Finance with SAP S/4HANA

Enterprises today are increasingly experiencing a new normal of volatility that is  fundamentally changing how they engage with their investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and employees. This volatility is driven not only by traditional areas of currency exchange risk and commodity prices but also by macroeconomic volatility and rapidly changing consumer and employee preferences. Additionally, tax policy volatility and complex regulatory requirements are challenging finance to capture, analyze and provide deeper and more relevant real-time information.

The role of finance itself is evolving towards active engagement with business partners, simplifying and automating processes, enabling new questions to be asked that were never possible and delivering new insights during the decision-making process. Leading finance organizations are driving digital transformation and fundamentally changing the way they bill, collect, report, and pay taxes, and how they plan for and manage a constantly changing business. Finance’s role is expanding as it leans into innovation to creatively adapt to change, manage volatility, and to find new opportunities to create value.

SAP S/4HANA is the finance innovation platform that enables today’s digital business by bringing business processes and analytics together into a single, smooth, digital motion. It provides the foundation for continuous innovation by allowing customers to benefit from newest SAP Leonardo innovations as they emerge along with the ability to leverage extended finance for procurement, workforce management, travel & expense management, etc. The time to innovate and transform is now and SAP supports a live business for all roles of the office of the CFO.

SAP S/4HANA for central finance foundation
Provides a non-disruptive path to adopt SAP’s latest finance simplifications and innovations for customers with heterogeneous landscapes, out-of-maintenance, and/or highly customized SAP systems. It provides a unified financial and management platform to centralize process execution, planning, and reporting based on the same (single source of the truth) data. Benefits include advanced reporting at the segment, entity, or group level; business-model-agnostic rollups for reorganizations and M&A modeling; scalable local and central process execution (complementing process execution in source ERPs); and a starting point for finance shared services across business units.

Transformation platform for the digital enterprise
Create an advanced digital data architecture (universal journal), a platform to include future innovations, a single source of the truth for both transactions and analytics, and a digital core to include integration for workforce, network, customers, and new innovations enabled by SAP Leonardo, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Field glass solutions.

Rapid value creation with minimal disruption
Massive simplification and optimization within SAP S/4HANA can be deployed with minimal business disruption to accelerate business value and capture and eliminate the need for overly complex processes.Additional value can be achieved by deploying solutions and templates within our SAP Activate methodology, standardizing master data using the SAP Master Data Governance application, and focusing effort on the reduction or elimination of legacy custom code.

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Mid-year review – 2018 Technology Predictions from Approyo

Every year, the team at Approyo puts together a few predictions for the upcoming year. We published our original predictions back at the start of 2018 and now that we are half through the year, we thought we would revisit these predictions.

IT predictions for 2018

• Cloud First - It's not a question of "if" the Cloud and more. Companies of all shapes and sizes need the cloud to innovate in a digital world. You can't be on the sidelines anymore and 2018 is the year to fully embrace the cloud. 
• Everything as a service - Traditional business products are being re-imagined as services.
• AI and Machine Learning - Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously. SAP introduces SAP Leonardo this year that has many features for AI and Machine Learning that can help companies today. 
• Security – As we mentioned in our first bullet point, the cloud is the new normal. Your data is one of the most important aspects of your business. Cloud and hosting partners will need to continue to adapt security measures to protect this valuable information.

Observations from the first half of 2018
Through the first half of the year, the Cloud continues to be more and more important. One of the major themes from this years SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference was that the cloud is the foundation to achieve the intelligent enterprise through SAP Solutions.

Additionally, security continues to be an important topic throughout the year and into the future. As your company continues to create more and more data, securing that data becomes more important. That’s why we recently announced a new partnership with Bohh Labs. BOHH Labs brings an easy to implement service that acts as a layer between the user/ application and the back-end data store. BOHH enables total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, removing it from the source and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed through keyboard, text-and-type from any device and voice commands to enhance the access flow to data within the system. This means sensitive and non-sensitive data residing in SAP HANA can easily be searched at once in real-time to extract valuable analytical insights without putting sensitive data that must stay protected at risk by hiding it away for access by authorized users only.

