Valuable Features:
Up to the implementation of the application, it used to take weeks to the consolidation team to carry out the entire, monthly, financial consolidation, now it takes them just one or two days to perform the entire process.
The tool is highly customizable and, apart from the consolidation and elimination process itself, it gives you a wide range of possibilities to build reports and format them in whatever way you like.
Improvements to My Organization:
It has hugely reduced the amount of time dedicated to perform the financial consolidation of the group. The group is composed by 100 companies, and this process is key to maintain the wellbeing of it.
Technically, as the database of the product that we use is SAP HANA, the performance is quite good, even though we're dealing with quite a few million of records.
Room for Improvement:
There are no tutorials or wizards inside the tool, and I think they would be very useful sometimes. Having said that, I suspect that it is one of the SAP's strategies, because they get a lot of money from SAP training and don't want people learning who to work with their products on their own.
There is another thing as well which could be improved. In my view, it is necessary to introduce another way to create reports apart from MS Excel, and it must be a way that can be exploited through mobile devices as well.
Deployment Issues:
We've had no issues deploying it.
Stability Issues:
It's a robust solution with no issues.
Scalability Issues:
It's scaled for our needs.
Other Advice:
I think it is now robust and fast, especially if you have HANA as database. It wasn't as robust in previous versions, mainly in versions < 10.0.
Another good thing is that financial users are quite accustomed to the naming it uses, and being able to use MS Excel as the platform to build the reports, is, in my opinion, a great idea for those kind of users.
