It became clear in April, when SAP AG acquired privately held Virsa Systems Inc., that the enterprise software giant was beginning to target business processes, such as government compliance and risk management, that are usually overseen by chief financial officers.
Recently, however, SAP's focus on government risk and compliance (GRC) became more fully realized with a newly formed GRC business unit, new risk management software products, and a reseller agreement with Acorn Systems, Inc., a provider of profitability analysis software.
SAP is marshaling its GRC business unit, software products, and reseller agreement to support CFOs who increasingly are being asked to manage risk and government compliance efforts across the enterprise and to contend with a longer list of risks flowing out of increased business complexity, geopolitical threats, and compliance legislation, says Amit Chatterjee, SAP's senior vice president for GRC products and services.
The GRC unit is under the direction of Doug Merritt, SAP corporate officer, a member of the company's Executive Council, and head of the company's business user development efforts. In addition to managing SAP's GRC products and services, Merritt's group will oversee the company's corporate performance management products.
SAP unveiled its GRC Risk Management product, based in part on the Virsa product, at the spring Sapphire user conferences in Atlanta and Vienna. The product lets CFOs consolidate information about risk and compliance consistently from across the enterprise, develop plans for mitigating risk, and then monitor those plans, Chatterjee says. The platform supports four major GRC activities: planning, risk identification and analysis, risk response, and risk monitoring. The risk response component relies on best practices that SAP has compiled based on its experience in various vertical industries, he says.
"We would expect most manufacturers to be primarily concerned with supply chain risk management issues," Chatterjee says. "They have a wide range of vendors and suppliers that they have to deal with, and they need to know who can deliver and who conforms with government regulations."
Subsequent products from the GRC unit will allow manufacturers that have identified risk mitigation strategies to use business process management tools in SAP's NetWeaver stack to implement business process changes, Chatterjee says. As part of its GRC push, SAP also has agreed to resell profit analysis software from Acorn Systems. SAP will market and support the software, which is built on top of NetWeaver, as the SAP Business Profitability Management application by Acorn.
This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of Managing Automation.