‘Tis the season of out-of-control diets and talk of trimming the fat. As year-end nears, we often contemplate how to rid ourselves of unwanted pounds, live better, be more efficient, save more money.

The same is true of managing business processes. How can you do more with less and still operate at peak performance? By automating your business processes—procure-to-pay, order-to-cash and other back-office operational procedures—you save time and money because your employees aren’t engaged in non-value added activities. No more researching, reconciling exceptions and tracking down where something is within the process. Once routine tasks have been automated they become part of the natural flow of how tasks are handled and productivity is heightened.

An automated SAP business process speeds up your business by making your knowledge workers more efficient and your executives more effective. They now have access to real-time information that helps them make more informed decisions about managing the business. A proven process that reduces errors and increases both system and process performance translates to sustainable cost savings and increased cash flows. This is the power of an automated process.

Dolphin’s business performance improvement solutions for SAP environments maximize your investment in SAP applications by saving you time. By automating how the data enters your system as well as the process for handling exceptions and approvals, we take the time and cost out of manual processing. We also place information at your fingertips to give management the visibility it needs to actively manage your organizations’ cash positions. In other words, we take SAP transactional information and make it available at the right place at the right time.

Dolphin has helped some of the world’s biggest brands for nearly 20 years optimize their SAP applications and systems. Learn more about the power of process and how we may be able to help you get the right information at the right time at the right price. Contact us at contact@dolphin-corp.com or 888-305-9033.

Based on Dolphin’s many years of helping customers with the most efficient and flexible improvements to their SAP business processes, we’ve gained insight as to what works best in the SAP environment. Here are  the Top 10 Reasons why the ‘best practice’ third-party solutions for Accounts Payable automation and enhancements for SAP applications is one that leverages your SAP system.

1. System of Record. Your SAP system is your corporate system of record.

2. Why pay twice? If your company is running SAP business processes, your organization owns SAP Business Workflow.

3. An upgrade to SAP could also mean an upgrade to your non-SAP workflow. Typically, at the very minimum, this means additional time and inefficiencies. It can also add expense and disruptive changes.

4. No duplicate backups. Your SAP system is backed up regularly and monitored. High Availability and Disaster Recovery plans are in place. Adding external software duplicates those operational tasks.

5. No synchronization. An external workflow may require regular refreshes of exported SAP data. Refreshing exported SAP data can create duplicate data and can cause synchronization issues.

6. Inherent data validation and verification. SAP Business Workflow has inherent, immediate access to live data for validation and verification.

7. Security. Information security and access control is crucial. Your business community is already licensed with the level of SAP access you determined.

8. Ease of use. Change Management and training on a new user interface falls in the category of another distraction to the business.

9. Compatibility. Workflows within the SAP system and certified by SAP will remain compatible with future SAP releases,

10. Lowest Total Cost of Ownership. An external workflow system requires more hardware, storage, database licensing and more IT and operations resources.

When you use SAP applications, you have a powerful platform for managing the flow of work for key business processes like Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Order Management, Human Resources and more. The smartest solution is often a platform that brings out the best in the system you already are using.

That’s why we build our solutions incorporating the SAP Business Workflow engine. When you think about it, taking advantage of – leveraging – SAP features to optimize your business processes in SAP just makes sense. It’s safe, cost-effective and doesn’t add to your infrastructure. Want more detail?  Go to full article.

Many suppliers are willing to agree to discounts in exchange for earlier payment of their invoices. But for scores of companies, the financial supply chain is just not equipped to take advantage of the opportunity—missing out on early pay discounts because it is too difficult to change payment terms, or the accounts payable tools simply aren’t in place to offer or accept a change in payment terms.

Without automation and real-time process visibility, it is extremely difficult for businesses with high invoice volumes to take advantage of early payment discounts. The process can be complex, requiring alignment between purchasing, liquidity management, accounts payable and suppliers. And often accounts payable processes are highly structured and lack the flexibility to process invoices with non-standard “dynamic” payment terms.

The process is called Dynamic Discounting and allows buyers and sellers of commercial goods and services to change the payment terms for an individual invoice or group of invoices to accelerate payment based on a sliding discount scale. The process is specifically designed to allow buyers and sellers to manage early payment discount offers easily and seamlessly.

Incorporating Dynamic Discounting into our Dolphin AP solution offers our customers a host of additional benefits. It allows buyers to convert a large number of their suppliers to slide scale payment terms and to enable their suppliers to opt for an earlier payment of approved non-discount invoices against a discount. Dynamic discounting functionality enhances supplier relationships, improves the AP department productivity and facilitates effective cash flow management that can benefit the bottom line. A win/win for both buyer and seller.

It would be interesting to know how many companies are actively using dyanamic discounting, or are looking into it, and what their experience has been. www.dolphin-corp.com/ap-dynamic-discounting/

To compete, managers at all levels are acutely aware that they must make smarter decisions and quickly take action. However, many lack the insight they need to make key decisions and are depending on hope that they have made the right ones. But as we know, hope is not a strategy. The statistics below were taken from a recent survey conducted by Accenture:

• 42% of managers use wrong information at least once a week
• 59% of managers miss information they should have used
• 47% of users don’t have confidence in their information

It’s not that they lack the data, but rather they lack the means to derive meaningful information when it’s needed—the right information at the right time in the right place. All areas of business are affected. There is also a need to further analyze this information to uncover new opportunities to grow revenue and reduce costs. Solutions are available to provide this information both for the business process itself and from business intelligence (BI) solutions with vast reporting capabilities, but implementing these solutions alone is only part of the answer.  To quickly take action on opportunities, these solutions must provide real-time information at-a-glance—easily and quickly.