SAP S/4 HANA is the new beginning of SAP Business Suite- made with simple, flexible and leading edge components that make businesses nimble. It is designed to solve the difficulties and frustrations that business & IT users faced with traditional ERP softwares. Some of those complexities were:
- Overall Landscape complexity
- User Experience- impacted user productivity
- Maintenance- Skills, efforts and budget
- Scalability- High volumes of data
- Extensibility – Adding new business functions and technology features
- Custom Development
Analyst house Pierre Audo in Consultants said companies can reduce the complexity of their systems with S/4HANA because the platform integrates people, devices, big data and business networks in real time.
The S/4 HANA offering is meant to cover all vital processes of an enterprise. It integrates functions from lines of business solutions as well as industry template solutions. The whole philosophy of S/4 HANA is to allow companies to respond faster to their changing business needs. While S/4 HANA comes with these foundational building blocks that give us a jump start on our new enterprise journey, companies would require to frequently extend these core functions to keep up with emerging business demands.
So how do we extend S/4 HANA (On-premise and In the Cloud) with new business functions?
This is achieved through the SAP HANA Cloud platform- the extension platform of SAP.
SAP S/4 HANA extensions can be easily built with preconfigured APIs available on HCP or developers can compose new extension applications using the build components available on HCP. This enables companies to easily add new technology features such as analytics, big data, mobility, portal, internet of things or connect with other platforms (on-premise and in the cloud) such as:
- Success Factors
- Cloud 4 Customer
- Ariba
- Concur
- 3rd Party Apps
- Social Data
In the past such functionalities were achieved through custom coding or Z programming. The traditional approach of custom coding was very inefficient. Custom coding would often cost companies a huge maintenance cost due to
- Code Modification
- Upgrade Costs
- Special Skills Requirement/Uncommon Technical Skills
- Testing Efforts
- Lack Of Documentation And Standardization
Unfortunately, many companies had to implement custom coding to keep up with the new business demands resulting in even higher landscape complexities.
The s/4 HANA extensions on HCP solve these complexities.
With the S/4 HANA extensions in the HANA cloud platforms, companies can use compatible and standard APIs provided by SAP to avoid the drawbacks of risky modifications. This approach developing extension apps is highly accelerated due to less testing time and enhanced standardization of tools.
With this approach, companies can save months of development efforts and millions of dollars that were previously spent on additional hardware and custom development cost.
SAP has said that the SAP HANA platform can potentially save an organization 37% across hardware, software, and labor costs.
Change is inevitable, whether in your business, industry, marketplace or economy. Technology is becoming extremely relevant in order to support this change. Don’t let your enterprise systems become a bottleneck for your success. Nurture your enterprise systems with faster innovation and new functions so that you can reach your potential.
Sodales solutions will be presenting its latest S/4 HANA extension apps at SAP Sapphire 2016 session ID- PS37834 ” Optimize Your Supply Chain for the Digital Era with IoT and Analytics”.
In addition, we will be showcasing our latest industry based S/4 smart analytics template apps that were created after our successful implementation of smart analytics with our customer. To hear from our customer, join us at Sapphire session ID A4962 ” Enabling real time decision making with SAP’S latest technology.”
