The challenge
The digital world has brought the topic of tax to the fore. Rapidly evolving regulatory compliance requirements and tax authorities’ growing call for real-time reporting means corporates require homogeneous tax platforms and better control of their data. SAP S/4HANA, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for large enterprises from SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, represents the ideal tool, but until recently wasn’t targeted toward tax reporting.
With 25,000 SAP customers - for which tax is an important part of their digital transformation - migrating to S/4HANA over the coming five years, SAP needed to evolve its solution. It turned to PwC as part of our global joint alliance to gain a complete understanding of the functionalities a tax executive would require to be able to incorporate them and to open the door to a larger target audience.
Leveraging the best of each other
"SAP's a technology company that provides intelligent tools to help firms enhance their business performance. An important part of the transformation of our portfolio and critical to our programme is tax compliance which is one of PwC’s core strengths. That makes PwC a very strong business partner." says Michael Depner, VP Globalization Services, SAP.
"We really appreciate the outside in perspective PwC’s brought in to help shape our products. There are many opportunities for PwC to help us expand our product portfolio to market to help companies manage tax and to deliver real added value to customers," he adds.
"Together we’re now aptly placed to ride the key market trends in front of us."
From drawing board to market
With PwC’s support, SAP’s developed a number of solutions specifically for global tax management: SAP Documents Compliance, SAP Advanced Compliance Reporting, SAP Tax Service, SAP Tax Compliance.
"In the last three years, we’ve made significant progress together in growing the portfolio from drawing board to market. SAP solutions for tax management help companies manage indirect tax consistently and cost-effectively, enabling CFOs to adapt to rapidly changing regulations around the world. They do so by digitising tax determination, calculation, reporting and compliance, and by integrating them with core business processes on a global scale," explains Sridhar Sundaram, Lead for Customer and Partner success, SAP Globalization Services.
With the solutions and value proposition now developed jointly by the two firms, they’re now being translated into customer success, again with each partner leveraging their capabilities.
Reaching the right audience
"Traditionally, we’re in contact with and speak to a company’s CTO or the head of IT. But for these solutions, we need to convince the tax lead in the firm, people who PwC’s regularly in touch with and can introduce us to too," Sridhar Sundaram enthuses. To initiate contact, PwC helped up organise a workshop with members of the Tax Executive Institute in Europe to introduce them to SAP and sensitise them to the firm’s product portfolio.
"In this way, PwC’s really helping us reach new horizons," Michael Depner adds. Since then, the partners continue to actively go to market together via joint presentations at conferences and other events. We’re also involved in pilot tests of new SAP innovations - such as Digital Boardroom for Tax - and take part in co-creation initiative and workshops.
Delving deeper into digital
"Together, we’ve already landed a number of key customers and we’ve great aspirations to grow this number quickly. We’re off to a fantastic start with PwC and are continually jointly looking for more opportunities," enthuses Joe A. Kattackal, Global Lead, Strategic Partnerships, SAP Globalization Services.
He goes on, "there are many opportunities on the innovation front with machine learning, Blockchain and other new technologies that can help us enhance the user experience. With our different strengths continuing to complement one another and our ongoing strong partnership, we can achieve a lot. We’re very much looking forward to the next phase of our partnership where together we can simplify tax for corporates around the world."
As PwC and SAP entered into a global joint alliance, any service to be provided is subject to an independence analysis and assessment, in compliance with global independence rules and Belgian legal requirements.
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