GO Live CFIN programs or Organizations implementing CFIN in the world if available New Title: How To Implement SAP CFIN Successfully? Keywords: What Are The Benefits Of SAP Central Finance? Best Practices To Perform SAP Central Finance Implementation
Central Finance (also known as CFin) plays an important role in helping businesses integrate their financial platforms into SAP S/4HANA at a gradual shift. This is enabled instead of embarking on an intensive upfront data migration. For many organizations, the business case for implementing CFIN accurately revolves around the benefits of centralizing financial data without disturbing the sources systems or business processes where the data resides.
The first and foremost thing to remember when planning for Central Finance implementation is that it goes beyond a conventional data migration project. It is imperative to comprehend the data and perform this operation on a seamless initial data load from all the source systems throughout the enterprise. The user must do so in such a manner that makes it possible for the organization to replicate all the transactions that take place in the source systems on an on-going basis and transport them into the central finance in ‘near real-time’.
When an organization has a non-disruptive Central Finance model that pays dividends for the business, it requires an effective data migration project including its data mapping, harmonization, and integration activities. During data migration, it is important to lie down the groundwork and ensure that after the initial data load, an accurate and mission-critical data from the source systems is being replicated continuously into Central Finance. Having the right platform allows for the mapping and execution of the initial data load to Central Finance along with positioning the organization to build off that effort and keep the data in coordination.
What Are The Benefits Of SAP Central Finance?
As an increasing number of customers are planning to transition from ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA, it is imperative for many to think of taking advantage of the process improvements promised with SAP S/4HANA Finance. Central Finance is the popular route for such businesses that plan to avoid any long and expensive migration projects or that need to maintain a multi-ERP system landscape.
With Central Finance, it gets easier for the businesses to migrate their data from one system to another without any disruption. This ends the need of preemptively migrating all their data from one system to another. Implementing a Central Finance involves a replication process throughout the records that is achievable across IT systems and agnostic regarding business models.
Once this mapping is completed, there is no need to move data to separate applications for financial processes such as reporting, planning, and consolidation. This is because these processes are already embedded in the Central Finance system. The user can simply jump in and start using several SAP S/4HANA’s in-memory, predictive, cloud, and machine learning innovations common to the new suite.
SAP Central Finance is an effective approach to utilize S/4HANA Finance without interrupting the organization’s source SAP ERP frameworks. This is enabled after the establishment of the DMIS programming part and SAP Notes.
The user can also recreate the bookkeeping interface into the Universal Journal using Central Finance. This, in turn, lessens the requirement for clump handling, information duplication, integration, and compromise exercises.
Another benefit of SAP Central Finance is ongoing replication, which pays attention to improved detailing, a single hotspot for combination, the fast and effortless non-problematic movement to S/4HANA, and usage of other focal procedures such as central payments, in house cash for working capital, and central receivables. This real-time replication allows for quicker migration and better compliance.
What Are The Best Practices To Perform SAP Central Finance Implementation?
SAP Central Finance Implementation can be best performed by following the five best practices as mentioned below:
- Establish Standards It is important to establish standards and manage with a configuration governance council to enable a flawless implementation of SAP Central Finance. This centralized management of the new configuration includes its creation in source systems, in Central Finance, as well as in updating mapping values.
- Effective Governance of Master Data & Replication It is recommended to determine master data conversion strategy prior to testing and manage all finance master data that is being replicated centrally. One should not miss to govern and oversee the minimum number of views needed in Central Finance for master data i.e., Business Partner, Materials, etc. It is also important that the user does not allow the source systems to update master data. Rather, it is recommended to maintain it centrally and create its copy at both source and Central Finance simultaneously.
- Anticipate Issues With Initial Load Owing to the issues found in the early initial load cycles from a new source system, it requires significant time to resolve them. It is important to be sure to schedule enough initial load cycles for testing and utilize production-quality data in test environments with balance/document cut-offs to imitate production timings.
- Ensure Effective Communication It is important to ensure that an effective communication is maintained across support teams and finance organization to resolve errors. Having a dedicated team with sufficient resources to manage errors and maintain an error playbook as well as regularly communicating with Finance users about the status of replication, errors therein, status and expected error resolution times is extremely important.
- Maintain Vigilance On Errors & Reconciliation It is important to keep a close tab on all types of errors that might occur during the implementation process. The errors that are generated throughout the month in Application Interface Management Framework (AIF) are generally resolved during the month. However, there are some issues that remain open at month-end. Moreover, these errors might require SAP messages to resolve, and the time required to resolve them can be lengthy. There are chances that the configuration errors may remain open if the proper approvals are not received prior to month-end. Master data governance and configuration governance can minimize the number of replication errors, but other errors still occur.
Conclusion
SAP CFin can be successfully implemented by carefully planning the steps in advance and following the practices as recommended by the experts. With Central Finance, it gets easier for the finance leaders to take finance decisions proactively and in minimum time possible. Therefore, if you would like to get things done efficiently, reduce total cost of ownership, and harmonize data to assist the finance team, opt to carefully and successfully implement SAP Central Finance in your organization.