Data also continues to be an important trend. We already talked about the security side of data, but another important aspect is how companies are using that data. Another major focus on SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 was how companies need to implement the right technology foundation in order to use all the data they are producing in an intelligent way. This will continue to be an important trend for the rest of the year and beyond.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Approyo named one of the 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans of 2018 by Insights Success

Approyo is excited to announce it has been named one of the 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans of 2018 by Insights Success.

Insights Success is a platform that focuses distinctively on emerging as well as leading companies, their confrontational style of doing business and way of delivering effective and collaborative solutions to strengthen market share. This magazine talks about leaders and orators from the world of technology, which includes CEOs, CIOs, VPs, managers and other professionals who had set a benchmark in the revolution of the industry.

“We are honored to be part of this great list of companies" said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. "This achievement continues to validate our success in the SAP and Cloud marketplace.”

“Upon Review of the nominees listed in The 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans, 2018, with consideration of aspects such as prolificacy in the application and delivery of technology, provision of all-encompassed solutions and services, and an ambitious global ascension, Approyo has excelled pertaining to its complete SAP service technology in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for its customers,” asserts the Editor-in-Chief of Insights Success Magazine, Pooja M. Bansal.

View the full profile: https://www.insightssuccess.com/approyo-customer-centric-sap-cloud-solutions/

30 Most Valuable Tech Titans of 2018 list: https://www.insightssuccess.com/the-30-most-valuable-tech-titans-2018-may2018/

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Insights Success Magazine
Insights Success is a forum where top leaders and executives talk and share about their experiences, views, and mantra for success which will help the young and dynamic bloodline of professionals to learn, cater and deliver business needs for customers in order to become futuristic market leaders.

BOHH Labs and Approyo Announce OEM Agreement for Enhanced Security within SAP HANA Environment

BOHH Labs, the leading provider of seamless and secure access to data, today announces an OEM agreement with Approyo, a leading enterprise SAP HANA Solutions Provider. The agreement brings a bundled solution that offers SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA Cloud environments with a secure method to easily enable access to all enterprise systems for increased business flexibility and productivity.

The market demand to adopt Cloud deployments is rapidly gaining momentum, but security, performance disruption and accessibility are still challenging progression. Under the agreement, Approyo will integrate BOHH’s capabilities to enable better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA and mitigate these setbacks. This will offer their customers better security for their data and business flow to leverage the benefits of SAP HANA and convert real-time analytics into business decisions.

Approyo has been providing solutions powered by SAP HANA®, such as the latest version of SAP S/4HANA®, in the cloud for the last three years. Approyo built an entire platform using the best solutions in the market, helping companies move to SAP HANA quickly and benefit immediately with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration.

BOHH Labs brings an easy to implement service that acts as a layer between the user/ application and the back-end data store. BOHH enables total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, removing it from the source and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed through keyboard, text-and-type from any device and voice commands to enhance the access flow to data within the system. This means sensitive and non-sensitive data residing in SAP HANA can easily be searched at once in real-time to extract valuable analytical insights without putting sensitive data that must stay protected at risk by hiding it away for access by authorized users only.

“Approyo is proud to offer this new security solution to our customer base,” said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. “I believe our industry leading SAP Cloud Solutions and BOHH Labs’ award-winning solution recognized in the SAP+Google Cloud Intelligent App Challenge, makes for a unique combination for SAP customers looking to move to the Cloud.”

“This agreement is a great step for everyone involved – joining together with Approyo, we can now help SAP customers increase their business flow through a secure Cloud that allows them access to all of their sensitive documents using one quick search of all their finding requirements,” said Simon Bain, CEO of BOHH Labs. “By partnering with Approyo, we can address customer demands and focus our capabilities on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the Cloud.”

The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the Cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data.

SAP HANA and the Digital Economy

IT groups no longer need to rely on 20th-century technology while seeking a strategic role in 21st-century business innovation. The revolutionary SAP HANA® platform lets you perform all transaction and analytic processing in-memory and make data instantly available from a single system. Fend off competitors by building smart, insight-driven applications your business needs to take immediate action and capitalize on change.

