SAP has this week announced an upgrade to its Enterprise Performance Management suite of applications, following on from new releases of its Business Intelligence and GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance) offerings earlier this year. Slipped into the body of SAP’s announcement was the launch of the new SAP BusinessObjects Disclosure Management application targeting the ‘Last Mile’ of finance.
According to SAP’s James Fisher, talking to FSN in advance of the official announcement the new Disclosure Management Capability leverages the Cundus AG acquisition reported by FSN last December. The new capability fills an important gap for SAP since competitors have been fielding similar capability for up to three years; most notably Clarity Systems, now officially part of IBM, – see FSN’s very recent product review. Oracle, Tagetik and Trintech also compete in this space.
Disclosure management has become a hot topic with finance functions over-burdened by regulatory disclosures. Interest has also been heightened by regulatory demands for mandatory e-filings in XBRL and iXBRL. SAP’s Disclosure Management provides the usual collaboration capabilities and integrated workflows that finance users require to work quickly across organizational hierarchies, geographies and systems to manage approvals and deliver statements to stakeholders in required output formats.
“GEA is very excited about the release of SAP BusinessObjects Disclosure Management as part of its 10.0 EPM release,” said Dr. Hans-Jörg Harth, head of Group Reporting, GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft. “We were able to introduce the solution into our business in a very short timeframe thanks to its highly intuitive user experience, which required little upfront training. Our team is now able to collaborate and work in parallel on the creation of our financial statements with full confidence that we are working with the current version, complete with a full audit trail. As a result, we have been able to realize significant time savings during the final publication and formatting of our regulatory reports.”
