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How to optimize your financial closing process using the plug and gain approach by SAP Signavio
- Do you struggle to complete your financial closing process in time or need to accelerate the closing process so that financial results are available for internal and external stakeholders in a timely manner?
- Would you like to understand the main improvement opportunities along your financial closing process but do not have the capacity or budget to invest in a process mining project?
- Have you started using the plug and gain approach and would like to dive deeper into the financial closing process? Would you like to understand the degree of automation and standardization of your financial closing process including potential process bottlenecks?
- Are you looking for a record-to-report process analysis focusing on financial closing that has SAP ERP process knowledge built in but does not require the consumer to be an SAP ERP expert in order to understand them?
If any of the above applies to you, the value accelerator for analysis of record-to-report (financial closing) based on the plug and gain approach – first released in August 2024 – is the answer. It provides the necessary dashboards out-of-the-box, uncovering improvement potential and root cause analysis in an easily understandable way.
What's included?
We have prepared an out-of-the-box dashboard that includes several analyses to enable customers to readily utilize them for their continuous improvement initiatives and transformation projects. Each analysis is tailored to a specific business use case and inherently includes value identification and SAP recommendations as standard features.
As part of the “How to optimize your financial closing process” dashboard, the following focus areas for analysis are provided:
- Identify automation potential
- Avoid process bottlenecks
- Avoid exceptions
- Improve standardization
The data, as is customary with the plug and gain approach, originates from SAP Signavio Process Insights. This allows the dashboard to quickly provide data without building or leveraging dedicated extractors in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. In order to facilitate a holistic view of the financial closing process, the accelerator takes the data from the Schedule Manager tables (based on the process performance indicator in SAP Signavio Process Insights Schedule Manager: Runtimes and Status).
Please note that this does not mean that to use the accelerator, you need to actively utilize the Schedule Manager tool in SAP ERP. It simply leverages those tales since they log financial closing data across various transaction codes and programs, regardless of whether you trigger those from the Schedule Manager or not. This is a big advantage since the data is delivered in a harmonized way. The data can be loaded over an extended period to facilitate the detection of patterns and trends over time, like for all other value accelerators in the plug and gain approach.
The dashboards are structured to seamlessly lead users through the analyses, providing explanations of context and motivation, along with potential conclusions for each analysis. Additionally, users will receive recommendations on how to proceed and address the root causes of process issues. This facilitates business users in navigating the analysis without requiring extensive technical knowledge of SAP ERP or expertise in process mining.
Example: Avoid process bottlenecks
Let’s look at how the standard analysis can support you in avoiding process bottlenecks. You start with “General Overview” where you directly get insights on how your closing process is running (sequences, lead times etc.).
Additionally, you learn how long your closing process takes in average and whether you have particularly long-running jobs. This allows you to prioritize this topic accordingly and act.
In the previous example, we see how complex the process is. Since we are analyzing a particular period (represented as a case in this value accelerator) many activities need to be executed during the closing process. We continue with detailed analyses for lead times that will help understand the processes done in both Finance and Controlling in a better way
If, for example, the average lead time for your closing process is 2 weeks and 5 days but your management defined a target of 1 week and 3 days for financial closing, you might want to identify potential of how to shorten the financial closing period by avoiding bottlenecks.
As an example, you might see that the closing steps in controlling and project systems take a lot of time, particularly settlement. You can also identify closing activities that directly succeed these long-running jobs. This indicates which long-running jobs delay other dependent activities – for example, project settlement should be finalized before cost center assessment. This helps you assess the impact of delays on your closing process.
Another way to avoid bottlenecks is to run closing activities in batch instead of dialog. This not only allows your users to focus on other tasks but also makes it possible to schedule and run closing activities at hours when no dialog users are present, thus gaining valuable time for finalizing your financial closing. You can use the “Identify automation potential” section of the dashboard to investigate this further.
Example: Improve standardization
In addition to process improvement, you can use the plug and gain dashboards for transformation projects. These aim to harmonize the process and give a detailed analysis on your as-is process.
Why is process harmonization desirable? It helps you to streamline operations, lower onboarding, and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and testing effort. With SAP S/4HANA, the closing process has been significantly improved, including new functionalities that are provided, such as Advanced Foreign Currency Valuation, Event-Based Production Accounting, and many more.
Regardless of whether you are already on SAP S/4HANA or planning your transformation towards SAP S/4HANA, this dashboard supports you in identifying custom transaction codes/programs being used as part of your closing process.
Additionally, it gives you a hint whether similar (standard) programs are being also used within your system – this can be an indicator that some parts of your company are working to the standard already while others are using custom transaction codes/programs.
While this analysis still requires a certain degree of follow-up deep dives and validation of standard alternatives, it shows you holistically which custom functionalities you might want to get rid of as part of your SAP S/4HANA transformation or in which areas you might want to check out new SAP S/4HANA functionalities which might address the reasons for why you originally have built those custom transaction codes/programs and could thus make them obsolete.
How to get it?
If you believe the above-mentioned analyses would offer value to you and your organization, you might wonder how to obtain them. These analyses are included in the plug and gain approach by SAP Signavio. This approach harnesses the capabilities of the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite and offers distinctive out-of-the-box analyses for both continuous improvement and transformation projects. By leveraging this approach, you can bypass lengthy implementation projects and quickly access valuable insights.
Reach out to your SAP counterpart to learn more about how you could benefit from plug and gain by
SAP Signavio.
Where to find further information
- How to improve your invoice-to-cash process using plug and gain by SAP Signavio
- How to improve your invoice-to-pay process using plug and gain by SAP Signavio
- The following note explains the prerequisite and scope of plug and gain by SAP Signavio: https://me.sap.com/notes/3340986/E
- Plug and gain approach: https://www.signavio.com/plug-and-gain-approach/
