Surfacing SAP Data Clarity with insightsoftware

⇨ As enterprise data landscapes evolve, organizations are finding it crucial to reevaluate data analysis strategies and tools for real-time reporting and generating business insights.

⇨ insightsoftware solutions address critical challenges faced by organizations, providing them with the tools needed to streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and navigate complex SAP environments.

⇨ The company's product portfolio includes Process Runner and Process Runner GLSU, which focus on data automation and streamlining business processes and financial operations while eliminating cumbersome manual processes.

Modern enterprise applications are inundated with an unprecedented data volume, particularly evident in the extensive data generated by ERP systems. Despite this abundance, the ability to derive meaningful business insights is often hindered. Multiple data sources, data complexity and silos, difficult data preparation processes, inadequate automation, and a lack of strategic direction and governance are the challenges that organizations often face. Consequently, a disparity emerges between business performance and transparency, leaving IT and business functions like finance and supply chain entangled in technical intricacies. As enterprise data landscapes evolve, organizations are finding it crucial to reevaluate data analysis strategies and tools for real-time reporting and generating business insights.

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, dedicated to empowering organizations to extract valuable insights from their business data. With solutions across financial planning and analysis (FP&A), accounting, and operations, the company enables organizations to transform and automate their processes, generate trusted insights, boost predictability, and increase productivity. With solutions built upon an advanced data layer that enables seamless access to essential business and financial data, solutions like Process Runner and Process Runner GLSU strengthen their capabilities in data automation.

Purpose-built for handling SAP data

As an SAP partner, insightsoftware offers a range of purpose-built products tailored for SAP customers. The company’s product portfolio includes Process Runner and Process Runner GLSU, which focus on data automation and streamlining business processes and financial operations while eliminating cumbersome manual processes. Additionally, Wands for SAP provides real-time access to SAP data directly within Excel, allowing finance professionals to create reports effortlessly without delving into the complexities of SAP schemas. Its user-friendly interface simplifies financial reporting tasks and enables intuitive data manipulation.

insightsoftware solutions address critical challenges faced by organizations, providing them with the tools needed to streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and navigate complex SAP environments. Process Runner extends its utility beyond finance to encompass all business users, IT managers, and SAP experts. Recognizing the time-consuming nature of data entry into SAP, Process Runner aims to streamline SAP data management, offering comprehensive automation features across all SAP modules. Operated through a user-friendly Excel interface, Process Runner boasts over 1900 pre-built templates, enabling rapid deployment and immediate productivity gains for users.

SAP customers have reported saving up to 90% of their SAP data processing time, thanks to its efficient automation capabilities. For instance, one of insightsoftware’s clients managed their bills of materials, material masters, and pricing updates using spreadsheets, a method prone to errors and inefficiencies. By implementing Process Runner, they gained the ability to thoroughly test and validate data changes before uploading them to SAP, thereby ensuring accuracy and streamlining processes. This resulted in considerable time savings, as data load procedures that once consumed hours were now completed within minutes. Notably, even large uploads impacting tens of thousands of records could be seamlessly executed overnight, thanks to the robust data validation capabilities of Process Runner.

The solution’s key advantages include its comprehensive validation features, adaptability, and notable productivity enhancements, which span across all SAP modules. As a result, Process Runner has become an indispensable tool for SAP users across various functions. As Bryan Motteram, VP – Product Marketing at insightsoftware emphasizes, “Our products address the pressing need for automation in finance, particularly amidst skill shortages. For finance professionals engaged in time-sensitive activities like month-end closures, manual data entry tasks can be cumbersome and error-prone, often leading to significant delays. Process Runner GLSU streamlines these processes by offering 40 powerful SAP FICO transaction automations, coupled with pre- and post-validation capabilities.”

De-fogging the supply chain

insightsoftware boasts a strong presence not only within the office of the CFO but also in the supply chain. A prime example of this is Angles for SAP, a product that focuses on operational reporting and analytics within the supply chain domain. With complexities of SAP data structures within supply chain processes posing significant challenges like data scattered across numerous tables, Angles for SAP tackles this by providing a holistic view of an organization’s operational processes, facilitating the identification of inefficiencies and bottlenecks across the entire supply chain.

Angles for SAP provides self-service, cross-process, analytical capabilities that enables teams to analyze, consolidate, and investigate information across the entire value chain. Its unique understanding of the SAP system’s configuration allows it to extract both data and configuration settings, understand complex process relationships and facilitate the addition of new calculations, statuses, and fields.

