SAP and Deloitte are working together to make batch processing for ERP a thing of the past
German software giant SAP said Wednesday that it is partnering with international consulting firm Deloitte in a bid to create customised financial management software based on the SAP HANA cloud platform. The companies said they aim to leverage in-memory compute capabilities in order to make processes that traditionally require batch processing available in real-time.
SAP said it is working to modernise its ERP Financials solution to including native HANA capabilities that allow for more “on-the-fly” processing for things like month-end activities, which have traditionally taken long periods of time to process in batches.
It has also worked with consulting firm Deloitte to create a common source of information for all regulatory and managerial accounting processes in a bid to make it easier for customers to customise their ERP platforms for their regional and vertical markets without having to do much manual tweaking.
“Deloitte has been collaborating with SAP on the next generation finance solutions and we have significant experience with SAP HANA, as we use it within our own financial systems,” said Jan Waals, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and global SAP practice leader.
“The role of the CFO and the CFO’s team continues to evolve, and this new wave of innovation will allow finance professionals to access information in new ways enabled by the speed and power of SAP HANA. This will help to drive ongoing finance transformation as we see it at Deloitte,” Waals said.
Deloitte has partnered with other cloud service providers before, contributing its deep knowledge of the regulatory environment around a range of industry verticals. Earlier this year the company partnered with NetSuite to help the SaaS ERP provider improve its targeting of niche industry verticals.
Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board of SAP AG said that the partnership will allow both companies to develop technical solutions based on the in-memory computing platform that can bring more predictability and agility to financial processing.
“We see CFOs around the globe starting the next wave of finance transformations to cope with the new normal of business reality and partner more closely with the business,” Leukert said. “Technology is a major enabler of this transformation.”
The move may be welcomed among those using SAP’s software. Many using the company’s flagship ERP products, particularly in the ‘just-in-time’ sectors, through a variety of technical workarounds aim to make the software emulate a real-time system. But by leveraging SAP HANA the software company claims to be building those capabilities directly into the platform without much data duplication or I/O overhead, which could help keep its customers from moving off the platform and adopting more lightweight SaaS-based ERP offerings from younger market entrants.