mySAP™ Financials Moves Beyond Budgeting

Customers Benefit From New Strategic Enterprise Management Functionality And Expanded Financial Supply Chain Capabilities With Acquisition of PayNet Software

WALLDORF, Germany - December 5, 2001 - — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new functionality for strategic enterprise management and financial supply chain management within mySAP™ Financials. The solution will now allow more comprehensive processing and interpretation of key performance and financial data to further streamline the planning processes and provide a closed-loop strategic enterprise management process beyond budgeting. The new functionality for strategic enterprise management includes enhanced business planning and simulation, strategy management, and performance measurement and stakeholder relationship management capabilities. As a result, users will now be able to leverage new financial service models, the Internet and collaborative financial business scenarios to convert intangible assets into financial capital, thereby increasing business performance and improving informed decision-making. To complement the support for the financial supply chain, SAP acquired the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) Consolidator software from PayNet International AG, a company of the Telekurs Group, Switzerland, and a leading provider of EBPP applications, to expand the EBPP capabilities in mySAP Financials.

Functionality Enhancements Translate Strategy Into Action
With its new capabilities, mySAP Financials supports Beyond Budgeting. This management model, supported by SAP® Strategic Enterprise Management™, enables companies to make rapid and accurate business decisions and to react to changes in the market based on consistent, trustworthy information, and to collaborate on global and local levels, both internally and externally. The model’s devolved and adaptive organization allows strategy formulation and execution to become a continuous and inclusive process, which supports the move beyond the traditional annual cycle, centralized planning and fixed budgets.

"mySAP Financials provides the tools that organizations need to implement the Beyond Budgeting model, along with its capabilities for strategic business decision-making and multilevel controls," said Robin Fraser, program director of CAM-I’s Beyond Budgeting Round Table.

Business Planning and Simulation
The Business Planning and Simulation functionality enables companies to manage planning across multiple locations and through several feedback loops and to compare plans to actual data at the push of a button, including simulations. The solid analytical foundation of mySAP Financials allows the integration of in-house and peripheral systems’ application data. Users can now track and monitor the entire planning processes. Through Web-based interfaces or enterprise portals, users can monitor progress on specific tasks and the people involved, as well as timeliness, communication and workflow throughout the organization. New predefined applications for cost center, personnel and financial statements planning accelerate implementation, making it easy for occasional users to get up to speed.

Strategy Management and Performance Measurement
Enhancements to the Strategy Management and Performance Measurement functionality include increased personalization features and ease of navigation. Risk analysis provides the ability to converge value-based management and risk management in one central application. For example, SAP co-developed comprehensive strategy templates for the chemical industry together with the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative. These templates, also containing the Balanced Scorecard, focus on innovation, operational excellence and customer intimacy strategies that can be used as a starting point for a strategy discussion within an enterprise to help organizations visualize how objectives integrate to achieve an overall goal. SAP continues to work on strategy templates for other industries and specific business functions.

Stakeholder Relationship Management
Stakeholder Relationship Management is an entirely new capability in mySAP Financials and promotes stakeholder outreach through push services, such as automated e-mails. It also supports pull services, such as Web-based enterprise portals, to collect stakeholder feedback. Stakeholder databases and analysis reports deliver business strategy information so that stakeholders can better recognize the full market value of the company.

Business Consolidation Along the Financial Supply Chain
mySAP Financials supports customers according to the EBPP biller direct model, which enables the exchange of invoices with various customers for a company through the Internet. As a result of the recent acquisition of PayNet software, it also supports customers according to the consolidator model by providing holistic international consolidation functionality for exchanging invoices of several billers with their customers through a third party. The software will be seamlessly integrated into the Financial Supply Chain Management functionality of mySAP Financials, providing SAP customers with the capability to collaborate easily with their business partners.

"mySAP Financials provides a complete, closed-loop solution for companies to streamline the entire cycle of financial planning, reporting, measurement and analysis," said Hans-Dieter Scheuermann, senior vice president of mySAP Financials at SAP AG. "We now offer best-of-breed decision support capabilities that integrate with core operational functions, such as supply chain planning, operational planning and customer relationship management."