SimpleFi Helps SAP Finance Leaders Move Faster from SAC Investment to Business Value

In a recent SAPinsider podcast conversation, I spoke with Henner Schliebs, Executive Vice President at SimpleFi Solutions, about a challenge many SAP senior leaders know well. SAP Analytics Cloud is powerful, but value depends on how quickly finance teams can turn the platform into usable planning, reporting, consolidation, and enterprise performance management capabilities.

Schleib framed the issue clearly. SAP Analytics Cloud is the tool, but finance leaders are not buying a tool for its own sake. They want business outcomes: faster insight, better planning, stronger collaboration, and a more scalable finance operating model. That is where SimpleFi’s prebuilt application content becomes important.

SimpleFi has built applications based on experience from more than 500 SAP Analytics Cloud implementations and roughly 20,000 hours of development and solution refinement. Rather than asking finance teams to begin with a blank sheet of paper, SimpleFi gives organizations proven models, workflows, reporting structures, planning logic, and reusable components that can be adapted to their needs.

For SAP senior leaders, this changes the implementation conversation. Traditional SAC deployments often require long foundational phases: defining model structures, aligning dimensions and hierarchies, designing workflows, and agreeing on planning or consolidation logic before business users see anything tangible. SimpleFi’s approach compresses those steps by giving teams a working design to evaluate, refine, and adopt.

That matters because time to value is now a board-level issue. CFOs and finance executives do not want to spend a large portion of their tenure waiting for a transformation program to produce results. They need faster movement away from spreadsheets and toward connected, enterprise-grade planning and performance management.

One of the most important points from the podcast was that finance-led does not mean IT is excluded. Instead, it means finance owns the business design, planning logic, reporting requirements, approval workflows, and operating cadence. IT owns the technical swim lane: integrations, security, platform standards, controls, and architecture. For SAP customers, that balance is critical. Finance must define the outcome, while IT ensures the solution is secure, scalable, and connected to the broader SAP landscape.

SimpleFi’s value proposition is especially relevant for organizations trying to modernize finance without creating another long, expensive technology project. Its prebuilt content can accelerate fit-to-gap discussions, reduce requirement churn, and give stakeholders earlier visibility into how the solution will work. For senior leaders, that can translate into faster decisions, more confident sponsorship, and a clearer path from implementation to adoption.

The broader takeaway from my conversation with Schleib is that SAP finance transformation should not be measured only by implementation cost. It should be measured by how quickly the organization can make better decisions, run more efficient planning cycles, and support growth with a scalable performance management foundation.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Evaluate SAP Analytics Cloud initiatives based on time to productive use, not just project scope or license strategy.
• Keep finance accountable for business design while giving IT clear ownership of integrations, security, and platform governance.
• Look for prebuilt application content that reflects proven finance processes rather than starting every implementation from scratch.
• Prioritize solutions that reduce spreadsheet dependency and help finance teams move faster from planning to insight to action.

Listen to the full podcast with Henner Schliebs here: