TRACK PRESENTATIONS

Many organisations do not pay sufficient attention to the quality of their master data and often do not have business ownership of it. This leads to problems reconciling reported financial data across the various reporting systems. This presentation will explore how Australia Post has applied themselves to this common challenge being faced by many organisations.

• How to achieve effective data quality across the system landscape via the use of SAP tools
• Data ownership and the boundaries between what the IT team and the business controls
• Business process and procedures in maintaining an effective reporting environment to reduce reconciliation problems
• Some of the common pitfalls that should be avoided

SAP release: ECC6 & BI 7.0
Original go-live date: August 1996

BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation) is a performance management tool that brings a lot of flexibility to the planning process as well as catering for consolidation and reporting requirements. The Gallagher Group is a large manufacturer that has a global distribution network with various foreign subsidiaries. Effective coordination was required to deal with budgeting and reporting in a multi-currency environment.

Being the first NZ entity to embark on a BPC implementation has taught us many lessons and pitfalls to avoid.

• Overview of BPC functionality and terminology
• BPC for Excel, how close to Excel is it?
• Architectural design considerations
• Implementation challenges and what to watch out for
• Benefits gained and potential future applications

Come and hear our experience as the first New Zealand based organisation to implement this tool.

SAP release: ECC5
Original go-live date: July 1999

The world of SAP upgrades has changed forever due to the Enhancement Pack - with the release of Business Suite 7. This change of approach has left many businesses with questions on how best to implement and utilise Enhancement Packs within their Finance functions.

• What is the difference between an old fashioned upgrade andapplying Enhancement Pack?
• What exciting functionality do finance users get with the latest Enhancement Package?
• Does SAP provide recommendations on the question if new functionality in Enhancement Packs should be activated as a default?
• Functional Upgrades: How do you engage the business to drive functionality gains?
• What is the experience of other businesses that have embarked on using Enhancement Packs?

Drawing on implementation experience and knowledge this session aims to bring clarity to many of the questions raised above.

Is your current project facing challenges with change management and user acceptance? Do you worry about how to drive user system adoption at a reasonable cost? Do you have concerns about losing knowledge over time as new employees join the company after a major system has gone live? Find out how autodesk solved these problems with an extensive user training program and ongoing new hire education, as part of a recent SAP system upgrade. Hear how they continue to address ongoing concerns with SAP’s usability and ease of use as part of their change management program.

• The key ingredients of a worldwide communications and training program
• How to improve the quality and usage of what you have installed as part of an SAP upgrade, using SAP’s latest tools
• Key methods to develop prepared and satisfied users, knowledgeable about the new system
• The importance of managing ongoing learning and user education

SAP release: ECC5 & BI 7.0
Original go-live date: June 1994

This presentation will help you decide if you need costing-based PA, account-based PA or both, the practical limitations of CO-PA (both technical and in line with sensible business processes). It will also outline strategies on how CO-PA should be considered along with archiving and BI/reporting projects.

• Can we expect to reconcile CO-PA (Profitability Analysis) with FI (Financial Accounting) and with SIS (Sales Information System)?
• Financial tool or sales and marketing tool?
• Sensible business processes vs. ‘net net margin’ in CO-PA
• Technical considerations: characteristics required and data volume
• Summarisation levels and data, archiving, or just move to a business warehouse solution?
• Profitability Analysis relationship with BW/BI (Business Warehouse/Business Intelligence)

Find out if SAP Customers are using CO-PA to its full potential and if there are ways your organisation could improve its CO-PA performance. Hear from an independent consultant who was one of the first to speak on Profitability Analysis at CIM shows in the UK, and who has implemented CO-PA in consumer goods industries in the UK and Australia.

Today’s IT infrastructure is complex, consisting of multiple, disparate systems and applications. For each of these systems, a unique set of policies, user credentials and entitlements must be maintained, which leads to a set of dissimilar provisioning and access control systems. As a result, risk information is isolated and compliance efforts are duplicated across the enterprise.

Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments puts SAP solutions at the core of enterprise-wide provisioning, identity integration, access and security information and event management.

This delivers a real-time, holistic view of all provisioning, access and security events across both SAP and non-SAP systems.

Security events within the infrastructure are correlated to business process and policies and provide real-time enforcement of policy throughout the enterprise.

• Integrating SAP into your Identity, Access and Security ecosystems
• Addressing potential threats as they occur
• Delivering role based access to resource
• Simplifying password management
• Streamlining communications between compliance and security systems

Learn which ready-made financial reports are delivered with your SAP system and what tools are now available to generate, customise, develop, run and distribute reports. Get an up-to-date look at the options available to create profit and loss statements, balance sheets, accounts receivable and accounts payable reports and analyses, asset balances, acquisitions and retirements, asset history sheets and cash position and liquidity forecast reports.

