Absa Group has begun a multi-country digitalisation journey, with its Kenyan subsidiary the first to go live with SAP S/4 HANA.
The Kenyan implementation of S/4 HANA was launched on Amazon Web Services (AWS), 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 at Absa.
SAP had been chosen to assist in simplifying the group’s internal finance and reporting processes, with the implementation of SAP S/4 HANA 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 its data models, and guide decision-making processes through embedded analytics and machine learning.
It will also improve the bank’s IT total cost of ownership (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,” says Cathy Smith, MD of SAP Africa. “Absa is innovating and leveraging further insights into its 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.”