How to Successfully Blend Finance Needs and SAP Functionality
26th - 29th October 2010, The Waldorf Hilton, London
THE annual event for finance and IT professionals looking to maximise their investment in SAP

Get much more out of your existing SAP investment with focused case studies and interactive discussions on how:

1. To take control of your SAP user base by discussing the best governance models in our interactive discussions
2. Achmea built a single chart of accounts, consolidated five general ledgers to one, reduced finance FTEs and significantly increased productivity
3. Federal Mogul managed change in a global SAP roll-out while maintaining service delivery across multiple instances of SAP
4. Vodafone minimised post-go-live support costs by rapidly delivering self-service training to its global SAP user base
5. Unilever moved to a single instance of SAP across Europe and what it did next to avoid large future upgrade costs
6. Hewlett Packard handles tax compliance and avoids enormous tax penalties despite operating off multiple instances of SAP and legacy applications
7. Capita Group reduced back-office FTEs by 60% and has attained almost 100% payment on time
8. ABB has stopped depending on spreadsheets and manual intervention and is now providing its CFO with more timely and meaningful reports
9. BAE Systems reduced its average payment days by 20% and late payment charges by 74% with minimal support costs

See our comprehensive agenda, exchange ideas in our interactive sessions, benchmark your project against your peers, challenge speakers one-to-one in our Speaker Clinics and delve into detail with our 6 Learning Labs. If you are running off or moving to SAP in 2010/11, this is an essential event for you. 

How to Successfully Blend Finance Needs and SAP Functionality

26th - 29th October 2010, The Waldorf Hilton, London
THE annual event for finance and IT professionals looking to maximise their investment in SAP

Day One Wednesday 27th October 2010

08.15 Registration

08.45 Current challenges in 2010/11 and a chance to break the ice
In this opening ice-breaker session, Susie West will share some of the key challenges raised in sharedserviceslink.com’s recent research with its SAP users. This session will then give our delegates a chance to introduce themselves to each other and share their key objectives and SAP issues in our facilitated speed networking. Bring your business cards and prepare to use them, right at the start!
Susie West, CEO, sharedserviceslink.com

09.45 Squeezing out the functionality gaps: what’s new and coming up with SAP?
It’s important to know how to get the most out of your existing system. But SAP and its key partners have been busy working on new tools to further bridge the functionality gaps between current finance challenges in 2010/11 and previous SAP capabilities. This session will showcase some of their hot picks of best new tools that are sure to have the wow factor and help you plan to better solve your current finance challenges with your SAP system.
René Zigterman, Head Business Development Suite Solutions EMEA & India, SAP

10.30 Morning coffee

STREAM A: Effective reporting in SAP

11.00 CASE STUDY: How to report days earlier, seamlessly drill down to the data you want and free up resources for more value-adding finance
In 2007, Unilever was loading 5 million line items into its data warehouse everyday. To better handle this data and create a more scalable platform with more manageable costs, Rafal Zubowski and his team started two projects: 1) building a brand new data warehouse with the BI 7.0 platform and 2) implementing Business Planning and Consolidation software into SAP for improved budgeting. In this session, Rafal will share how his team overcame resistance to change and effectively set up their project team for success. Today they are delivering reporting for low and middle management to use, which has enabled Unilever’s finance team to cut one whole day out of its reporting cycle and drill down to data at lightning speed. If you want your finance department to feel confident in the information it provides, attend this session to discover what this has enabled for Unilever’s future.
Rafal Zubowski, Category Finance Manager, Unilever Supply Chain Company

11.45 CASE STUDY: Implement a new general ledger functionality with one person and no consultants!
In 2006, media group Mecom acquired Edda Media. One year later, Edda Media’s company consolidation project brought with it new finance and reporting requirements in terms of categorising costs and revenues. Edda Media wanted to keep its reporting flexibility, and its ability to report at a lower level and deliver greater transparency and discovered SAP’s new General Ledger functionality met these requirements. In just three months, during huge company consolidation and reorganisation of the key accounting dimensions, the new GL function went live! In this highly valuable session, Jose Eximeno will reveal how he overcame huge implementation challenges and quickly delivered project success. The end result: a much lower total cost of ownership, a seamless transition and better user experience for the GL team. You will also learn what this new functionality enables Edda Media to do in the future, including more effective IFRS reporting.
Jose Eximeno, Project and Development Manager, Edda Media AS

