Selected from SAP’s large and diverse partner base, nominations for the SAP Partner Excellence Awards are based on internal SAP sales data. A committee composed of regional and global SAP representatives determine winning partners in each category according to criteria such as sales achievement and performance. Awards are presented in a variety of categories, including overall sales, innovation, technology, services and solution-specific areas. 

BlackLine’s cloud solutions complement functionality provided by SAP ERP Financials and SAP S/4HANA®. The integration brings enhanced control, automation and data integrity to audit, finance and accounting departments worldwide, while ensuring that data flowing to and from SAP solutions does so through standardised processes. The BlackLine solutions are offered as SAP Solution Extensions under the following names:

• SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine
• SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine, premier edition
• SAP Intercompany Financial Hub by BlackLine

Commenting on BlackLine’s award win in the APJ region, Lee Thompson, Senior Vice President APJ at BlackLine, said:

“We are delighted that SAP has recognised BlackLine with this latest Partner Excellence Award across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). BlackLine is perfectly aligned with SAP to help customers accelerate their finance transformation initiatives and to become intelligent enterprises. This is a testament to the skills and experience of both companies in developing solutions that meet the demanding requirements of finance departments, as we focus on supporting enterprise innovation and emerging stronger in a post-pandemic environment.”

“BlackLine and SAP are jointly helping customers across the APJ region to transform accounting and finance processes. In 2021, we continued our ongoing joint new customer momentum by securing new deployment contract wins across the region and we look forward to building successful business momentum in the years ahead.”

In 2021, BlackLine received the SAP Pinnacle Award for Partner of the Year – Solution Extensions  – earning SAP’s highest accolade in this area.

More than a thousand of the world’s leading companies currently run BlackLine alongside SAP technology. However, BlackLine is ERP-agnostic, optimised for today’s modern enterprise with direct integration to more than 30 different leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and source systems, an added benefit for businesses using SAP solutions with multiple ERPs.

The 2022 SAP Partner Excellence Awards were presented at the recent SAP Customer Success Summit.

About BlackLine

Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. BlackLine’s cloud-based financial operations management platform and market-leading customer service help companies move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. BlackLine provides solutions to manage and automate financial close, accounts receivable and intercompany accounting processes, helping large enterprises and midsize companies across all industries do accounting work better, faster and with more control.

More than 3,800 customers trust BlackLine to help them close faster with complete and accurate results. The company is the pioneer of the cloud financial close market and recognised as the leader by customers at leading end-user review sites including Gartner Peer Insights, G2 and TrustRadius.  BlackLine is a global company with operations in major business centers around the world including Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay area, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney. For more information, please visit blackline.com.

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BlackLine’s founder and CEO Therese Tucker opened the conference with her presentation, “Trust is in the Balance.” Tucker took us through the changing expectations on CEOs and CFOs. The CEO’s primary role now is to drive trust, whereas the CFO is being pulled between managing risk and driving strategy. She asks, “can we solve real business problems with technology?” According to Tucker:

“Digital transformation must be top of mind. It’s the only way out of a difficult situation.”

Joon Ar Chiang of EY conducted three live polls of the audience, revealing concerns over increasingly complicated systems and diminishing skilled workers are top of mind for in-house accountants. According to Chiang, finance needs to become forward-looking instead of reactive. Building digital know-how will become critical. He tells us:

“The transformation age demands agility… predictive and data driven approaches will be the future.”

EY’s Doris Cheng followed up to give us a prediction of the future for finance personnel, that new jobs and skills will be required. With an increase in robotics-driven finance, industrial data scientists, RPA engineers and AI auditors will be required. Businesses will require a strong ability to change.

SAP and Finance

For InsideSAP Asia, the highlight was a presentation by Richard McLean, CFO of SAP Asia Pacific / Japan. In the first time this talk was presented, McLean announced that SAP has kicked off another wave of finance transformation. With new intelligent technology, repetitive processes can now be automated, enabling finance to take a more strategic role in business. This will be achieved through

• Process automation
• Dynamic analytics
• Next-gen UX

McLean revealed that SAP’s strategy is to deliver the intelligent enterprise. S/4HANA ERP allows all operational and analytical data to be held in one place, giving businesses agility, analytics, assurance and paving the way for automation. He explained why cloud is the best choice for ERP, allowing for:

• Flexibility, granting SMEs access to the same computing power and tech of much larger companies
• Support standardization, in reference to the record-breaking deployment by NZ company Kapura
• Agility and Scalability

Cloud ERP levels the playing field. Through the intelligent enterprise, SAP is creating a culture that encourages people to explore design thinking. To fail quickly, learn quickly and continue experimenting. Finance, he tells us, should become agile collaborators and co-innovators. He said:

“Stop over thinking agility and get on with it.”

