Streamline your FP&A processes with SAP Analytics Cloud

Different planning processes are becoming smart at different rates

With Excel spreadsheets and e-mail still playing key roles in finance, budgeting and financial reporting activities can be slowed to a crawl. Even more, manual financial processes may introduce more opportunities for error and duplicates.

“However, we’ve noticed that an increasing number of companies are ready to change their traditional mindsets and introduce integrated planning processes,” says Koen Vanderwegen, competence lead at Flexso. “This means interfacing financial planning processes with planning in other business areas.”

For truly integrated, intelligent digital planning, reports need to be easy to analyse, and FP&A teams must be able to use them to determine the financial impacts of potential strategic decisions using simulation. “To meet these needs, FP&A departments must be empowered with a modern, digital platform for planning and analysis. SAC is a clear winning choice.”

Integrated information sources, rich insights, accurate forecasting

SAC offers a single platform for both planning and analytics, saving costs and avoiding actual and planning integration hiccups. “The platform offers unprecedented advantages for planning,” Koen continues. “All of these benefits are based on several key capabilities: user-friendly planning input, workflow support and collaboration, intuitive variance analysis, ability to link business-wide data and the power of the cloud.”

Driver-based planning, flexible allocation and out-of-the-box simulations bring quick answers to strategic questions from the management team. By interlinking data generated by other business areas such as HR, manufacturing, supply chain, etc., planning is simplified and streamlined through scalable insights and real-time measurements.

The beauty of end-to-end integration

As it is a cloud application, planning teams can access data through the platform at any time and in any location. SAP offers an acceleration track to set up financial planning and analysis in combination with S/4HANA.

“In addition to inputting stories for P&L, cashflow and the balance sheet, people can see the actual real-time data in S/4HANA for lightning-quick reporting and variance analysis. Imagine sending the approved budget back to the financial system at the end of the process simply and easily – that’s the symmetry of end-to-end integration driven by SAP Cloud Analytics.”

A good practicable example is the possibility of running product cost simulations in SAC. The base data for these simulations would come from published cost estimates in SAP. It allows for tracking the impact on your total product cost by simulating cost changes in raw materials and activity types (e.g. energy).

Flexso combines functional and technological expertise

Thanks to our team’s strong background in financial planning and analytics processes and extensive SAC and S/4HANA product knowledge, we can guarantee an optimal implementation that maximizes the solution’s impacts for your specific business.

“We deeply understand relevant processes and how other companies approach FP&A and reporting. Because of that, we can play a unique advisory role during implementations to streamline them and ensure that the technology is adapted to each company’s process flow.”

“In addition to our technological expertise, we’ve completed numerous FP&A and reporting implementations, and have the functional experience to challenge companies’ approaches to the processes themselves,” Koen asserts. “We deeply understand relevant processes and how other companies approach FP&A and reporting. Because of that, we can play a unique advisory role during implementations to streamline them and ensure that the technology is adapted to each company’s process flow.”