Dolphin's Blog

Save Time and Cost in Order to Cash Process for SAP

dolphincorp — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:38:55 +0000

The Order-to-Cash process is at the heart of your business. And yet, it is often surprisingly inefficient and difficult to track. Even the smallest error can make the process inefficient, quickly draining available capital and resources. Automating O2C processes and linking documents improves cash availability by decreasing the number of touch points at each step of the cycle.

This is the kind of thing Dolphin does best — find smart solutions to take the time and cost out of critical processes like order to cash, accounts payable and ILM for SAP customers. We’ve put together a recorded webinar that highlights opportunities to increase cash flow, reduce costs and gain control over the Order-to-Cash process.

Click here to get the webinar. Or, download our new Order to Cash solution summary here.

Why Business Process Automation Matters More in Today’s Economy

dolphincorp — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:31:19 +0000

When addressing today’s pressing issues of cost containment and cash flow optimization, it is critical to first automate and then actively manage your most basic business processes, such as financial and sales order activities, as part of a broader business process management (BPM) initiative. The benefits derived from a sound process management strategy — including flexible workflow models, transparency to business-critical information, and the elimination of non-value-added tasks — should be actively sought out in an economic downturn, not deferred.

Too often, however, the wrong budget line item is eliminated. Delaying or canceling process automation projects may seem like a quick cost fix, but it’s a decision that can prove damaging over the short and long term. If a project is cost-neutral in a given fiscal year, in that its business benefits outweigh its costs, then why not stick with, or even accelerate, your process management roadmap?

By standardizing and automating its business processes, a company can better control organizational costs and cycle times and provide significant analytics and intelligence. The challenge is finding project support. Funding is naturally harder to come by when an organization is under pressure to cut costs, so sponsors must prove project value in terms that all stakeholders can understand and support.

It’s hard to argue that optimizing accounts payable (A/P), for instance, is a mission-critical task. But with the right analysis, you can prove that automating A/P directly supports an organization’s strategic mission to do more with less, while also conforming to financial directives such as reducing paper or improving throughput. You can also demonstrate that it is incredibly difficult to effectively reduce manpower — a common recession-era approach — when fractured, manual business processes stand in the way.

Demonstrate an Organizational Performance Boost with Dolphin

Dolphin’s business process automation suite — Process Tracking Systems (PTS) for Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Order Management — adds value to your broader BPM initiative, offering complete solutions to automate and optimize your business processes Our consultants will analyze your entire process and offer multifaceted approaches to help solve basic order-to-cash, invoice-to-pay, or sales order processing challenges by providing insight into the design aspects and anticipated benefits of the undertaking.Dolphin customers have realized payback on process optimization projects within the first year. The PTS suite’s shorter, highly focused implementation cycle enables customers to:

Contain and reduce costs
Optimize cash flow
Mitigate process risk

A business process automation project undertaken now will deliver near-term results while preparing your organization for any future economic condition.

Ensure High Compliance, High Performance: The Business Case for ILM

dolphincorp — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:26:26 +0000

Information lifecycle management (ILM) is the practice of strategically managing the data within your organization — including determining where it is stored, how quickly it can be accessed, how it is tracked, and how long it must be retained. With a well-planned ILM initiative, companies can ensure that their SAP solutions live up to their promise of high compliance and high performance; ILM helps companies manage data retention and access requirements to protect their organization from risk.
The foundation of an ILM initiative is a solid data archiving strategy, which enables companies to improve performance and manage their costs. Dolphin can help customers create this strategy based on their SAP R/3 or SAP ERP systems. Dolphin also helps customers assess DART and provides solutions for archiving business intelligence (BI) data, consolidating systems, and decommissioning legacy systems.

Solve the Compliance Conundrum
Compliance requirements often drive companies to implement ILM initiatives, and for good reason. After all, compliance with laws and regulations — from Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC reporting, to HIPAA requirements and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act — can impact legal disputes and regulatory approvals, as well as the very survival of the business.
Of course, not all information needs to be retained forever. Infinite data retention actually increases liability risks, since keeping data longer than required exposes the organization to potential data privacy breaches and legal claims. The challenge for IT teams is to retain the data they need and keep it accessible, and to destroy the data they no longer need — all while managing costs.
To do this, companies need a data archiving strategy that defines policies and integrates records retention requirements into short-term and long-term resource planning. This plan ensures that the right procedures — from records creation to archive retention and end-of-life destruction of that data — are in place, and that they are responsible, efficient, and cost effective.

Achieve Faster System Performance
SAP system users want every record and report available at the speed of thought. But the more records that are made available online, the larger the database — and this means slower response times. That’s why an effective data archiving strategy should free up the online database for the most active records.
At Dolphin, we have found that 75% to 80% of the records in SAP databases are inactive — the data needs no further modification. A smart data archiving strategy moves these records and documents off of the production database and onto an accessible offline archive to improve runtime and help meet service level agreements for backup and recovery. An added benefit lies in the fact that data archiving lowers the total cost of ownership for your data storage systems.
Information lifecycle management enhances how customers manage, identify, and categorize information for data archiving, retention management, and data warehousing. In addition, the solution’s new capabilities will be particularly useful for implementing more robust retention management policies and integrating third-party content management systems (CMS) through SAP ArchiveLink.

Get Started Now
Dolphin’s phased approach to setting up your data archiving strategy starts with collaboration between the IT team that manages data and the business people who use it. After analyzing retention times and retrieval needs, Dolphin consultants then prepare a comprehensive blueprint that serves as your archiving strategy roadmap.
Upfront analysis and planning for data archiving, especially when coupled with a more holistic ILM strategy, will pay off in both the short term and the long term through faster system performance and improved regulatory compliance — all with a lower total cost of ownership.

5 Compelling Reasons to Optimize Business Processes in an Economic Downturn

dolphincorp — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:42:13 +0000

Adaptive technology that enables process optimization can be game-changing for an organization in times of financial duress.
Administrative cost containment and reduction tasks can offset increased sales and marketing expenses, thereby supporting the organization’s leadership position for growing out of the recession.
Corporate finance has never been more reliant on optimized systems and processes to aid in unlocking cash flows – expensive and rare credit flows demand that all business processes contribute more to positive cash flow.
Exploit the ‘recession opportunity’. Organizations that are growing through mergers and acquisitions must integrate business processes. Standardization and automation of business processes can mean an easier transition for a combined entity.
Support the increasing demands of the external regulator and the internal auditor in their quest for better controls and compliance.

Catalysts for change emerge throughout the economic cycle, and counter-intuitive leaders leverage their organization’s current budget imperatives rather than succumb to them. Funding is naturally harder to come by when an organization is under pressure to cut costs, so sponsors must prove project value in terms all stakeholders can understand and support. With the right analysis and proof of direct support for the organization’s strategic mission, it is possible. Business Process Management projects can – and do – successfully Contain/Reduce Costs; Optimize Cash Flow; and Mitigate Process Risk.