SAP Treasury and Risk Management

Rudolf Bryša, Thomas Fritzsche, Markus Heß, Sönke Jarré, Reinhold Lövenich, Andreas Martin, Klaus G. Müller

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781592296170
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

SAP Treasury and Risk Management is an integral part of the SAP treasury solution portfolio. You use it to manage financial instruments, as well as monitor and hedge risks.

1 Introduction

In the next few pages, you’ll gain an insight into the contents of this book, its target audience, and what prompted us to write it. We’ll also provide a brief summary of the developmental changes that have been incorporated into Enhancement Package 6, which is the current enhancement package for SAP ERP 6.0.

1.1 Welcome to SAP Treasury and Risk Management

Before we gave any thought to writing, typesetting, and printing this book, we had to address the issue of conceptual design: which topics needed to be covered, and to what extent? Furthermore, what information did the reader hope to acquire from reading this book? When we came together to answer these questions for the second edition, it quickly became apparent that we needed to expand upon several sections of the first edition and add some new topics.

From your own experience, you know that SAP Treasury and Risk Management is a very complex topic with many ever-changing aspects: the financial markets, driven by banks, are inundated with new innovations in financial products. Accounting rules are constantly evolving. Parts of the new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have already entered into force, while other parts are still being debated. The financial crisis has also left its mark in the form of new compliance regulations, such as the European Market Infrastructure Regulations (EMIR) and the Dodd-Frank Act.

All of this means that you and your team have to deal with an increasing workload, and you probably spend a lot of time going back and forth between various systems, spreadsheets, presentations, and meetings. Equally confusing and complex is the specialist literature available to you. When it refers to analytical subject areas in particular, this literature is usually very mathematical in nature.

In order to deal with these changes, SAP Treasury and Risk Management has been developed on an ongoing basis in recent years. Even though this book now comprises over 1,100 pages, it’s still nowhere near enough to describe the world of SAP Treasury and Risk Management in detail. At several points in this book, we had to limit the amount of information we provided. Furthermore, we had to completely omit topics such as the somewhat new topic of central clearing. Consequently, this book does not reflect the SAP Treasury and Risk Management module in all its complexity. Rather, we have tried to identify topics and questions of particular concern to us and, we suspect, to many of you. It is on this basis that we have jam-packed this book with information about the essentials of the module; for example, what SAP Treasury and Risk Management is, how it works, and how you can operate the system and tailor it to your requirements. We believe that this book gives you a thorough and balanced insight into the SAP Treasury and Risk Management solution. We hope that you enjoy reading it and we wish you every success in your business endeavors. We also look forward to receiving your feedback!

1.1.1 Target Audience

If you are wondering if this book is for you, allow us to describe the readership we had in mind for our book.

As a treasurer, you know exactly how to steer your enterprise through the stormy waters of the markets. You ensure the liquidity of your enterprise, formulate and analyze risks, optimize the enterprise's risk structure, and manage surplus funds. If you’re an asset manager, you manage vast sums for insurance companies, pension funds, or other clients. You’re familiar with the market situation and know the internal requirements and guidelines, as well as the ever-changing underlying statutory conditions. You’re the true "treasurer" of your enterprise. It is not our intention to write a treasury manual; other books already fulfill this purpose. What we want to do is introduce you to a powerful, integrated treasury system that can be tailored to your individual requirements.

As either a member or the head of your company's IT team, you are responsible for selecting, implementing, and further developing SAP components in your company. You are familiar with the processes and tools provided by SAP. You have to deal with requirements from your company's business departments on an ongoing basis and are looking for a solution that represents the best possible value for your company’s money. In this book, we provide all the basic knowledge you need of the overlap that exists between business aspects and technical implementation in the system.

As a consultant working on a particular project, you w...