Enhancing Financial Close Efficiency within SAP S/4HANA Transformations

As companies make the move to SAP S/4HANA from legacy systems, they also reevaluate their financial solutions. This often provides them with the realization that they are reliant on outdated, manual practices that hamper their productivity and accuracy within critical financial workflows.

Leading organizations take this digital transformation as an opportunity to overhaul these workflows and implement new solutions that drive efficiency and enhance the value of the new SAP system from partners like Trintech.

Success Story: Bayer

In 2019, Bayer, a global leader in the life sciences industry, initiated plans to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, prompting a reassessment of their existing financial systems. Their previous setup involved a self-developed solution integrated with SAP through custom ABAP programs and WebDynpro UI. However, this system increased manual workloads and complexity, which proved unsustainable in the long term.

“Managing manual work on disparate solutions on each system led to increased workload and complexity that wasn’t sustainable for our team long-term. It became clear very early on that our self-developed solution would not scale with the migration to S/4HANA, which is where our conversations with Trintech began,” said Marc-Oliver Deinert of Bayer’s GPO General Ledger Team.

Recognizing that their legacy solution wouldn’t scale with S/4HANA, Bayer began exploring more robust alternatives. This led to their partnership with Trintech and the implementation of its Cadency platform in 2020, with an initial focus on improving and standardizing balance sheet reconciliations.

Bayer outlined key criteria for selecting a financial close platform: compliance, transparency, and workflow management. The chosen solution needed to support clear workflows, enforce approval processes, and prevent journal entries from bypassing checks. It also had to maintain audit trails, documentation, and include custom fields. Crucially, Bayer needed a system that could integrate with ServiceNow, which handles inputs from non-accounting departments—making Cadency’s compatibility a major advantage.

Taking a Structured Approach

As part of its broader SAP S/4HANA migration strategy, Bayer aimed to minimize custom development within SAP. Instead, they chose to shift specific requirements to external purpose-built platforms like Cadency that could integrate seamlessly with SAP. This approach helped streamline their ERP environment while allowing more flexibility and specialization outside the core SAP system.

The S/4HANA implementation followed a well-structured approach:

• Template Development: Bayer created a unified ERP template over 1.5 years.
• Division-Specific Customization: Tailored features were added only where necessary for specific divisions.
• Localization Projects: Adjustments were made to meet country-specific compliance and operational needs.
• Pilot and Global Rollout: Initial pilots were conducted in select countries, with plans to transition approximately 80% of global sales within three years and full implementation in 4–5 years across 90 countries.

During the migration, Bayer identified critical Record to Report (R2R) gaps that SAP alone could not address—such as lack of visibility into workflow compliance, the absence of a recurring entries workflow, integration limitations with non-accounting systems, and difficulties verifying journal entry IDs. Cadency’s features effectively closed these gaps.

Looking ahead, Bayer and Trintech plan to explore additional integration opportunities to further optimize their financial processes within the evolving SAP and ServiceNow ecosystem. Through this strategic alignment, Bayer is enhancing compliance, efficiency, and transparency in its financial workflows while navigating complex global and technological transformation.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Digital Transformation is an opportunity for upgrades. All too often, SAP organizations pause other critical upgrades until their SAP S/4HANA transformation is completed. Yet companies can actually derive more value if they run these programs in parallel, allowing them to hit the ground running when the new environment is live.

Integration must be paramount. When filling out the SAP environment, organizations should prioritize solutions like Cadency that can seamlessly integrate, providing enhanced flexibility. It also gives companies the ability to infuse specialization to meet whatever industry-specific requirements they have.

Set out a path to success. Digital transformations can feel daunting. Yet companies do not have to accomplish them all at once. Leading businesses like Bayer take a phased approach, allowing them to finish the move to SAP S/4HANA in their own time without needing to rush or skip important steps.