Treasury Workstation in SAP S/4HANA: Operational, Financial and Centralized Treasury

Challenge

The Customer, operating in the Chemical & Biopharma sector, as part of the digitalization of its business processes, expressed the need to equip itself with a SAP S/4HANA platform on which to manage the following typical treasury processes:

• Operational Treasury
• Centralized Treasury
• Financial operations management
• Communication with banking counterparties
• Financial final balance
• Group financial planning

The adoption of the new Treasury suite in the SAP S/4HANA environment required, in addition to the implementation of a series of modules / functionalities of the SAP Treasury suite, also the interfacing of the current SAP ECC (Core ERP) system with the new SAP S/4HANA system.

Solution

To meet the Customer’s need, it was agreed to divide the content into macro streams:

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

In the area of ​​Cash & Liquidity Management, the issue of operational treasury and liquidity management was discussed. The management processes of bank data, automatic payments, interbank money transfers / giro transfers, treasury payments but also operational and medium-long term reporting were supervised. Furthermore, the calculation of the final cash flow by financial nature was revised in order to make it uniform for all the companies of the group. The rules used to determine the final balance were then also adopted for the calculation of the forecast cash flow, ensuring uniformity of information and ease of comparison and analysis.

In the area of ​​Payments & Bank Connectivity, the issue of approval of payments and subsequent communication with the credit institutions involved, both Italian and foreign, was addressed.

In the In House Cash area, the issue of centralized treasury was addressed, automating the cash pooling processes already in place and integrating the other types of Intercompany relations present within the group.

Finally, in the area of ​​Debt & Investment, the issue of financial management by the Parent Company was discussed. Financial products representing loans to third parties and group companies, leasing, fin-import and fin-export, but also bonds and credit lines have been enabled.

With reference to the implementation scenario, the “Qintesi Treasury Template” approach was chosen, based on the latest generation Best Practice contents, suitably integrated by Qintesi implementation add-ons developed and consolidated over the years and aimed at covering functions not available in the standard. The Customer was thus able to benefit from the immediate availability of a fully configured and functional SAP S/4HANA system from the start of the project with which to support the FIT / GAP Analysis phase and easily identify the necessary customizations.

Considering the availability of the SAP Analytics Cloud component at the Customer’s premises, the Qintesi tool called “Strategic Treasury” was released as part of the project, which allows to obtain a Treasury reporting book in the SAC environment.