Managing and leveraging information has become a vital competitive tool for the success and sustainability of any business. Businesses burn up significant resources in order to manage information, cope with the impacts of complicated regulatory requirements and globalization.

The Chief Financial Officer and members of the Finance team play a major role in this time of change, since they are responsible for collecting, processing and reporting on business-critical information for the entire organisation.

When it comes to innovation, it has not been easy to simplify and optimize the finance processes mainly due to the multipurpose nature of the fundamental processes and policies involved, but also for the reason that analytical tools and systems have been limited in their technical capabilities and did not always provide users with the means to keep up with changing market needs.

SAP® Simple Finance, the result of a close collaboration between SAP and customers to identify the most complex functions and tasks in finance and make them simpler, is a major step forward in transforming finance. It brings the simplicity of the SAP Cloud to finance departments worldwide.

SAP® Simple Finance delivers real-time insights to CFOs and finance departments to help them model different financial scenarios, so they can stay abreast of rapidly changing market conditions and deliver strategic outcomes to the business.

For companies in Africa, the benefits of simpler and more efficient finance solutions, such as SAP® Simple Finance are translated into simpler code bases eliminating the need to write additional and unnecessary reports or customizing of the code, a simpler user interface that operates across desktops and mobile devices, as well as simple implementation wizard-like tools built into the application to guide and configure applications for the end-user.

 

"Related to this are specific issues identified by our customers, the need to simplify the complexity of our solutions, flexibility in the way they interact with their data, suppliers and customers and empowering their own workforce. These issues are real and SAP is addressing each of these areas in our new approach, to help businesses Run Simple," said Merlin Knott, Director of Business Analytics at SAP Africa.

SAP's Simple Finance main innovations for driving simplicity in the finance industry are;

  • Integrated business planning and analysis

 

  • Speedy inter-company reconciliations

 

  • Minimisation of cash management risks

 

  • A common information source

 

  • A reduced data footprint and increased throughput

 

These integrated solutions drive agility and flexibility in business helping CFOs to accelerate the transformation of finance and deliver strategic outcomes to the business. They can now augment their strategic role in driving business performance with efficient, manageable and real-time analytics and planning capabilities