2020 Central Finance Exchange: Customer Insights
2020 Central Finance Exchange: Customer Insights
TruQua recently participated, along with Magnitude and SAP, in the 2020 Central Finance Exchange. The virtual event brought together Finance & IT Executives from over 50 companies to discuss best practices, lessons learned, future plans, and to get an update on the Central Finance roadmap.
Prior to the event SAP collected information from these companies, via a survey, to understand their objectives, business priorities, planned solution implementations, their current landscape, and more.
Company Profiles
There were 15 different industries represented at this year’s event, with Consumer Goods & Services (24%) representing the largest number of participants. Attendees represented four different regions with the majority coming from North America (47%) and 24% of attendees representing global companies. In addition:
- 41% of participants in the benchmarking survey represented companies with revenue from $1-$25B, 21% represented $25-$50B, and 35% were in the $50B+ category.
- 38% of participants have 100K+ employees, another 38% have 0-25K employees, 19% have 50-100K employees, and 6% have 25-50K employees.
- 34% have 10+ SAP systems, another 34% have 5-10 SAP systems, and the remaining 31% have 0-4 SAP systems.
- 50% of the respondents have 0-4 live SAP systems, 31% have 5-10 live SAP systems and 19% have 10+ live SAP systems.
Business Priorities & Goals
Survey participants were also asked to list their business priorities. These included, Transparency & Accountability (74%), Speed & Efficiency (62%), Operating Costs & Productivity (59%), Strategy/Planning to Execution (35%), Revenue (12%), Service Level (12%) and Other (3%).
In addition, participants shared their goals as they pertain to Central Finance. These goals included, Finance/Business Transformation (91%), Central Finance as a Stepping Stone to S/4 (62%), Process Centralization (53%), Application/System Consolidation (50%), Merger & Acquisition (41%), Shared Service-Based Process Execution (38%), Innovation Adoption/Acceleration (38%), Most-Merger Integration (29%), and Process Automation/Machine Learning (29%).
Project Data & Objectives
As it pertains to project data, 53% of survey respondents have a high finance transformation level, 29% are at medium, and 15% have a low finance transformation level. 44% say they have a high data harmonization level, 32% are at medium, and 21% say they have a low data harmonization level. In terms of objectives in the context of Central Finance, Finance and Business Transformation takes the lead at 82%, followed by Standardized and Scalable Finance Processes and Execution at 65%, with Advanced Segment, Entity and Group Reporting at 62%.
Live & Targeted Solutions
As it pertains to live and targeted solutions Financial Planning & Analysis and Intercompany Management were the most planned solutions tied at 56%. General Ledger Accounting was ranked the highest live solution at 56%, from there Financial Reporting and Management Reporting are both live in 47% of respondent’s environments.
Conclusion
Despite this year’s event being virtual, a great time was had by all. The participation was excellent, the presentations shared were invaluable and the interactive discussions and connections made are irreplaceable. We are already looking forward to the 2021 event!
For the latest information and updates on SAP Central Finance, contact the TruQua team today at info@truqua.com. If you’d like to learn about Magnitude’s SourceConnect solution, which is now available through SAP as an SAP Solution Extension, visit: Magnitude SourceConnect.