SAP Highlights BlackLine RISE Alignment at Finance Innovation Week

BlackLine’s alignment with SAP’s new RISE with SAP initiative was a central topic during the ERP leader’s presentation at Finance Innovation Week, which is now available on demand.

RISE is SAP’s offering to help companies streamline—or for new customers, begin—the transition to its S/4HANA cloud ERP solution. RISE includes a range of tools and services, including business-process intelligence components, to ease the transition.

With RISE, notes Gillian McGrath, a director in the SAP S/4HANA Finance Centre of Excellence, SAP customers get the flexibility to choose the infrastructure that suits them best, along with business process intelligence to pinpoint the best place to start. A key benefit of RISE is lower cost of ownership.

“Our customers are experiencing a faster deployment by at least a two-month potential acceleration,” she says. “And they’ve seen an 87% reduction in in-house costs due to more flexible operational environments.”

McGrath also points to BlackLine as a key partner in helping SAP customers succeed with RISE. “There are many accounting processes that happen outside of the ERP, and finance leaders traditionally haven’t always been confident that they can identify financial errors before reporting results.

“So whether you’re from a very large corporation and you have 100 different ERP environments or just a single instance, BlackLine takes care of all those transactions happening outside of the ERP and fits right into this conversation of helping to move our customers to the cloud.”

According to McGrath, BlackLine has already helped RISE with SAP customers realize a “very quick time to value. They’ve experienced a high ROI, and they’ve done so with embedded leading practices.”

BlackLine’s market-leading cloud solutions for financial close, offered as SAP Solution Extensions, align with the value proposition of RISE with SAP to help customers accelerate their digital transformations and become intelligent enterprises. Many of the world’s leading companies have leveraged BlackLine as an enabler on their journeys to implementing SAP S/4HANA, and this will likely continue as many more move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

SAP recently honored BlackLine with the 2021 SAP Pinnacle Award for Partner of the Year in the Solution Extensions category, recognizing BlackLine for its “world-class solution extensions.” As a long-standing SAP platinum partner, BlackLine was one of only 21 partners that received an SAP Pinnacle Award from among more than 20,000 SAP partners worldwide.

Read our latest issue of BlackLine Quarterly for more stories like this that can help your F&A organization move out of the disruption caused by the pandemic and into the light of a more normal—and fruitful—future.