Tuesday 14th July, 2015

Just over 200 years ago – a powerful group of European leaders , with an eye on expansion and the opportunities of the future, met in Vienna for the first time at the Weiner Kongress.  In doing so, they set a chain of events in motion that lead to an unprecedented 100 years of stability in the region. And, in the burying of many a hatchet, their enlightened negotiation tactics paved the way for better country (and therefore business) value for all. In fact, their visionary perspective and new policies surrounding international crisis management set the scene for the later emergence of the United Nations and the EU.

So with the anniversary of that historic meeting upon us, Bernhard Fischer, VP Solution management, Shared Services, SAP, was keen for us to draw on the comparison between their vision and the kind of processes being advocated at the International SAP Conference for Financial Shared Services in Vienna last week.

With Tom Bangemann, Senior VP Business Transformation at The Hackett Group next up on stage advocating the need for end to end process ownership, the analogy turned out not to be a tortuous one. Being able to get a grip on the whole end to end process will always be fundamental to being able to generate business value; a fact the Weiner Kongress understood well. The key issue, as Bangemann explained, is to make sure your outcome and definition acts as the process trigger, not simply an afterthought. However, defining an effective process ownership is impossible without master data governance, and yet even in organisations The Hackett Group have identified as “world class”, only 52% seem able to manage theirs on any practical level.

Being able to have strategic insight is something which Nikos Vlassakidis from Coca-Cola Hellenic certainly seemed to appreciate the need for, but with 70 production sites across 27 countries, he was also keen to stress the importance of flexibility. Using SAP as a common framework, Vlassakidis understands that standardising processes is essential to gaining visibility and control, but believes true collaboration can only be achieved by gaining consensus with key stakeholders, prior to pushing new ideas through. And that’s where it’s important to consider Bangermann’s assertion that an “Enterprise Process Owner” (note, not Global Process Owner…) needs to be senior, but not too senior to be effective. You need to have someone who reports into the c-level with enough authority to drive strategic change, but with enough transactional knowledge to understand how that change can impact daily functions.

And change is something that Thack Brown, SAP’s dynamic General Manager for Finance is more than familiar with, having taken the unenviable decision to  join a company as CFO, precisely as Lehman’s collapsed…! And yet, for the last 10 years or so, the main challenges facing business, as he sees them – the need to drive efficiency and reduce the cost of finance - has remained the same. However, Brown was anxious to point out that there’s a sea change heading our way, and that the step changes organisations may have made that seemed adequate in the past, are not going to be enough to head off the challenges of the digital economy. In the B2C world people expect to be able to have real-time information at their fingertips, and yet, if that’s contrasted to the way we work, fewer than 12% of organisations are able to provide anything like real-time information.

With the pressures to drive costs down and efficiency up still imperative, companies will continue to search for ways to make that happen. However, it seems that’s no longer going to be possible by relying on labour arbitrage alone. Brown said that the challenge for the future is going to sit around how organisations can remove around 60% or so of costs into automation. And as far as SAP is concerned, part of that challenge is going to be met by the application of Simple Finance, a solution which goes some way to delivering the real-time information needed within a much more user friendly UI than previous SAP incarnations. As Brown says, we, and the processes we use, are fundamentally shaped by the tools and technology we use. The trick, he says, is to not let those tools become part of the complexity.

As business turned to evening and the sound of the band wafted through the beautiful, Baroque Palais Schönburg, it wasn’t hard to imagine the Weiner Kongress holding one of their infamous soirees somewhere quite similar. And as the neo-classical Greek statues became silhouetted against the evening sky, I wondered what they would make of the current state of EU end to end negotiation strategies…