The new weapon for the CFO’s knights – An Introduction (Part 1 of 3)
In my previous blog posts, I spoke about how volatile economic cycles, the ensuing regulatory requirements and thus evolving business expectations, are leading to a shift in the epicenter of the CFOs office - towards business strategy and growth alongside financial stewardship.
Thus, the CFO’s office, as some would like to believe, now has to be enabled using new technology(s) to cater to these new priorities. But, with such fast changing regulatory requirements a CFO can’t afford to change/upgrade his existing landscape time and again. Thus, the need is for a weapon(s) (read: applications) which offers such flexibility and robustness that not only encompasses the ever-changing expectations (business and regulatory) but also empowers the CFOs knights to a low cost - sustainable - self service platform.
This weapon should be a best in class solution that can tightly integrate some of the financial processes, provide Business Insights while satisfying compliance needs. Quoting Gartner from a recent publication “CPM suites can bring greater rigor, accuracy and transparency to many management processes...….The current economic climate is driving demands from the board of directors to minimize costs and maximize profits, and organizations are increasingly deploying CPM applications to help management teams make the right strategic decisions”. Gartner’s famous magic quadrant for EPM suites lists the usual suspects including SAP in the leader’s quadrant.
The case in hand is SAP’s new product suite for Financial Performance Management. This suite offers an entire gamut of tools for Planning, budgeting & forecasting, Profitability & cost management, Financial & management consolidation and Strategy management. However, I would like to get to your notice the capabilities of their Financial & management consolidation offerings (SAP BusinessObjects Business Planning & Consolidation and SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation) especially for meeting the global and domestic regulatory requirements. The primary aim of these financial consolidation tools is to reduce the compliance costs of an organization by reducing the time to financial close (thus, freeing up resources for value add activities) through automation of financial processes (thus, reducing manual intervention and increasing transparency with accuracy).
The recent flavor in the financial accounting regulatory space is IFRS with most of the developed and developing nations mandating its adoption by (or before) 2015. While some of the financial executives are taking this as an opportunity to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their financial processes and systems for financial accounting, reporting, statutory consolidations etc., others are having sleepless nights just thinking about the most cost effective way for dual reporting and transition.
Having set the perspective, I’ll signoff for now only to come back soon to delve further into the aspects of transition to IFRS and the crucial role SAP Financial consolidation offerings can play in it. I’ll also talk about another fast emerging regulation in the financial reporting space, called XBRL, that promises to make the life of regulators (like central banks, exchanges etc.) easier – but, whats to be seen is how it would weigh on our CFOs knights?
(To be continued……)
PN: Abbreviations used - EPM and CPM stand for Enterprise/Corporate performance management; IFRS - International Financial Reporting Standards; XBRL - eXtensible Business Reporting Language
Comments
Sometimes it really becomes confusing as there seem to be so many planning engines. What is better - SAP BPC or BO Financial consoli...How the later is better than previous ? Does it make sense to use both these planning engines..
Posted by: Amit Agarwal | November 11, 2009 05:20 AM
I understand the use of BPC within an organization, however what is confusing is SAP's roadmap for it's forecasting tools (BPC vs. Demand Planning)? Do these products complement or complete against each other? If a company already has APO should they expect to use Demand Planning or is BPC still the better option?
Posted by: Ron Bertram | November 12, 2009 04:14 PM
First of all I would like to apologise for the delay in responding to your comments.
Amit - There is no comparison between the two on such grounds. SAP BO FC is a consolidation engine and is a best-of-breed offering from SAP in that regard. However, SAP BPC packs planning and consolidation functions together into 1 box thus, providing organizations a one of a kind value add - possible in none of the other competitor offerings.
Ron - these offerings complement each other. The advanced forecasting capabilities of APO cannot be replicated in BPC but the resultant data can be fed to BPC and along with other information used to build multi-dimensional reports for the process owners/management.
Posted by: Bharat Chadha | November 30, 2009 06:52 AM