SAP Faces Challenges with Customer Assurance and Digital Boardroom

There were two noteworthy themes in SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s keynote at this year’s Sapphire conference. One was customer assurance; that is, placing greater emphasis on making the implementation of even complex business software more predictable and less of an effort. This theme reflects the maturing of the enterprise applications business as it transitions from producing highly customized software to providing configurable, off-the-rack purchases. Implementing ERP will never be simple, as I have noted, but as companies increasingly adopt multitenant software as a service (SaaS), vendors will need to make their implementations as repeatable as possible and enable flexible configuration of parameters and processes that substantially reduce the billable hours required to complete a deployment. “Customer assurance” is an important stake in the ground, but it will be an empty concept unless there is complete overhaul of the entire value chain to take it beyond good intentions. Otherwise, customer assurance will be an ongoing rearguard action to overcome technology-driven challenges and disincentives for improvement. Business applications must be re-engineered to facilitate implementation, substantially reduce the likelihood of implementation errors and facilitate subsequent changes to adapt to changing business conditions. Moreover, software vendors’ partners will need to demonstrate that they can reliably cut a substantial number of billable hours per implementation engagement. This will require partners to restructure their business models. Neither of these changes will be easy to accomplish. To its credit SAP has set a course for increasing the simplicity of using its core ERP and financial management software. Getting there soon would greatly enhance its ability to retain if not gain customers in these mature markets.

McDermott’s second notable touch point was the “digital boardroom,” a wall-size set of monitors displaying a broad array of current company data (including some in real time) in easy-to-understand visualizations and in alphanumeric format. The digital boardroom demonstration contained not just the standard set of drill-down and drill-around capabilities but also the ability to work interactively with data to do what-if scenario planning and analysis. While some might view it as only eye candy, the immediacy of the data and the ability explore potential outcomes based on different conditions or actions would represent a substantial breakthrough in the use of data and analytics by senior executives.

The idea behind the digital boardroom is sound: Boards of directors, executives and management need up-to-date information to help them understand the current state of the business, its opportunities and challenges. However, in our benchmark research on the Office of Finance fewer than one-third of companies said that the information they receive is timely. In the past, somewhat timely information might have been the best one could expect but no longer. Analyses and plans based on out-of-date information may not be actionable. However, the business value of the digital boardroom will be an empty promise unless companies address the root causes of the timeliness issue. They include scattered information, a heavy dependence on desktop spreadsheets for aggregating and analyzing data, and limited penetration of advanced analytics. Our research also shows that fewer than half of finance departments use relatively straightforward analytic techniques such as product and customer profitability, only 22 percent employ economic and market data and trends in their analysis, and just 12 percent use predictive analytics. SAP’s existing and planned software can help address these shortcomings, but it cannot overcome the data management issues that prevent companies from having timely information or the lack of analytical skills and training that also hamper a company’s ability to present incisive, action-oriented analyses and prescriptive models in a digital boardroom.

One of SAP’s objectives in demonstrating the digital boardroom is to make senior executives aware of what’s possible. Ideally this would be a potent source of “demand pull” – directives from the top to enhance a company’s systems and modeling capabilities by addressing data, training, process and systems requirements. SAP’s enterprise software generally and its Universal Journal in particular can begin to address the technology and some of the data issues. But experience makes me reluctant to assume the best. It seems likely that for the time being the numbers and analyses that wind up being displayed in a digital boardroom will be created using the same crude, time-consuming methods. Our next-generation finance analytics research finds that two-thirds (68%) of individuals spend the greatest amount of their time on data-related tasks in preparing for analysis while only 28 percent are able to focus on the analysis itself. One can hope that data environments will improve and that users will switch to dedicated analytic software from desktop spreadsheets, but applications vendors should focus on adapting to shoddy IT environments rather than hoping that customers will change their behavior. SAP also will need to ensure that the full range of its analytics and business intelligence software is readily integrated with the digital boardroom. Doing this must include its newly acquired technology from Roambi, which provides mobile support for smartphones and tablets.

The ERP and financial management software categories are currently in a process of transformation, as I have written, one that will be as sweeping as the shift to client/server applications in the 1990s. The trend to cloud-based multitenant architectures gets the most attention, but real-time information availability, a more productive and pleasant user experience, improved in-context collaboration and a lower total lifetime cost of ownership will be key factors in determining winners and losers. Aware that they are vulnerable to disruption, established vendors – including SAP – have been adapting. Statements of direction are useful for communicating with customers and the market generally. However, SAP needs to accelerate its pace of development to arrive at the transformed state it promises if it is to remain competitive.

Regards,

Robert Kugel

Senior Vice President Research

Tidemark Enables More Effective Business Planning

Tidemark Systems offers a suite of business planning applications that enable corporations to plan more effectively. The software facilitates rapid creation and frequent updating of integrated company plans by making it easy for individual business functions to create their own plans while allowing headquarters to connect them to create a unified view. I coined the term “integrated business planning” a decade ago to highlight the potential for technology to substantially improve the effectiveness of planning and budgeting in corporations, and it remains true that integrating business planning can produce superior results. Companies that maintain direct links between functional or departmental plans more often have a planning process that works well than others. Our next-generation business planning benchmark research shows that two-thirds (66%) of those that maintain such links have a planning process that works well or very well, compared to 40 percent that copy information from individual plans into an overall plan and just 25 percent in which plans have little or no connection.

