Corporate finance professionals face many challenges. They need to reduce the amount of time spent on inefficient month-end/year-end closing processes, improve their ability to extract timely and accurate financial information and streamline overall operational end-to-end business processes. They are also facing an increasingly complex compliance landscape with new accounting, reporting and disclosure requirements.
On the regulatory front, CFOs also must deal with, Revenue Recognition Changes (ASC 606 and IFRS 15), Lease Accounting Changes (ASC 842 & IFRS 16), Treasury and Risk management, Financial Instruments Impairments & Disclosures (IFRS 9) as well as on-going changes in the global regulatory environment.
Most conventional finance management technologies have been in existence for decades and, while they offer a familiar environment, the lack of unified solutions create significant limitations when it comes to keeping pace with today’s complex and dynamically changing corporate challenges.
And this accelerating set of new challenges and changing compliance requirements threatens to overwhelm the inherent limitations of existing legacy finance and ERP systems.
Many CFOs and finance leaders are using Finance Transformation to move to a “lights out” strategy looking to focus more effort on increasing focus on real-time insights and predictive, as seen in the chart below.
As companies undertake Financial Transformation to improve their ability to be nimble, react quickly and take advantage of market trends, several key things are emerging:
Ability to adopt to Best Practices
Real-time and Predictive analysis
Ongoing and Faster closing Processes
Improved Support for compliance Requirement
Enhanced productivity through native workflow integration
Enhance User Experience through Fiori
As with any complex journey, the keys to success with implementing S/4HANA is defining a Roadmap for your S/4HANA Success.
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Knowing your starting point.
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Defining what constitutes your destination goal and how you’ll know when you reach it.
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Mapping out the path forward, while considering available time, resources and obstacles.