Supercharging Financial Workflows in All Stages of SAP S/4HANA Transformation

The SAP landscape is coming around to the need to move to SAP S/4HANA from their legacy systems. Yet progress has thusfar been slow and uneven. Advanced findings from SAPinsider’s SAP S/4HANA Migration benchmark research report indicate that SAP organizations are relatively evenly split between those already using it, actively implementing it, and those who are evaluating the business case – all at between 20-30%. A sizeable share do not plan to move or just have not begun to plan the digital transformation.

Regardless of where a company is in its path to SAP S/4HANA, their needs are likely to be the same – financial professionals are under tremendous pressure to deliver real-time, actionable insights to business leaders. Yet many organizations believe that they cannot achieve these goals until they have completed their digital migration.

Delivering Results Across all Transformation Phases

While the majority of organizations have yet to move to SAP S/4HANA, they may be losing ground to their competition, waiting for a digital transformation to provide them with advanced capabilities to bolster planning, infuse AI, and automate key workflows. Yet this is not the case.

To help companies better understand how to accelerate their financial transformation, regardless of where they are in the SAP S/4HANA journey, CCH Tagetik recently hosted a webinar underscoring why the time to improve operations is now.

Many companies believe that they should wait until the move is completed to rethink core financial practices. However, this means that they would have to migrate outdated practices to the new deployment before ultimately replacing them.

Rob Konferowicz Director of Operations, CCH Tagetik, highlighted the fact that companies are taking a risk and possibly costing themselves in the long run by waiting around.

“The cost of waiting may not be zero – whether it is ongoing IT cost, higher risk for data in financial consolidation scenarios that is in a tool that is set to sunset, or opportunity cost. As organizations sunset different products, they might not be investing back in those products with new functionality or capabilities,” said Konferowicz.

Finding the Right Solutions

As SAP organizations rethink their capabilities, several key themes come into play – data analytics, visualization, customization, integration, and accessibility. With the emphasis on the clean core, companies do not want to alter their core SAP ERP system to gain these capabilities, so they are generally opting for third party platform solutions to deliver these enhanced offerings.

Many SAP organizations are turning to experienced partners like CCH Tagetik and its ONE Intelligent Platform. This SAP HANA-native corporate performance management (CPM) solution is available to all SAP organizations, regardless of where they are on their journey to SAP S/4HANA.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Analytics and visualization drive the future. Companies are increasingly prioritizing analytics and visualization tools as part of their essential financial capabilities. These help companies better understand how they can operate more strategically and communicate these important insights to all relevant stakeholders.

Opportunity cost is not free. SAP organizations have limited budgets and nearly unlimited options on what they would like to use their budgets to invest in. Leading organizations are prioritizing solutions that ensure they are on the cutting edge of financial capability. Platforms like CCH Tagetik’s ONE Intelligent Platform offers AI, automation, integration, and visualization capabilities that provide significant ROI to users.

The best time to improve is now. Even organizations with no plans to move to SAP S/4HANA can benefit from improved operations. Companies cannot use this as an excuse to fall behind their competition, trying to keep pace with manual, outdated workflows and substandard analytics capabilities. Leading organizations prioritize growth and improved workflows, no matter what stage of digital transformation they are in.