Businesses commonly do a lot of planning within individual silos: There are sales plans, marketing plans, manufacturing plans, R&D plans and various others. However, in most companies the only unified plan is the corporate budget, which is a financial plan used mainly for allocating resources and controlling spending. Because they are focused almost exclusively on monetary consequences, budgets are not especially useful for planning the operations of a company, which requires attention to the things of a business (such as head count, numbers of purchased parts and tons of materials).

Tidemark has made significant progress with its software that I have previously assessed with how it unifies business planning and the company’s Fall 2015 release includes a new feature, Tidemark Complete, that enables companies to benchmark their performance against that of competitors. In almost all organizations, performance reviews compare results against the current plan or the previous quarter or year. While this is essential, it’s insufficient because business is not an “us-vs.-us” game; it’s an us-vs.-them competition. Even so, most companies don’t assess their results against the market because they find it too difficult and time-consuming to assemble the data. Tidemark Complete addresses this issue. The latest release also adds packaged configurations and metrics tailored for the insurance, hospitality and retail industries that enable such companies to accelerate their implementation of Tidemark. In the Spring 2015 release the company introduced packages for higher education and subscription commerce. The subscription commerce app is especially useful for companies with recurring revenue businesses for two reasons. One is that managing these types of businesses requires using metrics that are not directly available from the accounting process. These include the annual recurring revenue (ARR) and annual and total contract value (ACV and TCV). Typically, the finance staff assembles data from one or more sources in desktop spreadsheets to do the calculations, analyze the results and create reports. As well as time-consuming, this method is prone to errors and incompleteness in the data. The second reason is that revenue recognition in subscription businesses is often complex. For planning purposes, it’s useful to be able to automate the translation of booking events into reported revenue because it saves time and results in more accurate projections of future financial statements.

Ventana Research rated Tidemark a Hot Vendor in our 2015 Business Planning Value Index. Tidemark’s software offers all of the capabilities necessary to support state-of-the-art planning. That is, it offers engaging visualization and reporting functionality that enhances understanding and insight in developing plans as well as communicating results. It has workflows to manage plan creation and periodic updates that cut the time and effort required to supervise the process and thus shorten planning cycles. It offers integrated analytics to support the planning and review phases of the process as well as Storylines and Playbooks, methods that present an organization’s performance in narrative form with engaging data visualizations. An important reason why companies invest time in creating plans is to set objectives so they can periodically review their performance to those objectives. By organizing all business planning on a single platform, Tidemark allows each planning unit to review its results faster and headquarters to review the overall financial and operational performance sooner. Our research finds that companies that use a dedicated third-party planning application such as Tidemark are more able to uncover details during a review meeting because they can drill down to uncover underlying details while the meeting is under way. This enables managers and executives to get to information that can promote agility and provides an environment that encourages action in the whole organization.

Tidemark also offers built-in social collaboration capabilities in context. Collaboration is essential in the process of planning in corporations because it helps ensure that activities are coordinated. Companies have multiple objectives for their planning processes. Chief among these is accuracy. But since things don’t always go to plan, companies need agility in responding to changes in a timely and coordinated fashion, and collaboration facilitates this also. In a small business, planning can be informal because of the ease of communications between all members and the ease with which plans can be modified in response to changing conditions. In larger organizations the planning process becomes increasingly difficult because communications become compartmentalized locally and diffused across the enterprise. Facilitating collaboration across geographies or business silos addresses the communications issues. Tidemark’s collaboration capabilities address this issue more readily and completely than email or instant messaging. Setting and changing the company’s course require coordination to ensure that the actions of one part of the organization complement (or at least don’t impede) the actions of others. Better communication across the organization promotes coordination because it enables better understanding of the impact of policies and actions in one part of the company on the rest of it. Yet only 14 percent of companies are able to accurately measure that impact, and fewer than half (47%) have even a general idea. Integrated business planning coupled with a collaboration capabilities addresses that issue.

Using the most capable technology also helps. Using limited tools is a major barrier preventing companies from integrating their planning efforts; spreadsheets in particular are a major culprit. Our research reveals that across the spectrum of corporate planning activities, seven out of 10 organizations use spreadsheets to manage their planning processes. Tidemark’s common planning platform for individual departmental and functional plans, plus built-in analytics and reporting and its focus on ease of use, provides a compelling reason to switch from spreadsheets. Also, compared to using spreadsheets, Tidemark’s applications can make the planning process far more interactive by utilizing in-memory processing to speed calculations. When even complex planning models with large data sets can be run in seconds or less, senior executives and managers can quickly assess the impact of alternative courses of action in terms of their impacts on key operating metrics, not just revenue and income. Furthermore, having the means to engage in a structured conversation with direct reports can help executives implement strategy and manage their organization more effectively.

Integrated business planning applications are changing the conversation from a finance-centric approach to one that supports planning operations and finance in parallel. Companies that are dissatisfied with their current approach to business planning and are looking to improve important aspects of it including accuracy, insight, speed and alignment should consider dedicated business planning tools. When they do that, they should consider the kind of software that will enable them to support a better process. We recommend that they include Tidemark in their evaluation.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research