The future of finance starts here

What does it take for a company to stay in the premier league and continue to strengthen its market position? And how can modern financial management contribute to this, particularly in view of challenges such as digitalization, climate change, or even deglobalization?

The EMEA Gases Division of Linde plc was pondering these very questions some time ago. The people in charge were looking for a financial solution that would provide reliable figures for management and ensure that Linde was equipped for the future.

During the course of their research, they eventually came across SAP Central Finance – a central SAP platform for finance, controlling, reporting, and consolidation.

With the help of shared services, SAP Central Finance also enables companies to streamline numerous financial processes by bringing together transactions and analytics. These include incoming invoice processing, central cash management, financial statements and consolidation, or central reporting.

“We immediately felt that the solution would be an excellent choice for mapping our requirements for a modern financial system. Central Finance can also be used to harmonize and centralize widely ramified ERP landscapes, which is an especially important point for us given that we have 200 legal entities and a variety of ERP systems in the EMEA region,” says Hannes Mayer, Head of Controlling REE and EMEA Central Finance Project Manager at Linde.

In order to examine all the requirements and implementation options for SAP Central Finance as a potential financial platform for reporting, corporate processes, and financial shared services, Linde therefore first commissioned a Central Finance pre-study.

When it came to choosing a consulting and implementation partner for this pre-study, the company opted – based on the GAMBIT pre-study model and upon further deliberation – for a collaboration between GAMBIT and the consultancy Accenture, with which Linde has already worked for some time.

“Central Finance is an ideal solution for groups like Linde,” says Thomas Pasquale, Founder and Managing Partner of GAMBIT.

“With Central Finance, companies can set up a central finance system into which data can be transferred from a wide variety of systems with different data structures from financial accounting and controlling. In this way, CFOs have direct access to all the KPIs and financial data they need and can evaluate them easily in clear and modern diagrams and graphics,” says Thomas Pasquale.

During the three-month pre-study, the consultants and project participants examined the feasibility, risks, and benefits of implementing Central Finance. They also developed a suitable architecture.

The pre-study found that all of Linde’s reporting and process requirements were 100 percent feasible. The consultants also identified a high degree of standardization of over 90 percent. This was largely based on “field level” investigations and assessments.

“Another finding related to the overall complexity of the implementation. Based on our analyses and investigations, we have classified the complexity as low for the most part – especially with regard to the future Central Finance architecture, the embedded processes and reporting, and the target data operating model,” says Thomas Pasquale.

With regard to the implementation period, the pre-study showed that a pilot platform could bebuilt within nine months. The plan was to conduct the pilot project for two SAP systems and Microsoft Dynamics-Navision as a non-SAP system in Hungary, Finland, and Bulgaria.

The pre-study was completed “in time” and “in budget.” The factors crucial to its success were the effective cooperation, the blend of competences, and the consummate professionalism of everyone involved from Linde, Accenture, and GAMBIT.

Based on the success of the pre-study, the two consultancies decided to recommend their successful collaboration to Linde as a working model for the pilot phase and to join forces as a bidding team.

After the bidding phase was complete and Linde had decided to continue working with GAMBIT and Accenture on the pilot project as well, the parties
involved launched the implementation as a joint venture. Within the project, GAMBIT was responsible for the entire setup of the SAP Central Finance system, all business-related issues, and the STL server, while Accenture looked after the necessary interfaces and the development area.

The pilot project focused on KPI reporting, corporate processes, consolidation, and master data management. In addition, the experts established CO-PA account-based profitability analysis and reporting using CDS views as part of the pilot implementation.

“Projects of this size are always challenging, and with this project we noticed that right from the start,” says Thomas Pasquale from GAMBIT. “Unfortunately, when we first loaded the data from the source systems our finance experts immediately spotted numerous incorrect account assignment objects and incorrect posting data. This meant that they had to incorporate additional validations rightat the beginning to make sure the data coming into Central Finance was accurate.”

“It’s true that we had to overcome one or two hurdles,” adds Hannes Mayer from Linde. “But the atmosphere in the whole project team was good, cooperative, and solution-focused the whole time. This allowed us to meet the go-live date and laid the perfect foundation for the EMEA rollout. Overall, we feel that the whole project went really well – and it is now highly regarded at Linde.”