STREAM B: VAT compliance with SAP

11.00 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: How to ensure SAP is set up and supported to reduce company risk by enabling prompt and correct VAT returns across Europe
VAT compliance across many countries with everchanging legislations is a huge challenge for VAT professionals. It can be extremely costly to promptly prepare and accurately submit your VAT declarations, all in compliance with national legislations. Management often want to have clear visibility with effective reporting so they can take action to avoid potentially huge penalties from the tax authorities. This session discusses key strategies to give you confidence that you are in control and that risks of non-compliance are minimal.

11.45 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: How to automate your VAT configuration with SAP
VAT has many complex local country compliance requirements. To ensure your company does not experience large scale errors in either charging VAT to customers, producing VAT-relevant documentation, or reporting VAT-relevant information, you need to automate the configuration of VAT with your SAP. But what are the best options for doing this? In this session, discover strategies to accurately work out output VAT, ensure you are compliant with your invoicing, recover correctly your input VAT, have effective VAT and statistical reporting, and streamline your month-end reporting.

12.30 The Speaker Clinic
An opportunity to ask your questions face to face with this morning’s speakers in small groups and really get the detail you are after.

13.00 Networking lunch

14.00 CASE STUDY: How to build a single chart of accounts across Europe?
To take advantage of the efficiency and transparency benefits of a Europe-wide single chart of accounts, financial services firm Achmea has consolidated 28 charts into 1 and has reduced its general ledgers from five to one. Heinz Warmerdam shares how after two years of little progress they turned the project round and completed it in just four months. The team has reduced its finance staff from 180 to 110, is now focused on reducing reporting time from 22 to 10 days and increasing general ledger accounting productivity by 75% and its whole financial organisation’s activity by 30%. This session illustrates the actions that made this possible.
Heinz Warmerdam, Senior Manager Financial Reporting, Achmea Finance SSC

Stream A: Effective reporting in SAP

14.45 CASE STUDY: Free-up resources and close your books faster with automated intercompany reconciliation
Intercompany reconciliations can be a bottleneck to your financial close process. The flow of information between the reporting units involved should be rarely interrupted. Avid Technologies has automated this process to remove the potential for bottlenecks and improve the accuracy of closing its books. In this session, Erkan Sappak will share how Avid Technologies implemented their automation solution, outlines the key improvements to its financial closing process, will share key lessons learnt so you can automate even quicker.
Erkan Sappak, Assistant General Ledger Accountant, Avid Technologies

Stream B: Ensuring organisational and legal compliance

14.45 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: How to get more out of SAP to handle your intrastat reporting compliance
Intratstat reporting collects information for governments on goods movements within the EU to assess their country competitiveness and to monitor price changes in foreign trade. Reports are required to be submitted every month, in some cases, and are often time-consuming. SAP can significantly help to compile intrastat reports by using your billing information. But there are many circumstances which can lead to inaccurate and delayed intrastat reporting and often standard SAP does not provide the flexibility to accommodate these. Financial corrections may be required, missing transactional data means manual intervention when generating reports and sometimes data cannot be collected via your billing information. This session examines how to deal with these circumstances so SAP produces more accurate reports in a much shorter timeframe.

15.30 Afternoon refreshments

Stream A: Effective reporting in SAP

16.00 CASE STUDY: Help your CFO make more timely decisions and sharpen your company’s competitive edge
ABB moved from seven ERPs to just one version of SAP in nine months. Previously the different methods of reporting created a culture of dependence on spreadsheets and manual intervention. Getting away from this to understand that there is one version of the truth in SAP is a huge change management exercise, and one that few conquer well. Andrew Marshall and Martin Smith from ABB will share the approach they used to give their business confidence that SAP produces reliable reporting data without manual intervention. After going live in December 2009, they have invoked an approach to continuously improve and optimise their processes with SAP. Now the CFO’s ambition is to complete reporting on day three. If you want a fresh, people-focused approach to get the most from your SAP’s reporting capabilities, attend this session.
Andrew Marshall, General Manager Shared Accounting Services, ABB UK
Martin Smith, FICO Systems Architect, ABB UK

