Day: November 3, 2017

I recently saw a quote from motivational speaker Steve Maraboli that said “Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.”

While I can certainly relate with the quote on a personal level, it does indeed apply to a business context as well. A winning corporate mindset is not only an organizational team building tool, but also a very real bottom line advantage that impacts financials, organizational efficiencies, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.

Nevertheless, 97% of companies have yet to fully realize the potential impact of a full-fledged digital transformation mindset, and they are severely lagging the 3% who have from a results perspective begging the question why.

In collaboration with Oxford Economics, we recently surveyed 3,171 senior executives around the world on the topic of digital transformation, and found that only 3% of the respondents had digitally transformed their entire enterprise as opposed to the 97% who were mostly in planning or pilot stages. The SAP Digital Transformation Executive study showed that while most everyone surveyed recognized the importance of digital transformation, only this small group had actually transformed to embody a corporate-wide digital mindset. Some of the staggering findings resulting of this mindset were tangible advantages such as 23% higher revenue, increased profitability expectations for 80% of the leaders (versus 53% for everybody else), and increased market share expectations for 85% of leaders versus 39% for everybody else.

While the leaders were scattered globally, we wanted further understand what drove these very significant differences in results and also understand if there were country specific patterns or prioritizations that enable or inhibit the move towards digital transformation. We worked with Oxford Economics to analyze what truly made up the digital mindset by creating an index that looked at a wide range of indicators and sub-indicators centered around three key pillars:

* Management of digital transformation
* Impact of digital transformation
* Digital-enabling environment

The Management of Digital Transformation

As the successful management of digital transformation requires a clear direction and vision, goals must be set and strategies developed to achieve them. We tracked how companies set digital transformation as a strategic priority, how digital investments are prioritized, if digital engagement strategies are far along, and if product development and delivery strategies are aligned with the digital transformation goals. On a country level, the results showed clear differences between countries with the Netherlands leading the pack ahead of the United States. Though interestingly, companies in the Netherlands were far ahead on setting and agreeing on digital goal, but relatively less advanced on the actual digital strategies needed to accomplish these goals. Plus, a country like Brazil was doing comparatively well on setting the digital goals, but clearly lacking in the overall development of digital strategies to follow through.

The Impact of Digital Transformation

In looking at the impact of digital transformation, companies were scored on their ability to execute digital strategies and their ability to realize performance improvement from both a market perspective and an internal efficiency standpoint. The United States topped the list in this category driven by a higher ability to realize improved performance with Southeast Asia, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and Mexico at the bottom suffering from low scores on the execution of digital strategies.

Room for Improvement Is a Requirement

In looking at the management and impact of digital transformation across countries, it is apparent that while there are marked differences between countries, the overall index scores are low across board with all countries scoring less than 16 out of a possible 50 on both measures. So while certain countries are generally ahead of others, there is significant room for growth across the board and companies are well served to ramp up their efforts across both the management and impact indicators.

When adding the digital leader group to the scores, the pictures changes dramatically though. The leader group scores more than twice as high across both the management and impact index as the highest ranked country.

The mindset adopted by these leaders who have implemented digital transformation across their business is not defined just by the action of just going through the digital transformation motions haphazardly. Rather, it is defined by the ability to set digital transformation goals as a strategic business priority, the emphasis on executing on the digital strategies across the business as opposed to in silos, and critically, the ability to achieve superior business results that set them apart from the competition.

As the leaders keep focusing on four key areas (namely, customer emphasis, talent management, next-gen technology, and true company transformation), they are likely to pull farther ahead of their peers. Their mindset is already now changing everything not just inside their business, but certainly outside and around their business as well.
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For more insight on digital leaders, check out the SAP Center for Business Insight report, conducted in collaboration with Oxford Economics, “SAP Digital Transformation Executive Study: 4 Ways Leaders Set Themselves Apart.”

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Michael Rander is the global research director for Future Of Work at SAP.

This story originally appeared on the Digitalist. http://bit.ly/2zczxJd #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

In 2015 and with much fanfare, SAP executives announced S/4HANA. SAP had originally included the Simple Finance product in its S/4HANA vision, another S/4HANA release, referred to then as Simple Logistics to bring all other modules in to the same platform.

Simple Logistics?

As with any major software release, there is often a disconnect between early product names and the final naming convention. You might have noticed that the S/4HANA, release 1511 to latest version 1709.

In short, S/4HANA Enterprise Management is the new name for the product formerly known as Simple Logistics.

In addition: Simple is out, and S/4HANA is in. So along those lines, what we knew as Simple Finance is now known as S/4HANA Finance.

S/4HANA Enterprise Management

Now, what is in S/4HANA Enterprise Management, and how does it relate to the software we currently know, such as RECC 6.0 or R/3? And how will everything fit together?