INCREASE EFFICIENCY, DEEPEN INSIGHT,  AND ADAPT TO CHANGE QUICKLY
Help your business accelerate the pace of innova-tion by moving to SAP HANA. Choose the game-changing in-memory platform that combines a database that complies with the standards for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) with advanced analytical processing, appli-cation development, and flexible data integration capabilities. Remove the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and their silos of data, so you can Run Simple in this ever-changing digital economy, where new technologies and solutions emerge at Internet speed.One of the most challenging roadblocks to innova-tion today is the sheer complexity of IT systems. SAP HANA can help you simplify your infrastruc-ture. As illustrated in the figure, SAP HANA con-verges database, advanced analytical processing, application development capabilities, and data integration in-memory to process transactions; analytics; text analysis; and spatial, streaming, and machine data processing in one system. You can operate in real time and accelerate business trans-formation by integrating core business processes with customer data, supplier data, and data from the Internet of Things.

The massively parallel, in-memory paradigm underlying SAP HANA speeds information pro-cessing by a quantum leap. This architecture converges online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) opera-tions on a single data copy in one in-memory, column-based data store. SAP HANA, in short, eliminates data redundancy, disk latency, and data movement among applications and analytical tools. And it provides advanced integration capa-bilities such as data virtualization, replication, bulk loading, transformation, cleansing, and remote data synchronization in the same architecture. This further simplifies application development and processing across Big Data sources.

SAP HANA is the platform for all existing applications – your legacy software, third-party software, and SAP software – and the optimal platform for building and deploying next-generation, real-time applications; machine learning applications; and predictive analytics. You can perform business operations and data analysis in minutes rather than hours, untangle your data center operations by integrating all data into a single truth, and lay the groundwork for reimagining business models. Plus, you stand ready to help expand and diversify your business with minimal IT growing pains.

View the full blog post on www.approyo.com

What is the SAP Intelligent Enterprise?

One of the most talked about topics at this years SAP SAPPHIRE NOW in June was The Intelligent Enterprise. This topic was  in nearly every keynote, speech and marketing material at the event. So what exactly is SAP's new strategy.

The next era of enterprise computing will be defined by intelligent technologies

For more than 45 years, SAP has been on a journey with our customers, helping them create value for their organizations by applying technology to solve some of their most complex challenges. In each era of enterprise computing, SAP has evolved our strategy – and product portfolio – so our customers can run better. In the 1960s and 1970s, as mainframe computing gained popularity, we enabled our first customers to automate their plant floor operations with material-requirements planning software. In the 1990s, as companies expanded their use of the Internet, SAP helped connect our customers’ headquarters with their subsidiaries through SAP R/3® software for enterprise resource planning.

And, over the past 10 years, as cloud computing and Big Data have become ever more pervasive, with SAP HANA software, along with SAP's extensive portfolio of cloud applications, has helped our customers begin their own digital transformations. Now, as technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), advanced analytics and blockchain become mainstream, SAP has a new opportunity – to help turn our customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises, with new capabilities that enable their workforces to focus on higher-value outcomes.

Intelligent technologies will drive a next-generation value economy

Advances in machine learning are enabling algorithms to become highly accurate in natural language understanding and in image and speech recognition. Businesses can use these  increasingly sophisticated capabilities to  drive the next level of intelligent business- processes automation and eliminate  repetitive manual tasks.

Automation can now also be  implemented far more cost-effectively, because it is embedded more and more  within business processes. All of which  means that the workforce will be able  to focus on high-value activities like customer success, strategic planning, and innovation.

Advances in ubiquitous connectivity  and edge computing are creating a step change in business productivity.  This connectivity, coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, can  be used to analyze petabytes of data to affect real business outcomes.  IoT can connect the entire value chain,  from design to production to supply chain, and data-driven insights of customer  preferences can inspire better design, lower material costs, and reduce risk.

Real-time analysis of machines can predict maintenance needs, identify potential  quality problems in manufacturing  processes before they occur, and reduce  asset downtime by as much as 50%. The integration of advanced analytics  capabilities into applications allows  business users to analyze data on the fly  and informs better decision-making. Empowered users, benefiting from embedded analytics in business  processes, can get real-time visibility  into their changing environment, simulate the impact of business decisions, and achieve better customer outcomes.

