How to Reduce the Cost, Time and Effort Spent During Your SAP® S/4HANA Transition

Blog post

If you have not already, it is likely that you will soon embark on the transition to a consolidated SAP® S/4HANA instance for your business, and for good reason. Due to events like mergers and acquisitions, or just the natural growth of an organization, most finance organizations have a heterogeneous ERP application landscape and many see the migration to S/4HANA as the natural solution.

Sadly, organizations all-too-often use their S/4HANA migration as a reason to ignore or postpone improvements to their financial controls and compliance framework, and the subsequent substantial benefits of such efforts for their office of finance.

Fortunately, implementing a System of  Controls, such as Cadency by Trintech® alongside an ERP migration not only reduces the cost, time and effort spent on the migration, but also produces notable ROI throughout the Record to Report (R2R) process itself.

How a System of Controls Makes Migration Easier

While well-intentioned, such a complex update of transitioning to a consolidated SAP S/4HANA instance quickly poses a major challenge for the office of finance as it works to produce reliable financial statements each and every period, even during this time of transition.

However, what a lot of financial professionals don’t realize is that R2R processes must be standardized first in order to allow the migration to a single instance of S/4HANA to proceed.

For example, with Cadency your business can make sure it has standardized templates for reconciliations and a clear journal entry approval process. The technology supports adoption of these templates across the business, resulting in standardized processes, and ultimately, clean data within S/4HANA.

Additionally, Cadency’s pre-built SAP-certified ERP connector enables you to implement this process standardization with your old ERP instances and then seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA when the time is right. By using this approach, your business can reduce the time and costs associated with the migration as the development to connect the two systems has already been completed and vetted with SAP through the creation of the pre-built connector.

Ultimately, Cadency allows finance organizations to standardize their financial close processes before or alongside their migration to S/4HANA, naturally creating cost and time savings during what can be a very complicated process. It’s important to be proactive and anticipate opportunities to reduce, and possibly even overcome, the various aspects that can make the S/4HANA transition time-consuming, complex, and costly.

To learn more about how implementing a System of Controls, such as Cadency, before, during and after their SAP S/4HANA Transition, check out our white paper.