What a great 2020 for SAP Central Finance customers

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Lets start with a year-end summary:

Solution

• With the wide adoption of Central Finance as key deployment option for S/4HANA - non-disruptive, iterative, with stage gate funding, and a low risk profile - we are addressing a wide range of use scenarios: central micro-segment profitability reporting, standardized financial and integrated external group reporting, intercompany and central payments, and cash and liquidity management ... business model transformation (self service, shared service, and increased process automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence) and so on. For pre-dominantly of course multi-ERP source system customers, but also now more and more single system customers as path to S/4HANA. And more and more customers also decommissioning source / logistics ERP system and bringing them into the Central Finance instance (Central Finance as stepping stone). And more and more customer with heavy Oracle or Oracle-only footprints ... adoption of SAP's Central Finance, to provide what Oracle can't and eventually take those Oracle systems out. And lastly along the full M&A lifecycle ... in preparation of mergers, execution of mergers, and post merger integration.

Product

• Our product management team lead by @BastianDistler has been busy improving existing and adding new features. Check out our published roadmaps to learn more about what was released and when, and what is forthcoming.

Adoption

• We added the Magnitude solutions for Transaction Replication and Data Harmonization to our solution offering. Now available as official SAP Solution Extensions on SAP paper they dramatically reduce the implementation effort and cost - as they are of the 'accelerator kind', with installation rather than implementation and in as little as 15-20 days per unique data source. No reason anymore to custom build integration and data profiling and load programs.
• We also added something we call 'cFIN Adoption content' to our Central Finance license, use rights for what was formerly called the 'model company for Central Finance' a set of best practices and documentation and tools aimed to accelerate Central Finance deployment - and again, available for everyone that bought the license
• Related - there we also have a now made available SAP's implementation methodology SAP Activate for Central Finance. Check google and sap.com for an in depth explanation what that all entails ... also, free.

Events

• Our flagship event by TA Cook was taken virtual this year. Fantastic showing for us - and everyone interested in the solution, with customer testimonies by Google, AnheuserBusch, Chevron, Goodyear, Perrigo, Verizon, and Excelitas. Check out https://sap-finance-and-risk-live to have a look at the session videos and material presented

Testimony

• We now have some 29 public customer testimonials in place, including above but also from General Motors, Enel, Generali, EDF, Airbus, Engie, Procter & Gamble, HP, Lufthansa, and others. Google for those or check with us if you want to access the session materials

Customer

• We took our 'live Central Finance' customer community network event (cFIN EXCHANGE) virtual this year and offered some almost 200 individuals the opportunity to remotely listen and learn from each other, and review with us the results of our 2020 Central Finance benchmarking study based on the pre-event survey (reach out to us if you are live and did not receive an invitation)

Deployment

• We expanded on our already existing on-premise and private cloud deployment options and now also offer to also take our products to a subscription model (without infrastructure services) and also added more hyperscaler-run deployment options. No reason anymore to not start moving to the cloud (from project to production) with Central Finance based S/4HANA

Adoption

• Some 500 global SAP customers have signed up for S/4HANA with Central Finance now and with some 100 customers live by the end of the year, we could not be more thrilled. Numerous projects on the fly ...so keep checking in with us and join our showcase events next year to hear about even more customer stories
• Mid-year we compared our customer list with the updated Global 500 published by Fortune 500: 4 of the top 10, 9 of the top 20, 18 of the top 50 and 35 of the top 100 are SAP Central Finance customers ... again, something we are super proud of

Happy holidays

Carsten Hilker, SAP - Global Solution Management | S/4HANA Central Finance