Money rules the world

Why only? In theory, the situation is quickly evaluated: The CFO is no longer the last link in a supply chain when it comes to posting the invoice, reconciling bank data, etc., but must be part of the core business and involved right at the start. The congress we both attended was about "The Future of Payments" and the value contribution of treasury - I learned a lot!

Now it's all about digitization again, which is why the CFO and the CIO arrived. Disruption is based on the networking of technology and processes.

Where the CFO can standardize workflow to achieve end-to-end and automated processing, the CIO can provide the framework with algorithms and data integration.

Easier said than done - I learned a lot at this congress: The old R/3 modules FI, AM and CO have been set for decades. What I didn't know is that numerous FI and CO functions have simply been hidden by SAP.

The areas of treasury, cash and liquidity management, risk management, controlling, finance and accounting, accounts receivable and accounts payable are naturally known at SAP, but in some cases not mapped in the depth that a CFO would like. As a result, there were SAP partners with add-ons at the congress that I hadn't thought of.

My CFO told me that Simple Finance is a good thing and that a sufficiently good treasury management system can be built with the SAP Treasury and Risk Management (TRM) module, but it is better with the relevant add-ons.

However, according to him, the real added value would come from the combination of S/4 Hana technology and add-ons - which is why he is also very happy to have my travel expenses posted to his cost center.

In the presentations, it quickly became clear where the journey should go: Process efficiency. CFOs expect greater process efficiency and security from digitalization in treasury. The former seemed logical to me from the CIO's point of view, the latter electrified me.

I thought we were adequately protected against attacks with our defenses and security efforts. But cyber security in the financial sector is a much broader field than just technical defenses, see social engineering. I think we need to upgrade here, too!

CFOs do not expect so much a reduction in costs from digitization, nor do they expect an improvement in decision-making quality. Here again, I had a divided opinion:

Yes, we have been diligent over the past years and SAP has done a good job with Simple Finance, so further cost reductions in operations are hardly possible.

As an enthusiastic AI fan, I disagree with you about improving the quality of decisions. I think that machine and deep learning are far from the end of the line here.

A few weeks ago, a colleague from Microsoft showed me what is possible when you combine SAP Simple Finance and Microsoft Machine Learning from the Azure cloud.

Microsoft's planning and forecasting accuracy surpasses anything I've seen in SAP-only systems. The features from Hana-PAL are worth noting, but this library doesn't come close to Microsoft's AI.

What I took away from our joint company outing: In many places, existing SAP customers see the switch to the new S/4 as an opportunity to integrate systems more closely.

In this respect, the system question is also posed anew. This can be an opportunity to make treasury processes more efficient with a new or optimized system solution. There are more SAP partners for Simple Finance, Treasury, etc. than suspected.

Together with our CFO, I will now provide holistic support for the processes: from the web store with the credit check and credit insurance to bank communication, fee management and control.