It’s true that S/4HANA Enterprise Management’s features and functions are similar to the scope of ECC 6.0. This is not a complete re-write of the code that encompasses ECCthat would certainly take much more time to pull off. However, a significant part of the ECC body has been re-thought and re-imagined to take advantage of the capabilities of S/4HANA and eliminate restrictions that the existing relational databases imposed.

Further, existing ECC functionality has traditionally been thought of in modules, such as FI/CO, SD, MM, WM, LE and so forth. Think of the new S/4HANA Enterprise Management in terms of processes: Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Plan to Produce, Request to Service, as well as HR/HCM and Finance.

Below diagrams represent the SAP ECC and S4HANA.

The S/4HANA product is new in many ways. An extensive redesign of these process streams, with input from customers and partners, has resulted in improvements in procurement, inventory management, material valuation, capacity planning, order management and more. Further, the creation of the universal journal and the central finance approach has increased the flexibility of the S/4HANA Finance subsystem. This has the possibility to deliver even more value to the enterprise as opposed to just accelerating the financial close process.

With S/4HANA having so much more functionality than the earlier release, the real question is one of roadmap: Just what is included in this Release 1709 and when will additional functionality be released, including the additional tools that will make deployment and implementation easier and quicker?

For that answer, look to the SAP Service Marketplace for the Product Roadmap. Finally, latest release 1709 opens up the integration of SAP’s cloud offerings into S/4HANA itself. Being able to connect SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, and Hybris with an enterprise’s transactional system will make it much easier to do business using SAP S/4HANA.

Cloud is here to stay. Anything SAP can do to make it easier for customers to do business in hybrid environments that mix on-premise with cloud solutions will go a long way to helping customers adopt this improved solution.

Future Directions

SAP S/4HANA is the future direction of ERP software that can take full advantage of the capabilities of SAP HANA. Further, SAP has to do a bit more to make licensing of this product more crystal clear, especially looking to the future.

I hope by seeing the below diagram of SAP S4HANA landscape simplification/Consolidation will explain what really SAP wants to do in future. Best Regards, Lingaiah http://bit.ly/2hER8zH #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

Machine learning is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where machines can learn through the use of algorithms to interpret various types of data to interpret results as well as learn from successes and failures.

While computers are not as intelligent as humans, they can process data much faster than you can. Computers are extremely fast and normally very accurate in their inferences. So, as machines find their way into the world of accounting and take over everyday accounting tasks, you will have more time, as an accountant, to utilize your professional skills on more important tasks such as advising clients based on the data processed by the machines.

That said, let’s have a deeper look at how machine learning will impact the world of accounting.

Machine Learning Will Promote Innovation in Accounting

In the past, accounting software companies used desktop support for their operations. This was eventually replaced with cloud-based services. Likewise, accounting firms and departments will have to invest in machine learning going forward. Machines have the ability to deliver real-time information, improve decision making, and promote efficiency.

Accounting Jobs That Machines Can Learn To Accomplish

You should realize that machines will not take your accounting job. However, the machines will be your workmates. Namely, you work together in a bid to deliver more efficient services to customers.

A machine that replaces the human emotional intelligence requirements of accounting tasks is yet to be developed. Nonetheless, machines can learn to undertake repetitive and usually time-consuming tasks.

Let us look at some of the applications of machine learning in the world of accounting:

* Accounting apps learn the behaviors of invoice coding and provide recommendations on how to allocate transactions. For instance, if you normally allocate a product to a given account the program learns, so the app will automatically allocate it to the appropriate account the next time around. The app also learns from mistakes you fix and in turn does so if it finds an error.
* Auditing of Expense Submissions. Machines can learn your business’ expense policy, read receipts, as well as audit expense claims to ascertain compliance. Then, it can forward questionable claims to you for approval.
* Risk Assessment. With machine learning, you can be able to undertake risk assessment mapping by pulling data from all the projects your business has ever accomplished to compare it to a planned project. Such a comprehensive assessment would take you ages if you were to do it manually, without the help of a machine.

It is also worth noting that machine learning will affect auditors’ work in the near future. Sometimes a careless action, innocent or not could be considered a criminal act. Vanguard Tax Relief points out that in a case of payroll tax debt, “if the IRS can prove that the missed payroll deposits were deliberate, rather than accidental, you could be criminally prosecuted.”

With the huge number of transactions that flow through organizations, auditors can only audit a limited number of transactions manually. This problem could be solved quickly with machine learning running the audits.

Conclusion

Given the advancements, we have witnessed in computing, many professionals, including accountants, fear for their jobs as machines threaten to take over them. The truth is that machines are not going to replace human accountants, at least not anytime soon. They will only work with humans in a bid to improve efficiency throughout the world of accounting, as outlined in this article. http://bit.ly/2hCAWPc #SAP #SAPCloud #AI