Drivers shaping mid-market businesses
Global expansion, increased M&A activity, and rapid growth are just a few key drivers shaping mid-market businesses and their use of ERPs. Regulations are also constantly changing, and businesses are just becoming increasingly complex; thus, having systems that integrate best practices and update quarterly to account for rapid change are critical to stay on track.
With SAP's mid-market ERP offerings, there's real time visibility into all aspects of your business – all from a single KPI (key performance indicator) dashboard. This allows you to drill down into the different areas of your business with just a couple of clicks.
SAP Business ByDesign is a single cloud-based ERP solution to scale and compete without the complexity and cost. Think of it as a “suite in a box” with all the core modules you need to run your business. It’s built on HTML5 technology – so that you can access this ERP from any device – and incorporates 36 identified best practices at its core. In this first blog on the Finance function, we would like to provide a quick orientation. Let’s begin with the user interface.
Finance at your fingertips, out of the box
When you log in as a user, you’re presented with your own Launchpad, an area that is customizable by user to include groupings of relevant tiles representing specific transactions, analytics, notifications, and the like. You can add any tiles to which you have access from a security perspective, and you can rename tiles, drag and drop, and re-group as you see fit.
When you click on your Inbox at the top, you’ll find all of the relevant tasks that have been brought to your attention, driven by an internal communication mechanism within the ERP. So, if you have responsibility alongside a best practice scenario such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash – say, for instance, that you are shipping, receiving, or even approving a purchase order (PO) – the notifications and workflow in the system are actually brought to your attention within these tiles. You can view all of your open items, including alerts, tasks, notifications, and clarification requests.
Below the Inbox, a Custom grouping of tiles can be found with various accounting-related transactions such as managing fixed assets or distribution for management account. In the Financial Accounting grouping, you have tiles that provide access to edit exchange rates, open and close period, and so forth. To edit exchange rates, you can enter directly, upload through a pre-delivered upload spreadsheet (Excel), or connect with a bank to automate exchange rate uploads daily.
You can also embed any KPIs (or key performance indicators) in your Launchpad so that they are brought to your attention at the start of the day. In the KPI Dashboard below, for example, you’ll notice that Gross Profit is actually dropping (note the downward trend arrow). You can also see that Overdue Receivables are on the rise (note the upward trend arrow), negatively impacting gross profit.
Other elements that SAP brings to each user’s fingertips out of the box include Work Centers, which you see on the left-hand side of the screenshot below. Work Centers are groupings of transactions or views, built in the best practices of SAP over the course of 40+ years. Business ByDesign was built on the bigger brother/sister product known as S/4HANA today, so those same best practices have been compiled into this mid-market product. SAP best practices include appropriate segregation of duties in terms of security consistent with Sarbanes-Oxley.
The segregation of duties concept embedded within SAP is a recommendation, and it alerts your organization as to where you're exposed to fraudulent activity. For instance, the person entering an invoice shouldn’t necessarily be the same individual who is performing a payment run and ultimately cutting the check or processing the ACH wire transfer file. As you may imagine, this can expose the organization to fraudulent activity.
Additionally, should you require help along the way as a user (e.g., trying to better understand a particular error message that was received), simply click on the Help Center to search a variety of embedded help resources that reside within SAP’s knowledge base. Here, you can also find Community Resources where partners and customers blog about various relevant topics. The Help Center artifacts also include Troubleshooting Guides, which are knowledge base article documents (aka “OSS notes”); they detail what’s causing the problem, how to reproduce it, and how to resolve the issue. Every error message, warning, or information message has a corresponding note, which helps from a self-service perspective.
Illumiti adapts best practices for custom fit
SAP encourages Business ByDesign customers to adopt as many of the 36 embedded best practices as possible, only deviating when a sound reason exists. For example, if expense reimbursement is not something that’s a differentiator for your business, SAP would push you to adopt related best practices right out of the box. On the other hand, perhaps product engineering really differentiates your business and the related best practice doesn't exactly fit your business. This is where Illumiti would help you to adapt the system to meet your exact needs.
For an SAP Business ByDesign Finance Deep Dive into Analytics, watch for our following post. Until then, learn more about this mid-market solution at https://illumiti.com/solutions/sap-business-bydesign/
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