Examine the capabilities and requirements of different financial reporting tools. Understand the differences between fixed asset, cost center and order accounting reports. This is an opportunity to evaluate and see demos of the new enhancements from SAP, including simplified reporting for financials delivered with enhancement packages 3, 4 and 5 for SAP ERP 6.0.

Three years ago the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government undertook an exercise that would pave the way for a significant program of change to its SAP systems.

Hear how the Department developed and obtained buy-in for its SAP strategic roadmap and how this roadmap was used to drive and deliver significant change throughout the organisation - increasing compliance, control and efficiency as well acceptance of the SAP system.

This presentation will use the Departments 5 Phase Strategic Roadmap and specifically our automated Procure to Pay Projects to illustrate:

• What you must do before you start - selling your strategy and vision!
• Building a business case and getting it over the line
• Delivering the benefits to your organisation
• Our lessons learned... including the importance of the end user

SAP release: ECC6 & BI 7.0
Original go-live date: July 1998

Understand why we selected SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) NetWeaver to replace our existing Consolidation solution over and above SAP’s other supported consolidation products. Learn how SAP BPC NetWeaver fits within our overall system architecture including SAP ERP, BW and BusinessObjects. Step through key considerations for optimising the BPC dimensional model to ensure that it effectively supports our management and legal consolidation business requirements.

See how BPC functionality enhances key consolidation processes such as data collection, posting corporate-level adjustments, validation, currency translation, execution of inter-company eliminations and consolidation of investments, reclassification and allocations. Discover the functionality and user friendliness of SAP BPC reporting using EVDRE and templates. And finally, appreciate the greater visibility, auditability and improved financial close timeframes that we have gained through our implementation of SAP BPC NetWeaver.

Whilst often the focus and understandings of an organisation’s business units are poles apart, their ERP’s adopt a standard structure and design for all. Matching the needs and tools for project delivery against those for financial management is an ongoing challenge.

Within the NSW government sector “NSW Public Works” delivers a comprehensive range of commercial services for government in property and public infrastructure development.

In the delivery of project management services timely and accurate project cost and revenue management is fundamental to our business success but is often seen as conflict within the requirements of project delivery.

• Project management vs. financial management - is there a difference?
• Public sector culture vs. commercial business delivery - how do you achieve best fit?
• Project planning and review vs financial planning and review - where is the common ground?
• The NSW Public Works solution - a web based solution using SAP Portal and cProjects including:
  • cProjects structures and tools
  • Integration with backend SAP - Project Systems, Sales and Distribution, CATS
  • Cost and revenue separations
  • Budgets vs. Forecasts vs. Actual
  • Quantum vs. Dollars
  • Training, acceptance and understanding
  • Lessons Learned

SAP release: ECC6
Original go-live date: July 2004

The Financial Budgeting and Planning process requires a creative and collaborative approach across the business. However, all too often the process is rigid, cumbersome, inefficient and very time-consuming. To make matters more challenging, the process usually involves a set of independent tools which are either loosely connected or interfaced. The end result can be a frustrating exercise that lacks clarity, transparency and accuracy. Worst of all, the process and tools frequently lack the flexibility to adapt to the changing world around us. How do we overcome this?

During this session finance people from a number of SAP customer organisations, facilitated by an expert, will discuss how their businesses deal with Budgeting and Planning. Hear their thoughts on processes and tools, as well as lessons learned. The discussion will also cover examples of the most commonly used applications for managing the Budgeting and Planning process. Join our discussion group and participate as a member of the audience, or just listen, as we address some of the following issues:

• How can you identify and eliminate the obstacles to an efficient process?
• What are the lessons learned from experience in implementing new tools and processes?
• Which tools seem to work best?
• Any trends?
• What are the essential requirements for achieving a flexible environment?

In the current economic environment, clients are using acquisitions and divestitures to focus on value and quickly exploit new market opportunities. In addition, with valuations at historic lows, clients with strong balance sheets are looking to move quickly to exploit market opportunities through acquisitions. Many of those activities will involve SAP systems.

• Are you ready for M&A?
• Things to consider
• 1+1=3?
• What tools are available to help you?
• Lessons learned

The typical monthly financial close cycle are being extended due to increased reporting requirements and enhanced legal/compliance requirements. This in turn can cause problems with later than desired reporting and can lead to additional errors and possible restatements. All companies should focus on how to shorten the typical monthly close cycle and in turn ensure the results and in compliance with the local and corporate legal reporting requirements.

There are several tools in the marketplace that can add stability and control over the closing process. This presentation will provide highlights for two options the SAP Financial Closing Cockpit and the Runbook solution.

