SAP Solution Overview SAP Business Suite SAP ERP FINANCIALS ENABLING FINANCIAL EXCELLENCE
ESSENTIAL ENTERPRISE BUSINESS STRATEGY PROVIDING A SOLID FOUNDATION FOR ENTERPRISE FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT 2
Even before Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, SAP ERP Financials gave us the support we needed to ensure our financials were well controlled, documented, and reconciled. John Barron, Chief Financial Officer, Cole Haan The SAP ERP Financials solution, which is part of SAP Business Suite software, delivers a complete, integrated financial management solution to ensure compliant, predictable business performance. An essential building block of your enterprise business strategy, SAP ERP Financials provides a solid foundation to expand your business, realize greater efficiencies across key financial processes, and help ensure compliant and accurate accounting and financial reporting. 3
SAP ERP AND SAP BUSINESS SUITE BROADENING YOUR VISION TO SIMPLIFY AND INNOVATE Through its core applications, SAP Business Suite supports all essential business processes, including customer relationship management, financial management, human capital management, asset management, product life-cycle management, supplier relationship management, and supply chain management. SAP Business Suite applications are built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help companies adapt to accelerating change. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, they give companies the oppor tunity to integrate their value chains, leveraging SAP and non-sap solutions. During this time of economic uncertainty, a company s decision makers need to know that the information they receive is both current and accurate. To achieve this, your business must establish a single version of the truth for all its employees. SAP ERP Financials can help, offering robust financial and managerial accounting and reporting functionality to support confident decision making. SAP Business Suite software enables enterprises to execute and optimize their business and IT strategies. Its modular software is designed to work with other SAP and non-sap software to provide broad support for an organization s essential business processes. Organizations and departments in all sectors can deploy the software in a stepwise manner to address specific business challenges on their own timelines and without costly upgrades. SAP Business Suite provides better insight and visibility across organizations, improves operational efficiency and effectiveness, and increases the flexibility to address business change. SAP ERP Financials: A Foundation for Expanding Your Business During this time of economic uncertainty, a company s decision makers need to know that the information they receive is both current and accurate. To achieve this, your business must establish a single version of the truth for all its employees. The SAP ERP Financials solution can help. Besides letting you streamline financial processes, optimize working capital, mitigate financial risks, and comply with global financial reporting standards, the software offers robust financial and managerial accounting and reporting functionality to support confident decision making. Over 20,000 global companies rely on SAP to provide the foundation for their financial management requirements. 4
YOUR BUSINESS AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY HARNESSING FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE THAT KEEPS PACE Business decision makers today have a greater need for relevant, accurate information than ever before. They require integrated reporting tools that give them the power to quickly identify the factors impacting the business. Together with the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, SAP ERP Financials offers powerful functionality that meets your most demanding accounting and financial reporting requirements. Not very long ago, the scope of a finance organization s responsibility was limited to managing financial transactions and generating periodic financial statements and management reports. Today business is more complex. We live in a global economy with financial professionals expected to meet a far wider range of challenges than ever before. As a financial professional, you must produce accurate, timely financial reports that satisfy global accounting and regulatory compliance standards that vary by industry and by country. Your financial management software must support internal controls and compliance standards to help ensure transparency of your company s accounting practices. On top of that, you need its support in streamlining critical financial processes, such as the financial close cycle, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and cash and financial risk management. Business decision makers today have a greater need for relevant, accurate information than ever before. Inaccurate or out-of-date reports can lead to bad decisions. Executives, managers, and frontline employees require integrated reporting tools that give them the power to quickly identify the factors impacting the business and help them make decisions that improve performance. Together with the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, SAP ERP Financials offers powerful functionality that meets your most demanding accounting and financial reporting requirements. In addition, finance professionals need to manage the cash conversion cycle and overall working capital more efficiently. Through automation and greater insight into the accounts receivable and accounts payable functions, businesses can improve cash flow, reduce days sales outstanding, optimize working capital, and mitigate financial risks. In short, finance professionals must manage increasing complexity. SAP provides the comprehensive financial management software you need to help your finance organization harness this complexity while gaining key insight that leads to better business performance. 5
FOCUSED FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT GAINING INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC SUPPORT FOR CORE ACCOUNTING From the knowledge gained from thousands of successful customer implementations, SAP has enhanced SAP ERP Financials with functionality supporting best-practices for the financial management requirements of companies in more than 25 industries. This delivers to you best-in-class support for your industry-specific core accounting and financial reporting processes. But the software s reach is much broader. It gives you the ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries on a single platform that brings unprecedented efficiency to your financial processes through end-to-end process integrity. With SAP ERP, we have realized the complete automation of our accounting process. Now we can perform monthly closing within one to two hours, instead of the one to two days of manual work required before we implemented the solution. In conjunction with SAP partner solutions, SAP ERP Financials can support enhanced processes such as cash management, financial risk management, invoice management, and the financial close and reporting cycle. Because they integrate with your core accounting applications in the SAP ERP application, SAP partner solutions can help support reporting and compliance requirements. SAP ERP provides a complete analytical platform to consolidate business data, giving you comprehensive and timely insight into critical business processes. And because SAP ERP is a single, integrated solution, finance professionals have access to completely reconciled data across your key financial business processes. Zhenhai Wang, CIO, Phenix Optics Co. Ltd.
