As today’s globally competitive landscape requires companies to tailor their organizations to be more responsive to local and regional market and customer requirements, they also must deal with increasing challenges for enterprise-wide integration and efficiency.

Companies that offer products and services to consumers are currently grappling with multiple tidal waves of disruption across virtually all industry segments.

Treasury is one of the most important aspects within the Office of the CFO and is a critical factor for success in every company. However, treasury functions are not always unified and integrated. In too many companies, the evolution of disparate applications for cash, banking, risk management and other key treasury missions has created a patchwork of legacy systems that can stifle productivity and increase risks.

Over recent years, companies have focused significant time and effort to comply with revenue recognition standards ASC 606 and IFRS 15. In previous blog posts, we’ve drilled down and looked at various aspects of RevRec compliance including the importance of Optimization and Integration, options for deploying SAP RAR in the Cloud, and leveraging Analytics for Disclosure Reporting.

As we move into 2021, companies are finalizing their plans, budgets and operational improvement processes for the coming year. One of the key challenges that many organizations face is how best to optimize and integrate their ASC 842 / IFRS 16 compliance within their overall business systems.

The implementation of new Revenue Recognition standards, ASC 606 and IFRS 15, has been a major compliance undertaking for nearly all companies throughout the globe over the past six years.

Companies in the SAP ecosystem need to carefully consider their options and start planning now for the inevitable migration to S/4HANA. While the discontinuance of ECC support has been rescheduled to 2027, it is critical that you not wait too long to evaluate what the best path will be for your company.

It is also important to remember that this will be much more than just a software upgrade. S/4HANA represents a unique opportunity for undertaking truly transformational changes and improvements across the entire enterprise.

Dashboards have become a hot topic across a widening range of application areas over recent years. However, it is important to remember that “dashboard” is much more than just a buzzword.

Just as the dashboard in your car is designed to organize and present a variety of information in a logical, prioritized and easy-to-interpret manner for fast on-the-fly decisions, an effective software dashboard needs to follow similar disciplines.

Among the numerous compliance and regulatory changes over recent years, ASC 606 on Revenue Recognition has been one of the most significant and challenging for companies to implement.

Treasury executives are facing an unprecedented confluence of challenges today, with no reasonable prospect that the massive waves of change will be easing up any time soon.  In addition to the black swan event of a global pandemic that has literally shutdown economic activity in much of the world, companies are also dealing with other high volatility forces, such as the Russia vs Middle East oil production standoff and global currency fluctuations.

These and other related forces are combining to create significant new challenges for Treasury, which in turn is accelerating the already existing trend toward greater integration and interoperability of various treasury-related software applications.  For example, management of cash positions, working capital and hedges against external risk factors are prime focus areas that can benefit from enterprise-wide visibility along with flexible analytics tools and agile response mechanisms.

Overall risk management entails these four key areas:

• Financial: Cash, Foreign Exchange, Commodities, Exposures, Credit
• Geo-political: Taxes, Tariffs, Trade, Political
• Business Continuity: People, Processes, Supply Chain, Equipment, Real Estate
• Security: Data, Systems, People, Property, Brand/Reputation

Security issues span all aspects of a business. For more info, watch the video of this webinar on Risk and Exposure.  In this post, we are focused on three areas, Financial, Geo-political, and Business Continuity, all of which have significant relevance to enterprise-wide treasury integration.