SAP Unveils Simple & Modern Set of Finance Solutions

SAP AG has introduced SAP Simple Finance, a set of solutions to bring the simplicity of SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA to finance departments worldwide. As a leader in finance solutions for the last several decades, SAP worked closely with customers to identify the most complex tasks in finance and make them simpler to consume and perform. The result is SAP Simple Finance, based on SAP HANA in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, delivering real time insights to CFOs and finance departments so they can transform their business. SAP Simple Finance takes full advantage of the in-memory SAP HANA platform with new finance capabilities, offers a new and beautiful user experience for easy access, all deployed in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud under a full subscription model, making it easy for finance departments to adopt these solutions. This modern finance software is designed to help CFOs accelerate their finance transformation and deliver strategic outcomes to their business. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held June 3-5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida.

With these integrated solutions, finance departments can now run their mission-critical processes in real time — including planning, analysis, accounting, consolidation, treasury, financial operations, risk and compliance — on a truly reliable and secure cloud. SAP Simple Finance is planned to be released for customers in 25 industries and more than 50 countries to match the local and global requirements of finance departments.

In addition to driving agility in finance, SAP Simple Finance is also designed to provide the most simple and unified end-to-end experience for easy adoption — from the discovery of the solution to the deployment, until the actual usage by finance users. By leveraging modern design principles, customers also have the option to deploy the SAP Fiori user experience for personalized, responsive and simple interactions across most common financial tasks.

“Thousands of companies around the globe run their finance processes relying on SAP solutions. The launch of SAP Simple Finance defines a completely new era with solutions designed to help our customers foster agility, flexibility and therewith simplicity in every business process,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP, Products & Innovation. “Delivered in SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA, SAP Simple Finance sets a new standard of business software in our industry. CFOs and finance departments can now augment their strategic role in driving the business performance with real-time analytics and planning capabilities delivered in the cloud .”

Accelerated Finance Transformation
SAP Simple Finance has been built to help meet the evolving business needs of finance departments. This set of solutions includes advanced capabilities and innovations, including:

* Providing a single source of truth between transactions and analytics to streamline and eliminate cycle times and reconciliations of the data

* New on-the-fly capabilities for moving finance processing, such as month-end activities, from batch to real time

* Innovative rapid planning and forecasting combined with predictive analysis to explore new business models and immediately assess potential effects on the bottom line

* New reporting and analytics capabilities for finance users with self-service access to all information, allowing instant insight-to-action

* Connections to business networks in real time to establish an integrated business ecosystem and help drive optimal collaboration with customers, suppliers, banks and government authorities

* Global regulatory compliance capabilities across currencies, languages and industries with built-in legal compliance capabilities and continuous risk assessment along all enterprise processes

“SAP Simple Finance is a major step forward in changing how enterprise software is deployed and used across the financial operations of a company,” said Joshua Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting. “It combines the ease of cloud-based deployment, a full set of standard financial functions and net new functionality that enables a company to conduct a soft financial close and model different financial scenarios. The result is not just better day-to-day financial management, but also an improved financial planning and execution function that can help companies stay abreast of rapidly changing market conditions.”

Simpler IT With Choice
For maximum choice and flexibility, SAP Simple Finance is offered with subscription pricing and can be deployed as a managed service via SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. This set of finance solutions can also be connected to other cloud and on-premise applications in a hybrid deployment model, allowing customers to protect and extend their current IT investments.

Existing SAP customers can move to SAP Simple Finance by transferring their current finance landscape to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

The offering can be easily connected to the broad portfolio of public cloud applications from SAP for key lines of business such as human resources (HR), procurement, sales, service and marketing, as well as to the Ariba Network, enabling collaboration in the world’s largest trading community.

Customers can rely on a large ecosystem of partners established across regions to drive rapid value with SAP Simple Finance. SAP’s cloud ecosystem already includes more than 900 partners engaged as system integrators, resellers, ISV partners or managed services partners. SAP plans to continue to integrate more partners in alignment with customer requirements and the innovation roadmap of the SAP Simple Finance solution set.