• Why is the monthly close taking so long?
• Review the close process and understand where many of the problems are
• Compare SAP’s enhanced Financial Closing Cockpit with a third party solution

Fonterra are the world’s largest dairy exporter selling New Zealand made dairy products to consumers in 140 markets across the globe. A complex series of intercompany transactions is required to facilitate these multi country and currency sales. The Fonterra In-House Cash project had two key objectives: to remove real physical cash flows from intercompany settlement and to increase the centralised pooling of funds with treasury. This is the story of the delivery of this project from concept through to go-live.

• Justifying the change - cost/benefit - business case approach
• Key enablers and constraints - what was helpful and what was not?
• SAP In-house Cash vs. Fonterra approach
• Implementation - lessons learned, additional benefits and things that we would do differently
• Future opportunities

SAP release: ECC6
Original go-live date: June 2004

Would you like to invest more in your financial processes and systems and reporting tools? Would you like to win a larger proportion of funds available for your internal projects?

Continuous improvement programs are extremely important. In a world of constant change you cannot afford to let your ERP rust away. ERP projects are essentially people projects. If you understand the stages of ERP-enabled transformation then you will agree that the journey remains ongoing. This interactive presentation explores the good old ERP value proposition - for mature (SAP) organisations in 2010:

• What are best practices for accelerating, maximising and sustaining the benefits of the ERP journey?
• How can you keep your financial skills, processes and systems current and aligned with your business strategy?
• How can you continuously identify practices that contribute to maximising the value?
• And above all: How can you convince your board?

Is your current infrastructure for monitoring and analysing spend manual and cumbersome, sometimes resulting in untrustworthy analysis and unrealised savings? Are there multiple unexploited or partially exploited opportunities for increased management of spend, including Marketing and IT costs? Find out how Autodesk solved this problem and is on track to get $3.5m of annualised savings with SAP’s help - by implementing SAP Spend Performance Management.

• The business case for SAP Spend Performance Management implementation
• Getting the most out of the organisation data (Spend and Supplier)
• Implementation using SaaS solution with third party
• Lessons learned, or “I wish somebody had told us before …”

SAP release: ECC5 & BI 7.0
Original go-live date: June 1994

SOX compliance is one of the biggest challenges of today’s business environment. Maintaining access control and segregation of duties can be complicated and resource consuming. In this presentation you will hear how the world’s biggest car maker used the SAP GRC tools to ensure sustainable and long term compliance.

• The business drivers behind implementing Virsa
• Establishing the governance model
• Using Virsa to automatically enforce segregation of duties
• Monitoring and controlling super user access
• Come and listen to our story of challenge and success
• See the real journey to solve the compliance headache

SAP release: ECC5 & Virsa 5.2
Original go-live date: July 1999

In an economy that still creates uncertainty, organisations are turning over every stone to maximise investments and streamline operations. Accounts Payable (AP) is often a department that is criticised for its inefficiencies suffering under the burden of paper and manual processing, resulting in high error rates, increased costs and delayed cycle times. Whilst leading companies recognise the value of transforming their AP processes through
automation, understanding the key considerations when selecting the appropriate automation solution is vital to ensuring peak operating performance and the establishment of a platform for continuous improvement to maximise ROI.

Gain valuable information with regard to the solution selection process - the questions to ask of solution providers, the traps and pitfalls of not knowing your current processes and processing costs, how to accurately assess these and use it in your decision making process, getting “buy-in” from stakeholders and last but not least, the importance of choosing a “good-fit” solution that provides long-term benefits that align with company goals.

• Developing the vision for AP best practice to align with company goals
• Understand the business benefits of automation to the entire organisation
• Ensuring strong commitment from stakeholders at the onset
• The importance of evaluating your current processes and the costs involved
• Key considerations for selecting the right solution
• Understanding the importance of integration with your SAP system

Changes to the profit center structure in SAP can impact thousands of cost centers and materials and millions of purchase orders, sales orders and projects. If the structure is not changed correctly, years of tedious corrections can result.

• Explore the latest SAP ERP functionality available from Enhancement Pack 5 that provides a single point of entry for defining, triggering, monitoring and reporting on a reorganisation plan that allows for a smooth transition between profit centers
• Learn how to ensure that all the materials, cost centers, orders and projects currently assigned to the old profit center are identified and re-assigned
• Explore the benefits of using SAP to build your profit centre reorganisation plan, rather than doing it manually with spreadsheets and email distribution lists
• Learn how to split a profit center, merge two profit centers, or lock a profit center that is no longer required

Within this context, discover hints about:

• How to implement an enhancement package
• How to activate a business function
• How to make the necessary worklists available to your end users

A PS/IM financial year end can be a complex process, exacerbated by its infrequent occurrence, interdependencies between steps and inputs from different areas across the business. From start to finish, the process can span several months; the key is in the planning.