A SOLUTION THAT RESPONDS TO CHANGE SUPPORTING FINANCIAL BUSINESS PROCESSES Financial professionals, executives, and managers need tools that adapt to the way they work and to the needs of their business. They want intuitively designed solutions that require minimal training and respond flexibly to the change inevitable in the business world today. And they require software that supports complex business processes in order to gain greater efficiency and effectiveness. Whether you are a regional business or a multinational corporation, the SAP ERP Financials solution gives you that and more. Because it is based on SOA, SAP ERP Financials allows you to deploy business solutions more quickly to flexibly manage your company s vital financial processes. Financial and Management Accounting The SAP ERP Financials solution is designed to support the most complex financial requirements of global companies. It helps ensure accurate financial accounting and reporting in accordance with global financial reporting standards such as generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). It helps streamline financial transaction processing. The SAP General Ledger application forms the foundation of accounting transaction processing and reporting, while SAP ERP Financials provides support for accounts receivable, accounts payable, fixed assets, inventory, and cash accounting. These subledgers are completely integrated with SAP General Ledger, so your financial data is always reconciled and your reports are completely accurate. This helps Financial professionals, executives, and managers need tools that adapt to the way they work and to the needs of their business. They want intuitively designed solutions that require minimal training and respond flexibly to the change inevitable in the business world today. avoid having to restate financial results and reduces the cost and effort of the financial close and reporting cycle. To support managerial reporting requirements, SAP General Ledger lets you allocate costs to the necessary business segments through document splitting. As a result, balanced and reconcilable financial statements can be generated by any dimension of the business unit, profit center, or geographical location. SAP ERP Financials helps reduce the complexity and cost of parallel accounting and managing multiple sets of books by region, industry, or financial reporting standard. It all rolls up to a single lead ledger, with managerial and financial accounting reconciled within a single application. Financial Supply Chain Management Cash is the lifeblood of every company, and to ensure a healthy cash flow from its commercial operations, a company must apply rigorous control over 7
customer trade credit evaluations and accounts receivable. The SAP Financial Supply Chain Management (SAP FSCM) set of applications can help your company more effectively manage the credit-to-cash cycle, reduce days sales outstanding, and minimize bad debt expense. Through robust information sharing, collaboration, and workflow, SAP FSCM helps you optimize working capital processes through automated credit management, electronic bill presentment and payment, collections management, and billing dispute management. Treasury Solutions Treasury professionals face challenges to optimize liquidity and protect company revenue streams and asset values by managing cash and financial risk more effectively. With treasury applications from SAP, you can manage the complete spectrum of cash, liquidity, and financial risk though greater transparency, control, and more effective decision making. Advanced analytics help finance professionals accurately assess interest rate, foreign exchange, and commodity price risk and employ hedging strategies to mitigate them. In addition, SAP treasury applications are completely integrated with SAP General Ledger to help ensure transactions and positions are accurately recorded and properly reported in accordance with global financial reporting standards. Financial professionals, executives, and managers need tools that adapt to the way they work and to the needs of their business. They want intuitively designed solutions that require minimal training and respond flexibly to the change inevitable in the business world today. Improve Performance Management Combine the power of SAP BusinessObjects solutions with the SAP ERP Financials solution to support all your performance management requirements. Provide your executives, managers, and information workers access to timely, personalized information and key performance indicators in their own work context. Give them the tools they need to gain insight for effective decision making. Take advantage of SAP ERP Financials, a solution that can give broad analytical support drawn from a rich selection of SAP software as well as non-sap software. Extend Financial Management SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management solutions and SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance solutions extend your financial management requirements into critical areas of reporting, compliance, and operational risk management with best-in-class financials applications that include: Consolidation and reporting Planning, budgeting, and forecasting Performance management and scorecards Governance, risk, and compliance Put the power of integrated performance management and enterprisewide analytic functionality on the desk tops of your information workers to improve decision making on all levels. Serve the needs of your finance professionals your accountants, financial analysts, credit managers, and accounts receivable managers with embedded analytical applications that deliver role-specific key performance indicators and performance information. 8
YOUR KEY BUSINESS ACTIVITIES SUPPORT FOR THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CYCLE The SAP ERP Financials Solution Supports Key Business Activities Business Area Performance management Financial and management accounting Financial supply chain management Treasury management Corporate governance Activity Supported Use the SAP ERP Financials solution in combination with SAP BusinessObjects solutions to: Define overall company goals and departmental objectives and monitor performance against them during execution Generate consolidated financial and managerial reports for globally distributed businesses by aggregating financial data from SAP and third-party software Perform ad hoc queries and measure operational performance using real-time transactional data and metrics Analyze cash and liquidity requirements, forecast cash, and manage financial risks more effectively Jump-start operational planning tasks such as cost center planning, sales planning, traditional budgeting, and collaborative express planning Determine inventory value according to country-specific accounting standards Record goods movements in up to three currencies and carry inventory values in two additional currencies Generate a balanced set of books by business unit, profit center, or any other organizational