While the COVID-19 out­break has affect­ed vir­tu­al­ly every aspect of busi­ness, com­pa­nies around the world have been pay­ing close atten­tion to their cash flows and pro­cure­ment process­es. In such uncer­tain times, it’s vital to keep a tight grip on com­pa­ny finances, while also look­ing for ways to con­tin­ue effec­tive­ly sourc­ing mate­ri­als and products.

“There has been a rapid accel­er­a­tion of how we stream­line the end-to-end requests and order­ing process,” said Chris Hay­don, pres­i­dent of SAP pro­cure­ment solu­tions, dur­ing a lead­er­ship pan­el dis­cus­sion at ASUGFORWARD.

Over two days, the finance and pro­cure­ment ses­sions at ASUG­FOR­WARD exam­ined how com­pa­nies are using busi­ness prac­tices and tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions to main­tain their cash flows and pro­cure­ment processes.

Pro­tect­ing Your People 

In the first ses­sion, Kei­th Combs, direc­tor of glob­al indi­rect pur­chas­ing at Ford Motor Com­pa­ny dis­cussed how the car man­u­fac­tur­er dealt with the ini­tial com­pli­ca­tions posed by the spread of COVID-19. Unlike a lot of com­pa­nies, Ford need­ed employ­ees to con­tin­ue report­ing to work on loca­tion as it pro­duced ven­ti­la­tors and cars. To ensure the safe­ty of its work­ers, Ford began tak­ing steps to mon­i­tor their health ear­ly into the outbreak.

“We’ve been putting scan­ning equip­ment in place, and cer­tain process­es and pro­ce­dures,” Combs said. ​“We’ve also been giv­ing employ­ees access to PPE (per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment) so they can get back to work.”

Using Tech­nol­o­gy to Bridge Pro­cure­ment Gaps 

While com­pa­nies have been forced to move huge por­tions of their work­forces out of the work­place and into the safe­ty of their homes, they have been able to keep up day-to-day oper­a­tions because of the tech­nol­o­gy and soft­ware solu­tions at their disposal.

“Many of our clients who are run­ning finance solu­tions are very hap­py that they have a dig­i­tal plat­form that will allow them to make use of this tech­nol­o­gy,” said Chris­t­ian Mnich, vice pres­i­dent and head of solu­tion man­age­ment, trea­sury, and work­ing cap­i­tal man­age­ment at SAP. ​“These solu­tions allow peo­ple to work from home and grant them access to busi­ness materials.”

Dur­ing SAP­PHIRE NOW 2020, the soft­ware com­pa­ny high­light­ed how the Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form and Intel­li­gent Enter­prise can assist cus­tomers as they nav­i­gate these uncer­tain times. At ASUG­FOR­WARD, atten­dees saw first-hand how SAP cus­tomer com­pa­nies are imple­ment­ing solu­tions to keep their busi­ness­es mov­ing ahead in spite of recent challenges.

In a ses­sion focused on Goodyear Tire and Rub­ber Company’s pro­cure­ment IT road map, Saleem Baheza­ad, Glob­al Busi­ness IT part­ner at Goodyear, and Rajiv Palkhi­wala, chief solu­tion archi­tect at SAP, walked atten­dees through the road map of Goodyear’s imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ari­ba, SAP Sup­pli­er Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment, and SAP Max­At­ten­tion to upgrade its pro­cure­ment process.

Enhanc­ing Finan­cial Fore­cast­ing and Tax Operations

Through­out the finance and pro­cure­ment ses­sions at ASUG­FOR­WARD, speak­ers shared how they updat­ed their IT process­es to gain access to bet­ter finance and pro­cure­ment man­age­ment solutions.

One ses­sion fea­tured three employ­ees of Air­bus Amer­i­c­as explain­ing how the com­pa­ny is using real-time ana­lyt­ics to make finan­cial deci­sions. Richard Mas­ci, head of finan­cial sys­tems ser­vices and com­pli­ance at Air­bus, detailed the SAP solu­tions the com­pa­ny is using includ­ing SAP Busi­ness Plan­ning and Con­sol­i­da­tion, SAP Busi­ness Ware­house, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Busi­ness Intel­li­gence. Darien Thayne, finan­cial sys­tems ana­lyst at Air­bus gave atten­dees a demo of the finan­cial dash­boards the com­pa­ny uses to fore­cast and ana­lyze finan­cial data.

In a lat­er ses­sion, Mike Spivey, senior con­sul­tant at Ver­tex, was joined by Jay­deep Dakhawe, IT project man­ag­er at First Solar, to walk the audi­ence through how First Solar deployed Ver­tex solu­tions along­side SAP soft­ware to upgrade its tax report­ing needs. Before the project, First Solar faced sev­er­al issues, includ­ing out­dat­ed sys­tems, inflex­i­ble sys­tems requir­ing a lot of main­te­nance, a lengthy accru­al report­ing process, and a lack of automa­tion. After work­ing togeth­er to upgrade First Solar’s IT stack with a mix of SAP and Ver­tex solu­tions, First Solar was able to decrease the time spent on tax research and on the invoice rec­on­cil­i­a­tion process. The com­pa­ny also was able to make sub­stan­tial improve­ments to its cor­po­rate tax operation.

Elim­i­nat­ing Man­u­al Processes 

One of the main themes through­out the finance and pro­cure­ment ses­sions at ASUG­FOR­WARD revealed how cus­tomers are work­ing to elim­i­nate man­u­al process­es in their systems.

Ang­ie Hal­der­man, the glob­al head of SAP Part­ner­ship at DocuSign dis­cussed the paper­less sig­na­ture tool and how it can help busi­ness­es be more efficient.

“Intel­li­gent enter­pris­es should nev­er end busi­ness process­es by print­ing pieces of paper to col­lect a sig­na­ture,” she said in her session.

Many speak­ers high­light­ed how they were lever­ag­ing tech­nol­o­gy to stop trans­mit­ting finan­cial data using Microsoft Excel.

“We want to move away from this,” said Sebas­t­ian Rogge, a finan­cial data ana­lyst for WR Grace, dur­ing his ses­sion about how the chem­i­cals com­pa­ny imple­ment­ed SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. ​“We want­ed users to pro­vide users with a full scale of ser­vices and move away from man­u­al processes.”

Sim­i­lar­ly, Michael Hub­bard, man­ag­er of finance, inno­va­tion, and trans­for­ma­tion at The Home Depot laid out the rea­sons why the home improve­ment retail­er imple­ment­ed Black­Line soft­ware with SAP solu­tions to auto­mate the company’s account­ing process.

“When we start­ed this jour­ney, a lot of our process­es were man­u­al­ly per­formed and main­tained in Excel,” she said. ​“There was no real cen­tral­ized place to keep the infor­ma­tion and mul­ti­ple jour­nal entries tem­ples were being used.”

Com­bin­ing Black­Line solu­tions with SAP S/4HANA, Hub­bard said The Home Depot was able to auto­mate its man­u­al process­es and improve its finan­cial workflows.

Reg­is­ter to watch all of the ASUG­FOR­WARD Finance and Pro­cure­ment ses­sions, along with the rest of the con­fer­ence. ASUG mem­bers will have unlim­it­ed access to all of the week’s ses­sions, while non­mem­ber reg­is­trants can view them until Sun­day, June 28 at 11:59 p.m. CT/​Monday, June 29 at 12:59 a.m. ET.