Manhattan:
Bill Gates of Microsoft made a prediction yesterday that tablet PCs will replace iPads and Android devices as people look for better productivity. Now you're probably thinking he would say that wouldn't he as it's in his interest to see current trends reversed. We keep hearing that tablets are replacing PCs but while sales of mobile devices are indeed soaring, sales of PCs and laptops are actually only down by 8% and my suspicion is that while many individuals are shunning laptops for tablets for personal use, there are few business users who would willingly exchange their laptop for a smaller mobile device.
A guest blog from Danielle Bass, Director of Global Accounting System with Citrix, first published on the SAP Analytics blogspot on 24 April. Danielle will also be sharing her experiences of implementing SAP Business Planning and Consolidation as part of the Finance Forum at SAPPHIRENOW 2013, 14-16 May, Orlando
Complicated multinational reporting requirements, intercompany eliminations, multiple disparate ledgers, and time-consuming reporting practices – if any of these characterize your financial consolidation process, it might be time for an overhaul.
An interesting discussion about the agility and productivity that mobile devices bring to business, how perhaps the smaller format devices have specific strengths for alerts and approvals - and how we might view mobile devices five years out.
From Elizabeth Milne, Kristina Henn and Stephane Neufcourt
In the 2013 “Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites,” Gartner* emphasized that disclosure management capabilities “should support specific generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) presentation rules, such as U.S. GAAP or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), to enable the preparation of statutory financial statements with appropriate commentary and supplementary notes. Increasingly, financial reporting solutions incorporate process controls for reporting and disclosure, such as templates, collaboration between the company and the financial statement publisher, business rules, workflow, and audit trails to better meet regulatory, compliance and governance programs.
In this fast-moving business world, managers and executives need to be able to make informed decisions on-the-fly to seize opportunities and react to deviations as they occur – in fact waiting until you get back the office might be too late. To satisfy that needs, SAP and others are developing a rapidly growing range of sophisticated mobile, yet easy to use, mobile business intelligence (BI) solutions.
From Elizabeth Milne, Kristina Henn and Stephane Neufcourt
According to AIIM Research, "in the Age of Facebook, organizations must redefine how they think about information management, control, and governance in order to deal with social technologies". With the growing use of mobile tablets for enterprise we would like to provide Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) with an "anywhere - anytime" access to financial key performance indicators (KPIs) to better monitor their corporate financial results prior to databeing made available to Board members, investors, financial institutions and shareholders.