• Developing an end-to-end schedule
• Functions that need to be considered: IM carry-forward, PS carry-forward
• Timing: from opening a new year to closing the old year
• Getting the order of steps right
• Integrating with other financial year-end functions

SAP release: 4.6c
Original go-live date: June 1996

Finance is core to so many collaborative business processes from planning, to new product introduction, to customer credit management and collection. These business processes are typically poorly supported by the workflow implementation in your SAP system and are often manually intensive and heavily reliant on ad-hoc email communications. Learn how Microsoft Office and SharePoint Portal can be leveraged to support your world.

• Think in terms of processes, not transactions
• Change is inevitable - design a system that is agile
• Learn about the features available in Microsoft SharePoint
• SAP support for SharePoint as the foundation of DUET Enterprise
• Use Interactive SharePoint forms for finance processes and rapid workflow enablement
• Create role-specific workspaces incorporating analytics, collaboration and productivity views

Explore best practices for implementing and deriving maximum value from SAP General Ledger in SAP ERP.

Examine the differences between the general ledger you now rely on and the SAP General Ledger within SAP ERP and learn where the new functionality can streamline your organisation’s financial processes.

Hear how other SAP customers have implemented SAP General Ledger and get dos, don’ts and lessons learned from their experiences. Find out how to ensure data and process integrity by avoiding too many parallel ledger setups and incomplete or false segment definition. Acquire best practices for utilising splitting and zero balancing functionalities. This is also an opportunity to evaluate the new general ledger functionality delivered with the latest SAP enhancement package.

With upwards of 500,000 Purchase Orders created each year BlueScope Steel needs to fully utilise SAP Procure to Pay capabilities to both control the process and reduce transactional costs. Depending on the capability of the supplier, BlueScope can deploy the following options:

• Full B2B automation of the Procure to Pay Process
• Online Portal Entry of Invoice Claims
• Scanning solution of low transaction invoices into SAP for automated invoice entry

This presentation will cover the benefits of using each of these processes and give an overview of the implementation challenges.

SAP release: ECC6
Original go-live date: June 1994

Is Finance one of the most underserved Business Intelligence communities in your enterprise? SAP Finance users are already empowered with comprehensive content delivered in the latest enhancement packages of ERP 6.0, but this is just one part of the overall picture. Come and hear how to expand on this content by providing rich visualisation, flexible reporting and comprehensive analytical capability for the Finance Executive.

• Core SAP financial reporting vs. finance focused Business Intelligence
• The SAP Business User tools with a specific focus on the finance community
• Experience a reporting day in the life of a finance user
• Tips on how to get started

Learn how to be the coolest member of the Finance team with tips on how to select the right tool for each requirement and see practical examples of options available now and in the future.

In 2006, Super Cheap Auto Group implemented SAP BI 3.5 and EP 6.0 to address the future reporting/performance management requirements. This session will give an overview of challenges we faced as an organisation, particularly in the areas of:

• User acceptance
• Single source of the truth
• System integrity with large volumes of data
• Critical role of master data

Having recently upgraded to version 7, we are looking to leverage the functionality to support a process driven dashboard/reporting model using:

• BW Accelerator
• Bex 7.0 functionality
• Visual Composer (interactive demo integrating data from multiple sources)

SAP release: ECC6 & BI 7.0
Original go-live date: October 2002

In March 2008, the Federal Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) implemented a centralised, web-based budgeting solution using the BI-Integrated Planning functionality available within BI 7. The Budget Allocation Tool (BAT) is a very powerful tool which is used to plan, forecast and report on the Departments $80 billion annual expenditure budget.

The focus of this session will be a live demonstration of the system including:

• A peek at the Budget Administrators cockpit - how to flexibly manage and model business assumptions, salary scales, version management, copying plans etc.
• Budget data entry including FTE budgeting, OPEX and CAPEX budgeting, budget functions and budget layouts
• Budget vs. actual reporting, forecasting and variance analysis with drill-down available at individual employee level
• OPEX and CAPEX budgeting and reporting at Work Breakdown Structure level (Project Systems)
• Extra tip - how the Federal Government Gershon IT reporting requirements are being met using Work
  Breakdown Structures and SAP BI

SAP release: ERP 6.0 & BI 7.0
Original go-live date: June 1999

We all use many documents in financial business processes in parallel with SAP transactions every day. Come and hear how SAP makes it possible to integrate financially related documents into the business process and makes access and processing of documented information easy and intuitive from within your normal SAP financial transactions. The content management functionality in SAP will be explained, including:

• Scanning, imaging and workflow of documents with SAP - the SAP Easy Document Management system and its application for procedures etc.
• Records Management with SAP
• Contract Management with SAP
• Document searching and viewing alternatives in SAP
• Secure document storage with SAP
• Workflow of documents in SAP
• Third party Enterprise Content Management (ECM) products - their functions and relevance with SAP