Category: Financial Planning

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.

A forecasting process must also allow for the ability to refresh and update relevant data during the forecasting cycle. This alleviates users’ tendency to collect updated data on their own and enter it into the system, which often introduces errors – or, worse, forecasters ignore recent events and let dated assumptions persist. Another concern is data “dumped” in front of users replete with useless fields, codes, and descriptions – for example, those field names found only in source systems. This practice greatly decreases the signal-to-noise ratio, forcing users to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to make sense of irrelevant or poorly labeled data. This is not only a data sourcing issue, but also a master data definition problem

In-memory and column-store technologies of SAP HANA provide new capabilities for planning use-cases. This blog describes how BW-IP was used as starting point to leverage this new technology. And how the fully compatible 'planning applications kit' evolved, combining the strength of feature-rich BW-IP and highly optimized SAP HANA.

I've worked across many clients and seen a lot of changes in the SAP world over the years so I'm not the easiest person to get excited about new versions of software that are often heavy on re-branding of old functionality and light on step changes that significantly benefit to our clients.

With pressure on margins, there is renewed interest in profitability reporting and a lot of global companies investing in new initiatives. If it’s a concern for you, as a first step I would urge you to benchmark yourself on a simple on-line assessment tool that SAP has put together. It’s quick, easy - and most revealing…

We just completed another re-forecasting exercise at IDC, as uncertainty increases over the health of the global economy. This time in particular, I was pressured to lower the enterprise applications forecast for next year and adjust the 5 years forward to account for the new and lower 2012 numbers. I have remained fairly optimistic for apps though, despite the overall economic conditions. It's a question that I answer several times a week…"what's the applications market doing and why?" If you look at the numbers over the last couple of years, especially since the "bottom" year of 2009, you'll see a market that is very healthy. Even so, I find a lot of skeptics when I talk about this health continuing.

CFOs and CIOs should theoretically be united in a common goal to shift from cost control to growth. But in reality, many organisations have been poorly equipped to make the business case for IT investment in disciplines such as planning, budgeting, forecasting, performance monitoring, compliance and internal management reporting. That’s often because IT and Finance don’t have a unified view of what success should look like – or how to get there.

Without stealing too much of their thunder, I can reveal that my colleagues responsible for our planning and budgeting solutions have been doing some research to uncover exactly how companies are adapting their planning and budgeting processes to cope with the stubbornly volatile global economy.

It’s good to see that the Gartner analysts who contributed to the most recent Hype Cycle for Performance Management 2011 have ‘Cost to Serve Analysis’ on the rise, Customer Profitability Management sliding through the trough and Profitability Modelling and Optimization climbing the slope of enlightenment.  That’s right three different flavours of profitability reporting on a [...]

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