Most organisations are in a state of perpetual motion, and their finance operations reflect that. With business constantly changing, the most successful enterprises are those with finance teams that can quickly respond to change and seize new opportunities.
For a finance team to manage continual change and make optimal planning decisions with real-time agility, it needs reliable, consolidated data from every part of the organisation.
Helping Finance Teams to Make Real-Time Decisions
But many finance organisations are hampered by inefficient and siloed legacy technology and processes. These splintered systems keep useful data locked up, which can delay the analysis of consolidated results and limit the team’s agility. Traditional tools can’t support the complexity of a financial consolidation, nor can they quickly adapt to changing requirements.
For those reasons, many finance teams spend too much time collecting, adjusting, and reconciling data rather than analysing it and serving as the true business partners their organisations need. Such difficult-to-use technology can leave these teams frustrated, and with limited insights and missed growth opportunities.
By upgrading to an agile unified self-service platforms, with SAP Group Reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud, finance teams can unify data, automate data management, and use easy-to-customise applications to make any changes they need in real time. With a common set of data across the organisation, finance can better collaborate, report, and plan accurately and efficiently. That helps enterprises adapt to changing conditions, make better decisions, and drive better business results.
The High Costs of Legacy Processes
Without agile tools for planning and consolidation, finance teams risk falling behind. And a majority of organisations are missing out on advantages finance could bring them. Consider:
• 73% of finance teams compile company data manually or run their forecasts and scenario planning offline, according to Deloitte Insights.
• 76% of CFOs say that their organisations struggle to plan without one consolidated source of truth across business units, according to Accenture.
• 50% of CFOs say they make financial decisions based on gut instinct, because data is siloed or otherwise not readily available.
An agile purpose-built planning and consolidation platform, with SAP Group Reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud, can help finance teams streamline financial reporting and company-wide planning. With a more reliable data foundation and automated data management, this technology can ensure more accurate and efficient financial close and planning cycles.
SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning & Group Reporting
Allows finance professionals to easily develop and analyse planning scenarios tailored to their own organisation and market conditions without requiring technical assistance—or engaging in traditional offline “shadow planning” processes on scattered unsecured spreadsheets they need to manage on their own.
400% More Time for Strategy
SAP EPM tools provide an intuitive low-code/no-code user experience allows self-service reporting, data exploration, collaboration, and agility, so finance team members can easily create queries and surface insights without the time-consuming step of involving IT resources.
Using an up-to-date, SAP planning and consolidation platform, finance teams can easily integrate data from multiple sources; collaborate easily across teams; and drive organisation-wide Financial Consolidation, Budgets, Forecasts, and Plans.
For these teams, consolidating data and providing self-service automated statutory and management reporting is streamlined, leaving time for them to create, analyse, and compare virtually unlimited scenarios to better prepare for the future.
After one company transitioned from legacy systems to a unified SAP Group Reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud platform, its finance team reported a 400% increase in available time to apply to strategic work—compared with its previous system of manual data collection using siloed legacy technology for financial consolidation and planning.
Eliminate the need to manage a range of technologies and platforms
Choosing SAP Group Reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud, can eliminate the need to manage a range of technologies and platforms to produce results and allow employees across the organisation to seamlessly consolidate, report, plan, and capture results. Moving to a single platform that’s easier to use and less prone to data errors can save time and provide a unified source of truth for all teams, eliminating any inefficiency of reconciling conflicting reports.
This insight underscores a pressing reality in the world of finance: the landscape is rapidly evolving, and traditional methods are struggling to keep pace. As disruptions in digital finance influence trends, organisations need to embrace agility within their finance functions, merging these with other operational areas for a more cohesive approach.
The limitations of legacy enterprise performance management platforms are becoming increasingly evident. These older systems often operate in silos, creating barriers to information flow and adaptability. Their inflexible structures hinder timely adjustments to planning strategies, which is crucial in a fast-moving business environment.
To navigate these challenges, the innovative thinkers are transitioning to SAP Group Reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud, that offers a consolidated source of truth. This transformation not only promotes data quality but also enables customisable and automated features for data collection, predictive consolidation, AI Based Inter-company Reconciliation and Predictive analytics
In doing so, finance teams can enhance productivity, reduce costs, and ultimately lead to swifter and more informed decision-making across the entire organisation. Embracing this shift is essential for companies to retain relevance and maintain a competitive edge in the digital age.
George Bola 