Top 10 Reasons Why Using SAP Business Workflow is the Sensible Choice for Your Automated SAP Accounts Payable Process
SAP® is the best-in-class ERP system. That’s why you chose it. That’s why your organization made a significant investment of time and resources to implement it to manage your critical financial business processes. It is your system of record.
Despite this, many accounts payable organizations look at vendors who go outside of the SAP system for workflow when they want to enhance their processes—even though they could accomplish what they want—and more—with vendor solutions that take advantage of the SAP system they already have.
Based on many years working with SAP customers to provide the most efficient and flexible improvements to their business processes, we’ve gained insight as to what works best in the SAP environment and what is the most cost-efficient.
Here are the Top 10 Reasons we’ve heard over two decades from SAP customers as to why the ‘best practice’ solutions for Accounts Payable automation and optimization in SAP is one that leverages your SAP system.
1. System of Record. Your SAP system is your corporate system of record. Doesn’t it make sense to have a single system for processing, approving and posting documents? With the posting workflows contained within the SAP system, you can get a comprehensive view of all unsettled liabilities (invoices in workflow, PO invoices with GR and no IR and blocked invoices) from one place. With proprietary, non-SAP software, you have to sift through multiple systems, or constantly synchronize it with SAP.
As an example, let’s look at accrual reports. Gathering accrual reports for non-posted invoices is difficult enough without having to consolidate information from multiple systems. Since PO liabilities are already accrued in SAP, why go to another system for non-PO invoices?
2. Why pay twice? If your company is running SAP business processes, your organization owns SAP Business Workflow. As an SAP ERP user, you already own SAP Business Workflow—which is one of the best independent workflow engines on its own. Purchasing solutions that include proprietary workflow duplicates functionality and can complicate your processing environment. SAP Workflow inherently takes advantage of the information in the SAP system, including vendor master, material master, cost center ownership and purchasing organization structure as well as PO and Goods Receipt information.
You can build custom interfaces to access the data with outside software … or you could save your time and money.
3. An upgrade to SAP could also mean an upgrade to your non-SAP workflow. Typically this means, at the very minimum, additional time and inefficiencies to the process. It can also add expense and disruptive changes.
4. Avoid duplicate backups. Your SAP system already is backed up regularly and monitored. High Availability and Disaster Recovery plans are in place. Adding external software duplicates those operational tasks.
5. Keep your data synchronized. An external workflow may require regular refreshes of exported SAP data. This often results in trouble. Refreshing exported SAP data creates duplicate data and can cause synchronization issues.
6. Inherent data validation and verification. SAP Business Workflow has inherent, immediate access to live data for validation and verification. Likewise, your SAP system is already configured with business rules for data, and these rules are leveraged with an SAP workflow.
Additionally, an external system may require duplication of those business rules, again presenting a potentially dangerous loophole.
7. Security Red Flag. Information security and access control is crucial. Your business community is already licensed with the level of SAP access you determined. With an external system you will be required to create and maintain a second set of user data, and with that, you may open security loopholes.
8. Ease of use. Change Management and training on a new user interface falls in the category of another distraction to the business. Typically, adding additional external workflow requires your knowledge workers to have multiple application windows open.
Often the proprietary providers claim that SAPGUI interface is clumsy for high-level approvers. We agree—but with SAP workflow, you are not limited to SAPGUI. With the latest advancements in SAP UI technologies you can tailor the UI that matches best to the recipient, ranging from browser, e-mail or smartphones.
9. Compatibility. Workflows within the SAP system and certified by SAP will remain compatible with future SAP releases, Enhancement Packs and Service Packs. External workflows may require significant changes that cause upgrade delays and business disruption.
As an example, with non-SAP applications, your outside software tries to emulate SAP posting transactions such as FB60/MIRO. This interface has to be constantly kept up-to-date with those transactional interfaces in the SAP system—and with SAP patches, upgrades and internal configuration changes.
10. Lowest Total Cost of Ownership. An external workflow system requires more hardware, storage, database licensing and more IT and operations resources. You’ve already invested in having those in place for your SAP application. By leveraging what you already own, you save money year after year. Additionally, external workflow engines are typically proprietary to the vendor, introducing a permanent dependency on that vendor or at minimum, new skill sets for IT.
When you use SAP applications, you have a powerful platform for managing the flow of work for key business processes like Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Order Management, Human Resources and more. The smartest solution is often a platform that brings out the best in the system you already are using.
Our customers prefer it. We agree. That’s why we build our solutions incorporating the SAP Business Workflow engine. When you think about it, taking advantage of and leveraging SAP features to optimize your business processes in SAP just makes sense. It’s safe, cost-effective and doesn’t add to your infrastructure.
