SAP Summer College Summary

This college consisted of a three-part webinar series, in which Zanders explained best practices on important topics in the world of corporate treasury and SAP elaborated on its latest offerings to support the processes with a focus on accelerated and cloud-based deployments.

If you were not able to attend, please find the recorded webinars here. Nevertheless, we now also offer you a short, written summary of what has been discussed.

Forecasting functionalities

The topic of the first webinar was ‘Cash management & cash flow forecasting’. Pieter Sermeus, senior manager at Zanders, explained the preparations needed before you can start daily short-term cash flow forecasting and executing cash management actions. Subsequently, he explained some approaches to prepare a cash flow forecast, whereby he made the distinction in the objective (cash management, hedging or funding) and the term of the forecast (short term, mid-term or long term). Thereafter, SAP’s Christian Mnich and Christian Schmid presented their SAP Cash Management solution. This module in S/4HANA provides support in bank account management, cash positioning and short-term cash flow forecasting, and can be deployed either on premise or in the cloud. Lastly, SAP elaborated on its Analytics Cloud solution, which offers the functionality to report and slice and dice. It also offers functionality in the workflow around collecting cash flow forecasts and the slicing and dicing of the forecasted and actual items.

Payment factory capabilities

The second webinar was on ‘Payment factory optimization’. Ivo Postma, senior manager at Zanders, elaborated on the payment factory process and the relation with various departments within an organization. In addition, different payment factory models (payment forwarding, payments on behalf of and collection on behalf of), connectivity options (SWIFT, cloud provider, host-to-host and e-banking) and cash management structures (zero balance cash pools and virtual accounts) have been discussed. Subsequently, Christian Schmid presented the cloud-based service SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity as well as dedicated payment factory capabilities supported by SAP In-House Cash and SAP Advanced Payment Management.

Process optimization

The topic of the third webinar was ‘Treasury process optimization’. Jonathan Tomlinson, senior manager at Zanders, provided an overview of financial risks managed by Treasury and explained why it is so important and complex to manage FX risk. Subsequently, the Zanders risk management framework was highlighted, including risk identification, risk measurement, policy and execution process issues. As part of the execution process, the whole deal life cycle was discussed. Lastly, Christian Schmid presented SAP’s Treasury and risk management module and the possibilities with its cloud-based Trading platform integration and Hedge management cockpit. Also, SAP Treasury analytics and reporting capabilities for risk management were addressed.

We are very pleased that over 200 professionals registered to the SAP Summer College and that we received positive reactions from the attendees – thank you!

In case you have any question regarding SAP functionalities or other above-mentioned topics, please do not hesitate to contact us.