Stream B: Ensuring organisational and legal compliance

16.00 CASE STUDY: Beat the breach: deliver scrutiny and control over travel and entertainment expenses
Every penny counts, so finding a way to scrutinise expenses, reduce payments, settle claims in SAP and tighten controls is crucial. Angela Lloyd and her colleagues at BAE Systems implemented a new e-expenses system, quickly overcoming various implementation challenges. She also coordinated a training programme so that six months after go-live, very few users needed support for the system. It is no surprise that this project was voted Best in Class by Amex with average payment days reduced by 20% in the first year and late payment charges cut by 74%. Angela will share their success factors so you too can gain strong financial control over your travel and expenses.
Angela Lloyd, Former Systems Accounting Manager, BAE Systems

16.45 CASE STUDY: Don’t risk enormous tax penalties – get alerted to illegal invoices
When you have many different versions of SAP with a plethora of legacy applications, having visibility and control of your invoices to meet tax compliance rules is extremely tricky. HP works in this complex environment, but Juergen Wendel and his team set out to implement solutions for their accounts receivable using standard SAP. In this session, Juergen will share how his team cleaned up and managed the maintenance of their tax rules to greatly improve control. If you want to take ownership of your tax considerations, partner IT better with finance and tax, and raise awareness of the criticality of VAT compliance in your company, this session is a must.
Juergen Wendel, GBS Indirect Taxes Processes Manager, Hewlett Packard

17.30 The speaker clinic

18.00 Chair’s close 

Day Two Thursday 28th October 2010

08.30 Registration

09:00 Top ten takeaways from day one
Crystallise essential ideas discussed at yesterday’s sessions to build on the knowledge you gain today.
Susie West, CEO, sharedserviceslink.com

09.45 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: Use SAP to analyse metrics and drive continuous process improvements
Continuous improvement of your finance processes is essential. A common approach in continuous process improvement is to use the define, measure, analyse, improve and control model (DMAIC). But the measure and analysis parts of this can be difficult to do in practice, particularly when trying to use your SAP system to achieve this. In this interactive session, you will discover the best tools and smart workaround ideas from standard SAP among your peers so you know exactly how to get your continuous process improvement programme back on track to strip out waste and fatten your profit margins.

10.30 Morning coffee

11.00 Attain 99% payment on time by streamlining your purchase to pay process
Manual intervention, endless keying of inbound paper invoices, poor controls for approvals - these are all factors hindering suppliers being paid to terms. To resolve these issues, Capita set up a shared services centre and automated its P2P process with a new OCR-based model. As a result, Capita has reduced its back office FTEs by 60%, makes almost 100% of its payment on time and now has far fewer query escalations. In this fascinating session, Richard Good will discuss the two phases of its P2P automation project and share his lessons learnt so you can get more from your SAP system.
Richard Good, SAP Programme Manager, Capita Group Plc

Stream A: e-Invoicing

11.45 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: How can you successfully interface e-invoicing providers with your SAP system?
e-Invoicing is becoming a necessity in 2010/11. But making it work with SAP is certainly not plain sailing. Data may not match in SAP, you may struggle to post your invoices into the system, endless re-keying can become the norm... All of which increases your process cycle times and resource costs. But what are the best ways to truly integrate SAP with your e-invoicing provider so these problems become a thing of the past? Share ideas and experiences with others in this interactive discussion.

Stream B: Optimising process controls and visibility

11:45 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: Taming your global master vendor data
Finance functions face an uphill battle if their data is not harmonised and standardised correctly: duplicate payments; raising incorrect POs; incorrect delivery for collection; credit issues; and inaccurate reporting and forecasting figures. But undertaking a large master data clean-up exercise is not easy. Attaining buy-in from your business units to fully engage with the project is often a struggle, but their input to re-validate data and give feedback is essential to managing your master data effectively. If you want to quickly identify exactly where duplication is occurring, spend far less by enabling far more negotiable vendor contracts, and speed up your payments on time, attend this session to exchange key ideas for best-practice master vendor data management.

