Liberty's successful implementation of SAP's Financials, Controlling, Accounts payable, Asset management, and Human resources modules has become the backbone of the organisation's corporate back-office.
Key to this are the international best practices available to the Liberty Group through its inter-enterprise software solution from SAP.
Deon de Klerk, Liberty Group's Deputy general manager of finance, says these in-built practices have formed a crucial element of the organisation's back-office system.
"We are totally comfortable with SAP's best practices philosophy and vision for the future," he says. "When we encounter a new issue, it's usually resolved by adopting the standard SAP process, which is based on international best practices."
The financial services group recently re-structured into business units. Within this new environment, the SAP solution will enable top class business unit accounting, transfer pricing and reporting.
Liberty Group completed its first year-end "smoothly and flawlessly from a general ledger point of view" using SAP at the end of 1999. De Klerk describes major benefits of the SAP solution as true integration and consistency of information across the Group.
"As the system is being deployed Group-wide, we have developed one Group chart of accounts. SAP provides the platform to tackle, in a second wave of implementation, a host of traditionally complex and time consuming issues such as the ability to reconcile inter-company accounts quickly across the Group, automated bank reconciliations, business unit accounting, cash management, transfer pricing and the ability to shorten the reporting cycle," he says.
Liberty originally implemented SAP only within its head office. Since then, the system has been rolled out to some of the Group's subsidiary companies, and by mid-year there will be a standard SAP platform throughout most of the Group.
Liberty will, by mid-year, have completed the first major phase of its SAP project and has a solid base for the second phase of the project, which will include value-based enhancements in several areas of the business.
"We have achieved much benefit from the system already, but the really dramatic benefits, including reduced transaction costs for back-office functions, will become apparent over the next 18 months," he says.
Liberty is looking at business-to-business procurement, and while the company has not made any final decisions about this, the platform is now in place to enable it easily.
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