Absa Group has joined forces with SAP for a core finance transformation. A multi-country digitisation journey has started with the Absa Groups’ Kenyan subsidiary’s S/4 HANA implementation. This is the first country in the Group to go live with SAP S/4 HANA.
The Kenyan implementation of S/4 HANA was launched on Amazon Web Service Hyperscaler, an African first for SAP and a Tier 1 bank in the African banking industry.
“Using best of breed technology and cloud, we are transforming our Finance business with highly integrated systems, automation and consolidation of our financial data and reporting’’ says Ebrahim Samodien, CIO Functions Technology.
SAP had been chosen to assist in simplifying the group’s internal finance and reporting processes. The implementation of SAP S/4 HANA is a step towards Absa’s vision to consolidate and report off a single instance General Ledger.
SAP S/4 HANA will help Absa to intelligently automate manual processes, simplify their data models, guide decision making process through embedded analytics and machine learning.
It will also improve the bank’s IT TCO by enabling legacy system decommissioning and moving compute resources into the cloud.
The SAP services teams in collaboration with Absa’s IT team commenced the S/4 HANA project as part of Programme Owari in May 2020. The programme was implemented using a combination of on-site and remote delivery consisting of SAP colleagues from EMEA South and, SDC India and Europe.
“We are delighted to have joined forces with Absa on their finance transformation. Absa are innovating and leveraging further insights into their core operational processes. This project also highlights the quick time to value realisation our customers are achieving through S/4HANA implementations and the associated benefit of the embedded technology capabilities. This journey between Absa and SAP is an excellent example of the power of collaboration in digital transformations” concludes Cathy Smith, MD SAP Africa.
