Porting group treasury from SAP S/4HANA 1909 to SAP S/4HANA 2021

Challenge

The Client, operating in the Chemical & Biopharma sector, as part of the ERP system conversion, expressed the need to port the already installed Treasury solution to SAP S/4HANA 1909 in a “sidecar” scenario.

To better understand the project aim, it is necessary to describe the initial context, marked by the co-presence of 2 systems, one side-by-side with the other, namely:

1. SAP ECC 6 environment on which all Modules, except Treasury, were installed.
2. SAP S/4HANA 1909 environment on which only Treasury was installed, with a basic accounting component.

Converting the SAP ECC 6 system to the SAP S/4HANA 2021 version made it necessary to decide between 2 alternatives:

• Maintain a “sidecar” scenario, i.e., leave the Treasury suite in the SAP S/4HANA 1909 environment
• Carry out the porting of Treasury to the new environment converted to the SAP S/4HANA 2021 version.

The Client opted for the second option with the aim of fully exploiting the integration potential of SAP Modules.

The processes involved were as follows:

• Operational Treasury
• Centralized Treasury
• Management of financial transactions
• Communication with banking counterparties
• Financial reporting
• Group financial planning
• Managerial reporting

The porting of the Treasury solution from the SAP S/4HANA 1909 version to the SAP S/4HANA 2021 version required not only replication of configurations but also adjustments to some features such as Liquidity Calculation.

Solution

To meet the customer’s need, it was shared the porting for all group companies all modules already active at the SAP S/4HANA 1909 platform, namely:

• Cash & Liquidity Management
• Payments & Bank Communication
• In House Cash
• Debt & Investment Management

In the Cash & Liquidity Management area, porting was carried out with respect to the management of electronic statement of account, vendor payments, free payments, bank connectivity, and operational and medium- to long-term reporting. In addition, the calculation of the final cash flow by financial nature was adjusted to make it consistent with the new logic introduced with the SAP S/4HANA 2021 version.

In the Payments & Bank Connectivity area, the porting of the payment approval/rejection functionality and subsequent communication with the involved Credit Institutions, both Italian and foreign, was carried out.

In the In House Cash sphere, functionality was ported to manage centralized treasury, i.e., to govern cash pooling processes and other types of Intercompany relationships present within the group.

In the area of Debt & Investment, the porting of functionalities for financial management under the parent company was carried out. Financial products representing loans to third parties and to group companies, leasing, fin-import and fin-export, as well as Bonds and Lines of Credit were enabled.

Finally, in the project scope it was shared to include the porting of the 2 Business Analytics solutions:

• Integrated Liquidity Planning for managing group financial planning;
• Strategic Treasury, Qintesi’s business content based on SAP Analytics Cloud for Treasury management reporting./