What can I do about it?

The $32.6bn question! If you're e an organisation that has the fortune to use SAP, then actually, there's quite a lot you can do about all of the points above, and of course Bluefin can advise you on all of them:

1. Get better at collecting cash from your customers. By using SAP's Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM) product, companies can more effectively marshal their valuable Credit Control resources to focus on collecting the cash that matters most to their business, in an automated, tightly-scheduled way. If you have turnover of, say, 1bn, then each day shaved off your DSO figure translates into 2.7m working capital freed up, and a yearly interest payment saving of 165k (at 6% interest)
2.  Implement SAP Business Intelligence. Most customers of SAP have Business Intelligence (SAP BI) included in the licence fee - it is free to use, requiring no additional cost, other than purchasing appropriate hardware. This is an extremely powerful tool waiting to be exploited, even if you have other non-SAP BI tools in place in your business (NB: if you use Business Objects, read this interesting analysis of SAP's impending acquisition of Business Objects). Through the use of out-of-the-box content from SAP, operations-wide performance management can be delivered extremely quickly, vastly improving transparency. Bluefin use SAP BI, and believe me, it is invaluable!
3. Consider using SAP's Governance, Risk and Compliance tools. More than a SOx box-ticker, this quite of products (including the product formerly known as Virsa) enables you to reduce the amount of time and effort involved in conducting statutory audits, and allows you to rapidly roll out new role definitions within your SAP environment without compromising security. In many companies, this last, seemingly trivial, point is really an issue, with new joiners often having to wait days or weeks for relevant logons - productivity which is lost forever.
4. Get to know your customers better, and capture opportunities more effectively, with SAP CRM. SAP's CRM suite is too comprehensive to do justice in one short blog. Suffice to say that over the past 5 years, SAP's CRM product has caught up with its main rivals such as Siebel in richness of functionality, and surpasses them in terms of integration with the back office. Bluefin uses SAP CRM to engage with customers, and it has been key to us achieving 45th place in the 2007 Techtrack 100, with a CAGR of over 80% in the past 3 years, whilst achieving exemplary customer satisfaction (a rating of over 90% on Customer Trust).
5. Speed up, and join up, your planning processes with SAP BI-based planning. Many Bluefin customers have implemented, or are in the process of implementing more consistent, less manually-intensive, more flexible planning processes using SAP BI. We are also advising them on what SAP's recent acquisitions in the planning space - for example, Outlooksoft - might mean for them in future.

Summary

I hope that my explanation of the recent global dramas has been illuminating. Whilst the outlook is not entirely rosy, I hope I have demonstrated that there are some things that businesses can do to prepare for any slowdowns or downturns. Indeed, even if the expected slowdown is not forthcoming, all of the suggestions contained in this blog can add real, significant, and tangible benefits to any business.

And a final word of warning: businesses sitting and waiting for events to play out would do well to take the lead from the bankers, and read up on a bit of Shakespeare themselves. As King Lear wisely stated, "Nothing can come of nothing."