There were many more presentations and amazing speakers, including some excellent breakdowns by BlackLine product specialists of RPA and technology that will affect the industry. The key takeaways for InsideSAP Asia were that finance must be empowered to decrease the reactive workload, whilst still increasing productivity. Doing so with the help of technology will enable finance to take on more innovative roles in business.

Overall, digital transformation allows mundane work to be replaced with high value work. This leads to further agility, further transformation and innovation.

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As technology provides the means to automate and standardise repetitive or low-value tasks, finance professionals now must think about where they might be able to create advantage for their companies through more strategic activity.

“Many years ago, when accounting was done by hand, if you had great accounting, that was a competitive advantage for a company. That has really changed quite a bit as accountants have got buried in their process,” says Tucker.

“I think the future might be a return to the past, and an accountant who is actually analytical, who is embedded in the business, who can see a little bit further out, becomes a true value-added partner with different business units.

“That’s not quite where we are at today. But in the best of outcomes, that gives a lot of job satisfaction to the accountant – it takes away the ‘grunt work’ they are doing and gives them important work.”

Haskins says technology is changing how finance is delivered through process and people, and business is already demanding more from finance. The CFO of today is expected to play four diverse roles. The two traditional roles are steward – that is, being responsible for preserving the organisation’s asset by minimising risk and ensuring the books are accurate – and operator – running an efficient and effective finance operation.

“Collectively those two roles actually form the core business of finance. It’s the production engine; it’s the stuff we can’t get wrong. Finance at a minimum has to produce those numbers,” Haskins says.

But increasingly, organisations are looking to CFOs to be strategists, helping to shape the overall strategy and direction, and catalysts, helping other parts of the business perform better by stimulating the right behaviours and encouraging a financial mindset.

“Where we find a lot of finance teams are spending their time is around the production of information – that steward and operator role that consumes most of our time in finance. Not surprisingly, most finance leaders and their teams would much rather be spending more time in the catalyst and strategist roles delivering value, being proactive and relying on automated information to be produced,” Haskins says.

Because the customers of finance don’t value the time it takes to compile financial information, being able to use tools such as BlackLine to automate and streamline standard processes is “quite exciting for accountants”, he adds.

Despite the potential of these tools, the finance function has a reputation for being married to Excel and other manual systems. Tucker says this is often because accounting and finance is seen as a cost centre, so they struggle to get funding for new solutions, as well as to find the time to evaluate other options.

“They are very overworked, and so getting their heads up out of the day-to-day processes to actually look at solutions that are more strategic is a difficult thing to do,” says Tucker.

When it comes to the hard numbers around calculating ROI on an automation solution, it’s perhaps not surprising that finance functions can find a number of different ways to justify the investment– time and labour savings, reduced storage, even simply the cost of paper.

“One of our customers said they have 10,000 that they reconcile each month, and a reconciliation is on average five pages long. If they don’t print just once because of this system, that’s 50,000 pages a month, and at 10 cents a page, that’s $5000 a month,” Tucker says.

Reducing the ‘grunt work’ load can also be an important talent retention strategy, according to Haskins.

“Generally the best talents in finance don’t want to be working on menial tasks,” says Haskins.

And of course, if there have been any financial irregularities or issues, there is a much stronger case to invest in a solution that may help to mitigate against those risks.

“The customers that move very quickly are usually those who have just gotten some very bad news from their auditors, and they call and say, I need it right now. The ROI on risk mitigation is enormous,” says Tucker.

Just as we are seeing analytics and business intelligence increasing in importance across many areas of the enterprise, having strong reporting capabilities is also critical for CFOs, as they look to take on those more strategic roles.

“The ability to produce information in real time is what make it actionable. [Companies] really have different views and ways of slicing and dicing data that they really need within their own organisation. We use BusinessObjects, and having a very powerful report writer embedded into our application is definitely an advantage for our customers,” says Tucker. “When you start to get information produced and collated and presented in useful ways, it really does provide a whole variety of new opportunities for running the business itself better.”

For organisations that want to take a step towards this finance function of the future, expect to do some change management, and take a stepped approach, says Tucker.

“Before you can ever automate things, you have to standardise. If you’ve got 5000 different versions of a spreadsheet, you are not going to be able to automate that. So step one is to essentially get your arms around what it is that you are doing, standardise that process, automate that process, and then reskill your employees so that they can actually provide the value-added activities that make [the technology] a good investment for you.”

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