Future business challenges will be radically different 

The global economic growth of the last nine years has been powered largely by technology. Record corporate profits and new business models can all be tied to technology-driven innovation. On average, an S&P 500 company is now being replaced once every two weeks. This “tumble rate” is accelerating – with the difference between winners and losers tied to their ability to embrace digital technologies. The next decade will, of course, bring about even greater tectonic shifts. To address these challenges, businesses need to make sense of a growing volume of data, create a step change in productivity, and innovate with relentless clock-speed. In other words, they need to accelerate value creation. This is the heart of the Intelligent Enterprise.

To help businesses become Intelligent Enterprises and achieve breakthrough outcomes, SAP provides three essential components:

Intelligent Suite - Will offer unparalleled, breakthrough business value. SAP provides intelligent, integrated applications that enable our customers to automate their day-to-day business processes and better interact with their customers, suppliers, and employees. These applications will be industry specific, global, and applicable to large enterprises and to small and midsize enterprises.

Digital Platform - Will enable data-driven intelligence and innovation.
With the SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Data Management Suite, SAP will facilitate the collection, connection and orchestration of data, as well as the integration and extension of processes within the intelligent suite.

The Intelligent EnterpriseIntelligent Technologies - Will embed intelligence in applications and facilitate new co-innovations.
With SAP Leonardo, SAP will embed intelligent technologies in customers’ core processes, enabling them to use their data to detect patterns, predict outcomes and suggest actions. For customers who want to innovate even faster, SAP solutions will offer industry innovation kits and open innovation services, which apply design thinking methodologies to new business models by industry.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

The Cloud Helpers Blog Series - GRC (governance, risk management and compliance)

GRC (governance, risk management and compliance) software allows companies to integrate and manage IT operations that are subject to regulation. Such software typically combines applications that manage the core functions of GRC into a single integrated package.

GRC software enables an organization to pursue a systematic, organized approach to managing GRC-related strategy and implementation. Instead of keeping data in separate "silos," administrators can use a single framework to monitor and enforce rules and procedures. Successful installations enable organizations to manage risk, reduce costs incurred by multiple installations and minimize complexity for managers.

Why is GRC software important?

• GRC software can satisfy the needs of multiple stakeholders, including:
• Business executives that need to identify and manage risk.
• Finance managers assigned to meet regulatory compliance requirements.
• Legal counsels grappling with discovery and records retention.
• IT directors managing software installations related to GRC projects across an organization.

Data retention and risk management procedures mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), HIPAA, Basel II and regional regulations have all placed unprecedented pressure on IT administrators to coordinate enterprise-wide tracking and organization of compliance measures. As a result, the GRC software category has rapidly become a hotly contested space between industry giants like SAP, Oracle, IBM, CA and a host of other companies. Given the complex regulatory burden imposed upon both executives and IT administrators, the tools provided by GRC software will become increasingly important to meeting the new standards.

SAP GRC Powered by Approyo
SAP GRC Powered by Approyo provides customers with a flexible, innovative solution that can include SAP maintenance fees, hosting and hardware, and implementation and functional support services. In addition, customers may deploy the GRC applications as an entire suite or as individual elements, based upon needs and budget.

SAP GRC Powered by Approyo offers clients accelerated deployment with the benefit of a significantly lower operating cost model.

• SAP GRC Software in the Cloud - Obtain SAP software licenses and maintenance for multi-year term on a monthly OpEx model. ​
• Managed SAP Application Services Delivered in the Cloud - Application management services and business process solutions to  ensure your applications adapt as your business grows. 
• Application Support / Managed Services for Your SAP Applications - Functional application support for  Security, GRC and IDM applications post Go-Live. Result driven with ongoing remediation and process improvement.
• ​Rapid Deployment of GRC Applications - Leverage a range of implementation, education, training & project management accelerators, to drive a rapid time to value for the deployment of your SAP GRC Application.

Experience Digital Transformation with Approyo
The opportunity exists to transform business processes and achieve the digital transformation of your business with more automation and real-time visibility. Our SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA and Cloud solutions address these important needs and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

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