12.30 The speaker clinic

13.00 Networking lunch

14.00 INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: Take control of your SAP user base: establishing effective governance
The interaction between finance and IT can make or break your SAP implementation project. If IT doesn’t accurately understand the finance team’s needs, it will waste time on the inevitable re-work and then the end result will be woefully below expectations. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. Setting up effective organisational structures and regular communication networks will ensure the right people take responsibility for problems and the team understands finance’s needs and IT’s capabilities with SAP. In this session, you will discuss key ideas to enrich communication between all SAP stakeholders so you can be confident which governance structure is right for you.

14.45 CASE STUDY: How to quickly roll out SAP globally while effectively managing your service delivery across multiple instances
Federal Mogul’s strategy is to have SAP everywhere, but not necessarily on the same instance. If a new location wants to move to SAP, then it will move to the new instance. However, some countries, such as Germany, have multiple instances, but it simply does not make business sense to bring them onto the new version. So how is Federal Mogul managing service delivery across an increasingly global but complex SAP environment? The answer lies in this session. Christophe Mouillet reveals all by explaining how IT and Finance communicate using the language of the business to effectively follow SAP logic and get the most out of this powerful tool globally. If you want a much smaller, highly effective SAP global onboarding team to quickly manage change in every location you onboard, you need to attend.
Christophe Mouillet, Finance Process Leader (IS), Federal Mogul

15.30 Afternoon refreshments

16.00 CASE STUDY: Deliver self-service SAP training globally to minimise support costs
EVO is Vodafone’s largest process transformation programme in a single SAP system. To reduce the level of SAP support required, Vodafone developed a Core Training Library to deliver cost-effective training materials to users. In this session, Zoltán Kardos will show, with a live demonstration, how Vodafone manages the library, how it has produced localised training materials, how it measures the effectiveness of the service provided, and how new technologies help give more SAP users access to this comprehensive resource. This session will show you how to get back to business as usual just six months after you go live.
Zoltan Kardos, CBM Training Manager, Vodafone

16.45 CASE STUDY: How to regionalise your SAP landscape and then optimise on your SAP ERP backbone
There are huge challenges faced when rolling out SAP across a region like Europe: implementation costs spiral out of control, timelines slip, master data becomes unruly, and you get a sense that every site onboarded is a separate implementation. There is huge resistance to change relating to local legislations and their ways of working. In the first part of this session, Paul Stevenson will show you how Unilever overcame these very problems by regionalising two different major business units onto single SAP systems across Europe. In the second part, Paul outlines what to do after you have rolled out across Europe. Ideas will be shared so you can partner with Best of Breed applications with seamless integration and avoid hefty integration and upgrading costs.
Paul Stevenson, Global IT Business Partner, Unilever

17.30 The speaker clinic

18.00 Chair’s summation and close of conference

Pre-conference Learning Labs Tuesday 26th October 2010

Learning Lab A: 08.15 – 11.15
Accelerate your local financial close and prepare to run in a shared service organisation with new SAP capabilities
Learning Lab facilitator: Ralph Schoepfer, SAP

Learning Lab B: 08.15 – 11.15
Achieve “the impossible” - 90% touchless processing of paper-based invoices into your SAP system
Learning Lab Facilitator: Steve Britton, Brainware

Learning Lab C: 11.30 – 14.30 (includes working lunch)
Unravel and comply with new VAT regulations: re-align your VAT processes with SAP
Learning Lab Facilitator: Roger Lindelauf, Meridian International VAT Consulting

Learning Lab D: 11.30 – 14.30 (includes working lunch)
Extending SAP for e-invoicing while keeping compliant
Learning Lab facilitator: Ian Ronayne, Ariba

Learning Lab E: 14.45 – 17.45
How to tackle the technical challenges from optimising SAP Business Objects in your shared services organisation (SSO)
Learning Lab facilitators: Scott Kenyon and Nicolas Henry, Xoomworks

Learning Lab F: 14.45 – 17.45
“Stop throwing money away!” Deliver process compliance as a by-product of operational excellence and improve SAP ROI
Learning Lab facilitator: Nigel Kilpatrick, Nimbus Partners