SAP - Simple Finance

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What is SAP? 

Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing.

How is SAP related to Finance?

You got to be kidding me, SAP has been evovled mainly to serve the financial needs of a company or any enterprise for that matter. Well, every company incurs profit/loss and has sales, debts and taxes to pay, inventories to take care of, create a balance sheet etc. SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system which takes care of all these requirements. The only thing you have to do is learn how to use the system. SAP certifications are pretty expensive. But, you ought to invest in it as it surely would turn out to be an incredible asset.

Facts about SAP 

• Founded by five former IBM employees in 1972 in Walldorf, Germany. 

• Leading global provider of client/server business software solutions. 

• Number one vendor of standard business application software, with a worldwide market share of 31%. 

• Fourth-largest independent software supplier in the world. 

• Available in 14 languages. 

• 34% of SAP's customers worldwide are under $200 million. 

• 10 out of the top 10 US companies with the highest market value use SAP software. 

• 8 of the top 10 largest US corporations use SAP software. 

• 8 of the top 10 highest profit US companies use SAP software. 

• More than 7500 customers in over 90 countries have chosen SAP. 

• Reported revenues of DM 6 billion in the most recent fiscal year, a 62-percent increase over 1996 revenues. 

• SAP is not any longer a one-product-company

Reasons to Use SAP

• Global Basis 

• Faster Speed 

• Flexibility for Changes (Business & IT) 

• Agility 

• Extended Supply Chain Management(SCM)

• Reach New Opportunity 

• Knowledge Sharing 

• Creativity Focus 

Guys, the facts have been added from standard data sources to stress upon its  importance. Yes, when I started to learn, I found it quite complicated as it is not a very user friendly interface. But, trust me it calculates and processes mammoth of data in seconds. Does it sound like I am being paid to market this stuff? Well no, this baby sells itself! 

I would like to stress upon one of the recent developments in SAP which brought about a sea-change in working methods & data processing-SAP Simple Finance. Actually, this system was introduced in my project and we got the feel of how the data is groomed faster with a really impressive U.I (User interface). I would just like to share an overview without getting into many technical jargon.

SAP Simple Finance

Traditional systems relied on inflexible models, pre-computed data, and slow computational systems. SAP HANA and SAP Simple Finance give an agile approach to financial management and planning. They eliminate needless duplication and pre-computation of data which clog other systems, lowering your cost of managing financials. 

SAP Simple Finance, based on SAP HANA in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, delivers real-time insights to CFOs and finance departments so that they can transform their business. SAP Simple Finance takes full advantage of the in-memory SAP HANA platform (i.e a database that uses a system's main memory for data storage)  with new finance capabilities, offers a new and beautiful user experience for easy access.

I understand this piece to be just a drop in the vast ocean of SAP. But rest assured, it is not the end. It's one of the most fascinating topics I have come across and you got to devote time to swallow the huge chunk of data it holds.

- Shubhangi Kulkarni ( XIME-Bangalore : PGDM 2015-17)