SAP has announced new capabilities in SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA that help enterprises accelerate and simplify their financial management processes. The SAP ERP Financials solution now provides users with a common source of information, new reporting and analytics, and an easier user experience.
Currently in ramp-up phase, SAP's early adoption program for customers, the new innovations will be generally available in a few months, according Amit Sinha, SVP, platform and applications marketing at SAP.
“Two years ago we announced the intent to put the entire SAP Business Suite on HANA and before the year had finished we actually delivered on that promise and since then a number of customers have adopted the Business Suite on HANA,” said Sinha. “One of the promises that we made to our customers is that while the innovation is disruptive, it does not need to be disruptive to them.” With HANA doing online transaction processing and analytics in one database, “this means that SAP Business Suite can become a lot simpler, faster, and smarter in terms of new business processes,” he added.
SAP is improving its real-time financial management solution with three key Innovations:
- Single source of data. For many companies, said Sinha, financials and costing have been done separately with time-consuming reconfiguration processes. “Now, because of HANA, we have one common source of information for all sorts of managerial, cost accounting and regulatory processes, eliminating the need for manual reconciliation.” As a result, he said, it is now possible to do financial close in real time or near real time because every is working off a single copy of data, whether they are in costing, finance, or any other part of the business.
- Improved user experience. In a second key innovation, said Sinha, the user experience for these processes has been elevated through SAP Fiori user experience which provides a role-based interface and modern look and feel across the most common financial tasks, while enabling access from mobile devices like iPads and smartphones. “It has taken the grunt work out of these manual processes and made the user experience much more engaging,” said Sinha.
- New reporting and analytics. And third, he said, there are new reporting and analytics capabilities for finance users with self-service access to all information allowing faster insight-to-action.
The entire SAP Business Suite – of which the Financials moduel is one part – is available via subscription on the HANA Enterprise Cloud, added Sinha. When people think of SAP Business Suite, they think of on-premises and they think large expense upfront, but the subscription approach is one of the most affordable and easiest on-ramps, he noted.