People are hard-wired to recognize and interpret faces with amazing speed, accuracy and attention to detail. Even as infants we quickly learn to know our own parents’ faces and to differentiate them from strangers’ faces. Throughout life, the ability to automatically pick up on subtle facial cues and to “read” the meaning behind them are critical factors for streamlining complex social interactions and enabling rapid decisions such as friend vs. foe, and cooperation vs. opposition.

Imagine if you met someone without a face. How would you even begin to interact with them?

Well, that’s how most CFOs and other C-level executives feel when they hear the term “Financial Transformation” without a way to clearly visualize what it means.

Accounting has traditionally been a backwards looking profession.  Let me be clear that I did not just call accountants backwards people, but in general their mandate has been to document, audit and verify what has already happened.

Some of the forces helping make these changes a reality are enterprise-wide integration of advanced analytics, unifying financial information in a single-source-of-truth, movement toward continuous-close processes and the rise of Machine Learning.

As companies grapple with accelerating changes across most global markets, they face critical challenges for staying ahead of competitors, sustaining growth, maximizing profitability, complying with regulatory requirements and establishing organizational agility to respond quickly to the unexpected.

Over recent years, companies throughout the world are experiencing a series of major changes in regulatory and compliance mandates that are disrupting existing accounting and business processes. 

We can all agree that any physical building needs to have a strong foundation to assure safety of the occupants and sufficient resilience to maintain structural integrity against external forces, such as wind, flood, earthquakes and other potentially damaging events.

If you think of today’s businesses as being like complex organisms, then it becomes easier to understand the critical role of advanced analytics in monitoring organizational health and supporting growth. Just as your body’s nervous system, immune responses and circulatory network provide continuous sensory feedback to identify problems and maintain healthy functioning, your company’s analytics processes are critical for organizational adaptation and survival.

For the past forty years, companies have been building all their financial and business decisions around information contained in traditional data structures. Virtually all financial systems, no matter who has designed them, have been built around relational databases.  This brings the same set of issues and challenges to every single system.

Today’s corporate finance professionals face an accelerating set of new challenges, changing compliance requirements and global competitive pressures that threaten to overwhelm the inherent limitations of their existing legacy finance and ERP systems.

On the occasion of our 20th Anniversary we want to take a moment to thank everyone who made this incredible journey possible. Most importantly, though, we thank you our customers, our partners and
our people without whom we could not be celebrating 20 years as an SAP Business Partner.