The Evolving Financial Consolidation Landscape (Part 1 of 2)
The responsibilities of the CFO’s office, has since, evolved from an operational and tactical focused towards more strategic insight driven. This new focus primarily includes, improving financial integrity within the firm’s operational layer; fulfilling regulatory requirements while keeping the compliance costs under control; increasing transparency across all financial processes to minimize operational risks whilst improving performance.
The SAP Enterprise performance management (EPM) suite is best structured to cater to this changing regulatory and business landscape. Financial Consolidation, Planning, Profitability and Cost management are now seamlessly accessible to the corporate, alongside strategic management tools, thus, ensuring efficient regulatory compliance through governance and risk control whilst improving business value of management decision making.
Financial consolidation offerings have probably evolved the most due to the direct regulatory and managerial implications. Shareholder expectations have also further amplified the criticality of a financial consolidation system. It is now not merely a tool to consolidate financial numbers but is also expected to expedite the financial closure process while improving data quality and governance, ensuring leaner financial processes and lower compliance costs.
Financial consolidation has, thus, risen beyond, from an accounting feature of the ERP suite, to being an integral part of the performance management landscape. SAP has introduced two consolidation and reporting tools under its EPM umbrella. SAP BusinessObjects Business planning and consolidation (BPC) packs planning and consolidation inside a single box while delivering a Microsoft Office enabled user-friendly consolidation engine. SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation on the other hand is a highly robust and advanced consolidation engine packing in a plethora of features including XBRL. Both of these offerings can be integrated either with the existing BI or ERP backbone to cater to various business requirements and also bridging in the short term gap created by the ever-changing regulatory environment.
(To Be Continued.......)
Comments
Thanks Bharat, this gives a good view of the financial consolidation landscape and its evolution. Speaking of products, it will also be interesting to understand how BPC may be better than Financial Consolidation considering it is also a Business Planning tool and should provide for seamless integration between the Planning and Consolidation areas. Cheers.
Posted by: Rakhi Makad | October 12, 2009 07:39 AM