From the time when SAP founders Klaus Tschira, Hasso Plattner, Dietmar Hopp, and Hans-Werner Hector first introduced SAP in 1972, SAP has arguably offered the best ERP available. It has certainly contributed to changing and improving the way that the best performing companies are managed today. Many businesses that use SAP could not effectively operate without it. SAP has delivered countless benefits to companies, but these benefits have not have come without a significant price tag. One thing that you can comfortably say about SAP is, nothing about SAP comes cheaply! So with the news that SAP has set a December 31, 2025 deadline, after which its ERP system will be built to run on just one single database platform; SAP’s own HANA; should have many CIOs, CFOs and CEOs quaking in the boots at the potential cost of moving to the new system. SAP describes S/4HANA as the “biggest launch in 23 years, if not in the entire history of the company”.
Topics: SAP
As the CFO, maybe you have been happy with Cognos Planning (CP), or maybe you have not. Maybe you are aware of the end user and administrator issues with CP, or maybe you are not. Maybe you prefer being slow to adopt newer technology, or maybe you are not. Either way to any of these questions, here are six main reasons why you, as the CFO, should upgrade to PA as a no-brainer decision:
Cognos Planning (formally known as Adaytum Planning) has had a good run, but the state-of-the-art solution, with respect to planning and forecasting systems, has moved on since the early 1990s. Today, we have higher expectations, including:
Topics: planning analytics, Planning, Planning Analytics Workspace
Cognos Planning (formally known as Adaytum Planning) has served many companies well since the early 1990’s, but is approaching the end of its life from an IBM support perspective, and the product is no longer being further developed by IBM.
Topics: planning analytics
In the cloud universe, where seemingly every IT function is “as a service” compatible, there are three main cloud service delivery models that businesses leverage every day to run their operations:
Topics: Cloud
The “C” in CEO, is short for “Chief”. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines Chief to mean: Highest in rank or authority; most important; the person who is the leader of a group of people, of an organization, etc. Today we are accustomed to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and in some organizations other chiefs like the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) and the Chief Risk Officer (CRO).
Chiefs have been around since man first graced the earth. However, chiefs in business, certainly ones with the word “chief” in their job title, are quite a recent thing. A 1999 University of Michigan study written by David W. Allison and Blyden B. Potts found that in 1955 only one of the 200 largest industrial corporations in the United States used the title Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to denote its chief executive. By 1975 all but one of these firms had a CEO. A similar study from the University of Princeton written by Dirk M. Zorn found through an examination of 400 of the largest corporations, none of them had a Chief Financial Officer in 1964 but more than 80% did by the year 2000. The main catalytic event was an ambiguous change in accounting rules in 1979 issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB 33) in response to the corporate funding crisis of the 1970's. As the need for financial controls became greater, companies needed to establish an authority at the top of their organizations that would be fully responsible for the compliance of control related regulations.
