Driving Value Through Industry and Line of Business Solutions

When SAP’s acquisition of BusinessObjects was first announced in October 2007, one of the things that I heard people saying most often was that SAP was going to spend the next 5 years integrating a bunch of acquired technologies and would do so at the expense of innovation. Having been party to at least 5 previous acquisitions in the preceding 8 years it won’t be a surprise to many that it was not exactly the first time I’d heard that. It’s fair comment after all…when you acquire a technology you need to integrate it in order to extract value but when SAP designed its current enterprise performance management (EPM) roadmap innovation was at the heart of it.

By designing a roadmap which delivered integration it also factored in a healthy dose of innovation not least of which is the ability to enable a complete closed-loop performance management process which it announced in January of this year and which attracted significant attention with a subsequent certification by Kaplan and Norton. This built upon its visionary and unique integration between its EPM and governance, risk and compliance solutions which it has continued to progress still further with exciting announcements expected later in the year. However one area of innovation which is often over-looked is the value that it’s creating through new line of business and industry solutions. BusinessObjects had a long history of delivering such solutions on its core EPM applications. Solutions to support planning processes in healthcare, banking and retail proved extremely popular with customers, as did its IFRS and US-GAAP starter kits designed to speed time to value for consolidation implementations.

Since the acquisition this has not gone away and SAP has been heavily investing to deliver additional solutions in this area including new solutions for planning in the public sector and Consumer Products built on SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, Retail Store Profitability based on SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management and new solutions for Banking and Retail based on SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management.

Its latest showpiece was unveiled this week at the SAP Insider Financials event in Orlando and in an effort to further help organizations streamline the entire capital-expenditure planning process SAP announced a starter kit for capital planning also built on the planning and consolidation application. The new starter kit provides an automated way to request, plan, model and evaluate large, complex projects as well as smaller, simpler ones. Developed in collaboration with SAP partner Aster Group, the starter kit is especially helpful for organizations in capital-intensive industries like automotive, chemicals and oil and gas. Pre-built templates and content Its also features embedded analyses of investment returns using industry-standard methodologies such as internal rate of return and payback period.

By all accounts this is not the last we will hear from SAP in this domain and the latest version of its EPM roadmap highlights this as an area of continued focus. In the keynote at SAP Insider Financials this week it gave us a glimpse of this as it demoed a forthcoming solution for Customer Value Analysis built on its Profitability and Cost Management solution. This focus is it seems at the heart of its EPM vision and rightly so. By taking its core applications and delivering these solutions it’s leveraging its assets in the form of the technology but also the domain expertise it has acquired. Good for SAP but also good for the customer who is able to take this content, speed time to value and ultimately deliver a higher return on investment than it would have done if it had started with a blank canvass. ROI being a topic to which I intent to return to in this blog very shortly.