Latest SAP® Solutions Drive Financial Compliance

ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Gruppo Coin and Standard Life Assurance Company of Canada are two customers using its solutions to help drive compliance with important regulations for the filing and reporting of financial data. These international companies rely on enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions from the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio to alleviate the pain-points commonly associated with eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The latest releases of SAP BusinessObjects EPM solutions bring customers new capabilities to help address the ever-changing needs of regulators, and to improve their overall financial decision-making. The announcement was made at Reporting, Planning, and Analysis 2010, being held in Orlando, Florida, from Oct. 27-29.

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Gruppo Coin Tailors Financial Reports for XBRL

Based in Venice, Gruppo Coin is one of the largest fashion-apparel retailers in Italy, and it is required to file financial statements for all of its eight different legal entities with the nation's chambers of commerce in XBRL format. Previously the company lacked a complete audit trail and insight into detailed data, so it began evaluating the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Planning and Consolidation application and the SAP® BusinessObjects™ XBRL Publishing application by UBmatrix.

"Before using SAP BusinessObjects solutions, we did not have the automation or integration we needed to meet the XBRL requirements efficiently," said Bruno Cocchi, chief information officer, Gruppo Coin. "Today, that is no longer the case. In a matter of weeks we were securely validating and filing our financial statements in XBRL format, and had detailed insight into company figures and data. We also now have customizable templates to quickly adapt our reports as needed. All of this has resulted in increased efficiency, and a lower total cost of ownership for Gruppo Coin."

Standard Life Simplifies Reporting for IFRS

Part of U.K.-based Standard Life plc, Standard Life Assurance Company of Canada offers a wide variety of retirement, investment and insurance products and services to more than 1.3 million customers. To stay atop Canadian laws and accounting standards, the company needed a solution for easier compliance with new national requirements for IFRS. By implementing the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Financial Consolidation application, the company was able to streamline operations by automating its consolidation and reconciliation processes.

"With our global reach, extensive products and the need to report in both Canadian GAAP and IFRS, consolidating our quarterly financials is a significant, complex undertaking," said Neil Thompson, manager of Financial Systems, Standard Life Assurance Company of Canada. "The SAP BusinessObjects application has enabled us to eliminate manual tasks, reduce risk of error and establish more efficient financial processes. It's also helped us improve the quality of our work, and we now spend more time providing strategic business analysis."

New Features Include Inline XBRL Support, Detail Footnote Tagging, Starter Kits

Today, SAP solutions lead the market by supporting the broadest possible range of financial and regulatory compliance requirements from complex financial instruments to accounting standards like IFRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandate that require companies to file their financial reports using XBRL, and SAP continues to invest in extending this reach.

The latest version of SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing offers users pre-defined templates to streamline processes, speed up filing times, reduce overall reliance on IT and help drive significant cost and resource savings. The application features support for inline XBRL (iXBRL), which converts the numeric-based reports into formats that are easier for people to access and comprehend via any Web browser. iXBRL is already being adopted by organizations like the U.K.'s HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), and the application is recognized by the HMRC accordingly. Additionally, the new version now features detail footnote tagging so that users can add written narratives and analyses to their disclosures during financial and compliance reporting. When building their reports, they can tag and link numeric detail with written information to produce a complete XBRL document and speed the last mile of finance process.

Newly available starter kits for SAP BusinessObjects software also help companies get the most out of their EPM and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions by speeding up time to value. The starter kits simplify customers' deployment and configuration scenarios, and help them improve compliance with financial standards and regulations. For example, organizations can use them to set up activities ranging from data collection to financial statement publishing, and preconfigured reports, controls and rules enable them to perform, validate and publish statutory consolidations that help meet IFRS or U.S. GAAP requirements.

"Today, SAP is the market leader in providing robust and proven solutions to the office of finance," said Stephanie Buscemi, group vice president of Solution Marketing, SAP. "By leveraging the combined power of our ERP, EPM, GRC, BI and enterprise information management portfolios, we continue to respond to our customers' needs and bring new capabilities to market – allowing them to not only fulfill the most recent financial regulations, but also to do so efficiently – and thereby help reduce the cost of compliance."

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SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 105,000 customers in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." For more information, visit www.sap.com.

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, and related applications.

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