reporting dimension Analyze profitability by various dimensions such as product, market, customer, service, or channel Streamline the financial close and reporting cycle Collaborate effectively to resolve billing disputes and account collections Streamline and automate customer credit decisions Automate the receivables and payment processing using Web and electronic payment standards Forecast cash and manage company liquidity Reduce the complexity of interunit cash transfers and international banking transactions Model the current and future market environment, perform thorough risk analysis before making investment decisions, and measure hedging effectiveness Achieve straight-though processing through electronic payment processes and cost-effective electronic bank integrations Use SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance solutions to: Identify internal control gaps to reduce risk of noncompliance Integrate automated control testing results into control reporting to reduce duplicate work Provide auditors and management with increased visibility and direct access to control tests, results, and remediation plans 9
A COMPLETE FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT SOLUTION REDUCING TRANSACTION PROCESSING AND ADMINISTRATIVE WORKLOADS SAP ERP Financials provides a complete, integrated financial management solution to effectively fulfill the most complex accounting, financial supply chain, treasury, and corporate governance requirements. It supports integrated financial and performance management, smart decision making, and collaboration among financial professionals, executives, and managers. As a facilitator of financial transformation, SAP ERP Financials reduces transaction processing and administrative workloads, allowing financial professionals to concentrate on value-adding activities. Here are some ways you can maximize your ROI using SAP ERP Financials. Increase your insight for better decision making and predictability by: Improving managerial accounting support and your ability to generate reports on any business dimension Leveraging performance management tools to deepen your understanding of activities across the entire value chain Improving the quality of business planning, decision making, and performance analysis Gaining access to relevant and timely information Identifying performance issues early and correcting them proactively Improve the productivity, efficiency, and responsiveness of your business by: Automating financial and managerial accounting processes and streamlining the financial close and reporting cycle Reducing operating costs of the finance function Extending the reach of financial business processes to more people within and beyond the enterprise including customers, suppliers, and partners Decreasing collections and billing dispute processing costs through improved collaboration and workflow an improvement that can account for 60% of total finance department costs Optimize your company s cash flow by: Improving credit and collections processes Making receivables management more efficient Utilizing powerful analytics to model future cash flows and financial risks, more accurately forecast liquidity, and reduce banking costs by pooling global cash positions Leveraging enhanced electronic connectivity to manage your organization s banking relationships and payment processes Using streamlined information exchange to benefit from up-to-theminute visibility of cash positions and accelerated cash reporting Improve financial compliance and corporate governance by: Giving managers better visibility of company performance to help them improve profitability and manage risk better Supporting global financial reporting standards such as IFRS and GAAP Providing a mechanism for internal process controls for financial reporting that includes support for documentation, testing, workflow, and quality sign-off The Right Application Architecture The SAP NetWeaver technology platform enables organizations of any size to implement SOA as the basis for innovative business processes resulting in better planning, improved performance management, and faster reactions to changing business requirements by supporting the following actions: Deploying analytical applications tailored to the individual user s role Integrating electronic payment and invoicing services into portals, enabling secure self-service and collaboration for customers, partners, and suppliers Modifying general ledgers without impacting financial consolidation or reporting processes Organizing consolidation processes according to the needs of individual business units Coordinating budgeting and planning processes intuitively, eliminating the need for end-user training and simplifying individual spreadsheet consolidation Enabling process owners and managers to document, test, and report on the effectiveness of the organization s internal controls Managing relationships with banks to track payment life cycle and reduce the number of exceptions Helping credit managers control credit risk by monitoring overall credit limits without impacting customer relationships 10
BENEFITS AT A GLANCE IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES TO SET STRATEGY Activity Financial and management accounting Financial supply chain management Treasury management Performance management Benefit Accelerate financial closes Increase accuracy of financial reporting Maintain balanced books reflecting any business dimension Comply with international and local accounting standards Decrease costs for billing, collections, and payment activities Reduce receivables risk Increase customer, partner, and supplier satisfaction Manage financial risk Forecast liquidity Measure future cash flows Maximize investment returns Expand the business Monitor performance against key performance indicators and benchmarks The SAP ERP Financials solution is designed to support the most complex financial requirements of global com panies. It helps ensure accurate financial accounting and reporting in accordance with global financial reporting standards such as generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). A Proven Financial Management Solution for Organizations in Every Geography and Industry SAP ERP Financials enables you to manage your business more effectively by supporting improved decision making in financial and managerial accounting, financial supply chain management, and treasury. With over 26,000 installations worldwide, SAP ERP Financials is the proven choice for best-run businesses. Regardless of size or industry, all companies gain from this robust, integrated financial management solution. It includes a solid foundation for growth, better visibility and control over all financial management processes, support for global business requirements, and a framework for sustainable corporate governance. For additional information on how SAP ERP Financials can help your company become a best-run business, please visit www.sap.com/financials. 11
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