Attended IAPP, IARP, and TAWPI Fusion conference this week in Dallas.  Over four days, 1,600 attendees attended 200 breakout sessions, heard four keynote speakers and browsed the offerings of more than 125 vendors.

One of the keynote speakers confirmed what we’ve been hearing for the last year.  There continues to be cost pressure on businesses, despite the somewhat better economic news, and “finance and AP are being asked to partner with the rest of the business to help drive efficiency and effectiveness”.

As Dolphin’s solutions optimize business process, they continue to meet the objectives of management by cutting costs, managing cash flow, and mitigating risk. Dolphin had 3 sessions at Fusion specically for organizations using SAP as their ERP system – a first for this conference which has focused on the process without regard to the ERP application. The well-attended break-outs  were on:

1. Accounts Payable: Case study on bringing an outsourced shared services ‘home’ and how the new solution optimized the process so that management gained visibiltiy as well as control. The savings were in the milliions of dollars.
2.  The importance the having procurement and accounts payable on the same team when looking at procure=to-pay automation
3.  Opportunities for optimization within the order-to-cash process including order management, cash application, and lockbox processing for those using SAP Lockbox.

Lockbox processing turned out to be one of the hot topics of discussion at both the session and the conference.  While certainly facilitating many aspects of collecting payments and applying cash easier and faster, it also includes some challenges. Not infrequently payments don’t match invoices one-for-one. The handling of this kind of exception can be time and labor intensive process and that adversely affects DSO.  Learn more here.

In a searchSAP.com story, editor Courtney Bjorlin reports that many users are upset about the cost of improving SAP NetWeaver BW performance with its BW Accelerator. In the article, Dolphin’s CEO Werner Hopf offers insight into how to assess your own needs for speeding up queries, and into the need to make your choices in the context of your company’s information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. The article states:

“BWA is a necessary ingredient once you reach a certain size,” Hopf said, “but implementing ILM and archiving can dramatically improve query performance. A good strategy is to implement nearline storage first and then decide whether query performance justifies a BWA purchase. Organizations may find they can postpone a BWA purchase, or, when using nearline in conjunction with a BWA, at least reduce the sizing of BWA, he said. BWA and Dolphin’s work can also be complementary solutions, where a customer using a BWA can lower the total cost of ownership and maintain performance by incorporating nearline storage.”

Learn more about Dolphin’s approach to speeding up SAP NetWeaver BW queries — while containing cost and risk — here.