Category: Last Mile

The instant access to data and information provided by the likes of Google, iStore and Spotify has made people increasingly impatient with some of the legacy systems we use in our business lives – me included. There is nothing worse than waiting for a report to compile or a screen to refresh and it’s particularly annoying when you’re trying to do other things – and there’s time constraints. So bear a thought for folk in the finance team reconciling various ledgers for the period end close:

Accelerating companies 'financial close processes through innovation' is our main goal for Enterprise Performance Management. Over the past few months we have been interacting with SAP® BusinessObjectsTM Financial Consolidation customers and came to the decision that automating the goodwill calculation should be considered as a high innovation priority in 2011. Available now, customers can benefit from a brand new release of the IFRS Starter Kit including an Automated Calculation of Goodwill feature. This blog introduces a working document, which explains why and how Financial Consolidation Starter Kit for IFRS has been enhanced to offer this automatic calculation of goodwill.

I guess this is an instance how seemingly small investments can deliver a big impact. With over 750 subsidiaries, The Dow Chemical Company faced the all-too-familiar challenge of reducing their financial close. This was no easy task for its finance team, which runs over 1,000 financial close jobs a month. To streamline and automate the process, they deployed tow SAP tools that often fall below the radar, but which can deliver impressive results for a small amount of effort – the SAP Financial Closing cockpit and the SAP Central Process Scheduling application by Redwood. Now Dow’s financial close process runs with greater efficiency and transparency at far lower cost.

Managing asset retirement obligations is challenging for companies in asset-intensive industries. Learn how the SAP® Asset Retirement Obligation Management application can automate many of the calculations required to meet these requirements -- all while complying with relevant accounting principles.

In this paper published in iBR in August, Sonia Simon of SAP explains why if you want to gain any benefits from XBRL tagging beyond mere compliance, the solution has to be in-house

95 of fortune 100 companies in North America are looking at moving to built-in approach as they have realized challenges of bolt-on to solve the XBRL needs. Had the privilege of speaking alongside thought leader and LastMile topic guru Mike Willis, trying to highlight few aspects of this in this post