IT partners with a focused approach in providing industry-specific technology solutions. Here are examples of five specific industries:
1. Healthcare
Throughout a patients’ journey in the healthcare lifecycle, the healthcare industry can leverage focused industry solutions to proactively approach the patient and provide individual, personalized content increasing patient satisfaction and building patient loyalty. With SAP industry templates, healthcare can increase efficiency with insight into costs and outcomes, improve customer experience and improve risk and compliance management.
SAP solutions increase workforce engagement, agility, and overall results. By means of invoice-to-pay, invoice-to-cash, and other features, the healthcare industry can enable their departments to collaborate efficiently.
2. Retail
Today, it is critical for businesses to treat customers as they want to be treated. This is possible only by customizing their experience and selling to them in a personalized way. SAP solutions are suitable for both small and large enterprises. It can be mapped for all company techniques and scenarios, and business features. Since they are exceedingly customizable, SAP solutions are best utilized for business strategies involving seasonal goods. Aggregates and indexes can be replaced by central tables ensuring that steps are transparent from order-to-delivery.
3. Logistics
Certified SAP focused industry templates and automation simplifies the process to avoid the need for designing a full business process from scratch. This can double the performance speed by accelerating user productivity and reducing frustration. It can also eliminate the use of printed paper, reducing your carbon footprint and costs. Automation in the logistics industry leads to faster decisions and instant actions.
4. Utilities
Utility firms undergo substantial changes across the world. This increases competition, thereby putting immense pressure on utility companies to provide a high degree of customer satisfaction. SAP solution templates and automation helps them by providing operational efficiency, steering utilities to their desired destination and beyond with minimum expense. It can also reduce implementation effort and time, thus realizing a higher ROI for the industry.
5. Media
Media industries such as newspapers, television, and internet-based social media applications face the challenge of delivering information at the right time to attract their target audience. Implementation of SAP solutions will ensure that all service processes are handled efficiently. It can help in better planning of which information should be broadcast at what time. SAP-based solutions enable the media industry to make instant changes and take quick action according to an on-going scenario. Such agility can provide better commercial outcomes for the industry.
Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries
It’s the Right Move!
Agility, quick ROI, streamlined processes – what are you waiting for? Businesses are moving on to Focused Industry Templates and Automation as we speak. Fingent has helped many of these businesses with a host of SAP services that help to improve operational efficiency. Give us a call and let’s get talking.
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.
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.
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.