Introduction and Overview of SAP Simple Finance

Introduction and Overview of SAP Simple Finance

With the arrival of SAP Simple Finance, SAP is integrating its newest technologies into age-old business operations and you need to keep up. Take a look at the applications that SAP Simple Finance offers across planning, consolidation, accounting, and compliance, and learn how they are pushing Finance forward.

SAP Simple Finance includes all of SAP’s solutions for finance, powered by SAP HANA. With the arrival of SAP Simple Finance, SAP is integrating its newest technologies into age-old business operations and you need to keep up. Take a look at the applications that SAP Simple Finance offers across planning, consolidation, accounting, and compliance, and learn how they are pushing Finance forward. The value map of processes and supporting capabilities that is available for finance, leveraging the portfolios of SAP ERP Financials; SAP solutions for enterprise performance management; SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance; and SAP Business Objects business intelligence solutions. Let’s look at these processes in further detail:

Financial planning and analysis: Managing performance is an iterative, ongoing process that allows companies to forecast, plan, and budget on an ongoing basis. With predictive analytics, finance can model and simulate multiple scenarios with what-if simulations to calculate the expected financial impact of business decisions.

Accounting and financial close: Streamlining the financial close processes enables companies to close the books quickly — both from a legal and a group perspective — with accuracy and in full compliance with global regulatory standards. Streamlining the financial close also provides stakeholders with vital decision-making data faster.

Treasury and financial risk management: Companies must optimize cash flow and manage liquidity, and integrate these processes with multiple banks. In addition, finance monitors investments and borrowing activities across multiple geographies and currencies to secure the best possible investment rates.

Collaborative finance operations: Core services provided by finance include credit checks, collections and dispute handling, invoice management, bank transactions, and travel expense processing. Streamlining these processes results in lower costs and fewer errors, and frees up finance to pursue activities that add greater value.

Enterprise risk and compliance management: To protect valuable financial data, processes must be tightly controlled to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive corporate assets, while detecting fraud and abuse. Finance can proactively balance risk and opportunity across all financial processes, from transactions to analytics.

Simpler IT with Choice

SAP Simple Finance marks the first step of s-innovations, which are a new line of modular solutions for lines of business and industries natively built on the SAP HANA in-memory platform, fully designed with the SAP Fiori user experience. As such, SAP Simple Finance is offered in a variety of consumption models, including on premise, in a managed cloud, and a hybrid of cloud and on premise deployments. Let’s look at the deployment options for customers.

On Premise

Some customers may prefer to continue to run their SAP implementations on premise, meaning that the software is installed in their own data center in one or more of their own sites. An on premise implementation involves having full control over the system and its implementation, including functional configuration and the ability to make modifications. The company’s IT team also manages its own security and governance. Each company maintains the software with any applicable enhancement packages and hot fixes, and chooses the timing of implementing any upgrades.   With this option, companies license the software, which is typically financially managed on the balance sheet as a capital expense that is depreciated over time. They also must use SAP HANA to leverage the new functional capabilities of SAP Simple Finance, such as SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA1 and SAP Cash Management powered by SAP HANA,2 which were natively built on SAP HANA.

Cloud

Companies that want to deploy SAP Simple Finance in the cloud can use SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. With this managed service, SAP maintains the servers and the software of an organization’s implementation. The software is installed on servers that are dedicated to a single customer, allowing each customer to configure unique functional business processes; however, modifications are not allowed. The customer still manages the applications and governance rules, and has the ability to be on a different release than other customers, again since customers are assigned their own hardware servers. As part of the managed service, SAP takes care of implementing technical maintenance, handling hot fixes, and performing upgrades.   Companies still need to license the software capabilities, and then purchase the infrastructure and application management on a subscription basis. The systems in the managed cloud are run on SAP HANA, which gives organizations the ability to use the latest innovations of SAP Simple Finance.

Hybrid

An increasingly attractive model is the combination of on premise and cloud implementations. Ideal candidates for these scenarios are point processes that can be easily carved out and do not require close integration with the remaining SAP Business Suite — for example, companies can use ARIBA Network for invoice management, or solutions for cloud-based travel and expense management.

Alternately, large companies that have an on premise implementation may choose to run specific organizations — remote sales offices, subsidiaries, or recent mergers and acquisitions, for example — in the cloud, with an integration into their on premise systems for consolidated reporting and disclosures.

SAP Simple Finance Applications

From cash management to financial close and consolidation, see what powerful applications SAP Simple Finance offers, and how they can change your financial operations.

• In-memory technology and SAP HANA
• Redundancy removal
• Non-disruptive innovation
• Flexible reporting
• Data aging
• Universal journals
• SAP Simple Finance applications
• Deployment and adoption
• SAP Fiori
• Central Finance