Motteram highlights, “Amid the current landscape of supply chain disruptions, organizations are exploring strategies such as near-shoring. Angles for SAP plays a pivotal role in enabling such investigations. Recently, one of our clients encountered recurring stock-outs in their inventory, disrupting their manufacturing operations. Through Angles for SAP, they meticulously analyzed their supply chain and identified a change in suppliers for a particular sub-assembly. Despite the component now being sourced differently, the lead time had not been accurately factored into their reorder algorithms, resulting in stock-outs. Harnessing the insights provided by Angles for SAP, they swiftly addressed the issue, reconfigured their supply chain processes, and successfully resolved the disruption.”

ERP knowledge embedded in products

insightsoftware’s core strength lies in the profound ERP knowledge embedded within its products. For example, with Angles for SAP, the company delves into the intricacies of SAP’s supply chain scheme, which spans numerous tables. Extracting meaningful insights from this complexity demands deep ERP expertise, a quality inherent in insightsoftware’s offerings.

As Motteram highlights, “The complexity of SAP’s supply chain data poses a significant challenge for many companies, necessitating an extensive understanding of the SAP schema without a solution like Angles for SAP. This complexity often leads to a disconnect between supply chain domain experts and SAP technologists, requiring iterative and time-consuming collaboration to extract information. Angles for SAP simplifies this process by handling intricate data plumbing, enabling business users to interact with the data effectively. This not only speeds up processes but also reduces the risk of errors, making data analysis more accessible and efficient for all stakeholders involved.”

Similarly, products like Process Runner GLSU highlight the company’s commitment to encapsulating extensive SAP knowledge. GLSU’s 40 pre-built transactions and Process Runner’s 1900 templates exemplify this expertise, enabling streamlined processes and heightened productivity for customers. This expertise translates into several benefits for clients: accelerated time-to-value, reduced risk, and enhanced productivity.

Furthermore, insightsoftware’s Platform’s broad and deep capabilities differentiate it in the market. While organizations often face the dilemma of choosing between point solution providers offering deep but disparate functionalities or single-vendor solutions with mixed capabilities, insightsoftware provides a unique proposition. By acquiring companies with rich functionalities and integrating them within its Platform, the company offers clients comprehensive solutions without compromising on functionality.

Organic and inorganic growth initiatives

insightsoftware grows its capabilities via both organic product innovation and inorganic strategic acquisitions. In terms of acquisitions, insightsoftware is known for its proactive approach by integrating acquired entities into its ecosystem. The acquisition strategy aims to enhance product offerings by strengthening existing capabilities, expanding into new geographies, or reinforcing presence in specific ERP domains. Additionally, the company explores opportunities in adjacent markets identified through a comprehensive analysis of white spaces in the product portfolio, with a strategic intent to strengthen existing markets and expand into new territories. Over the past five and a half years, the company has completed approximately 25 acquisitions, spanning various solutions. Beginning with financial reporting software vendors, such as Excel4apps, the company has expanded into areas like budgeting, planning, financial closing, consolidation, tax reporting, and operational reporting. Their recent acquisition of Magnitude has strengthened its offerings in operational reporting and analytics for SAP.

Focusing on organic growth, insightsoftware meticulously crafts roadmaps for all products, incorporating customer feedback. This collaborative approach underscores the commitment to delivering solutions tailored to evolving customer needs. Furthermore, significant investments in AI reflect the company’s recognition of its transformative potential in revolutionizing applications and business processes. Leveraging past experiences with transformative technologies, the company views AI as a catalyst for reshaping data interactions and business operations. Motteram emphasizes, “Our Platform serves as a conduit for delivering AI-driven services across the product portfolio, enhancing reporting capabilities to facilitate easier data refinement and prioritization. By leveraging AI to surface actionable insights within reports, insightsoftware empowers users to make informed decisions swiftly and effectively. The overarching goal remains consistent: to empower customers to extract meaningful insights from their business data, with AI serving as a pivotal enabler. I anticipate an increasing integration of AI-driven capabilities into our products over the next 12 to 18 months.”

What it means for SAPinsiders

Create a well-defined data strategy: Prioritize the development and implementation of a robust data strategy within your organization to ensure data quality. This entails establishing clear objectives, investing in data governance processes, leveraging advanced analytics tools, and fostering a data-driven culture across all levels of the company.

Streamline processes by introducing technology: Prioritize the successful integration of new technology for streamlining organizational processes by identifying current issues, assessing their impact, constructing a compelling business case for investment, and implementing a robust change management strategy for seamless adoption.

Improve visibility into processes to fuel growth: Implement automated reporting systems to empower teams to generate and distribute reports and dashboards efficiently. By doing so, you equip your organization with timely and precise insights, fostering informed decision-making across all departments.