Based on the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices and personal efficiency, Kaizen, all businesses strive to enhance the use and functionality of technology to rationalize and expedite processes delivering optimum output and maximum value. Technology is known to be a driver and enabler of innovation. SAP and IT have also come along a long way innovating and progressing together, giving birth to the latest offering SAP S/4 HANA. We all are pretty much aware of these platforms and the tools, but being in the fraternity, it is imperative for us to know the journey on how it started and how did we reach where we are.
Introduction
SAP Business Suite for HANA – S/4 HANA is an ERP revolution based on a fresh and fundamentally streamlined data model design. SAP S/4 HANA is in principle a new product and is not a legal successor of the SAP Business Suite 7, which was exceedingly received as a complete enterprise solution in 2013. The S/4 HANA looks to add immense value to businesses and management processes by exhausting the possibilities of the modern in-memory database technology, reducing data footprint and sponsoring faster analytics.
Background:
As already known, SAP HANA is an in-memory platform for processing high volumes of data in real-time. HANA allows data analysts to query large volumes of data instantaneously. The earlier offerings evolved overtime with SAP Business Warehouse to SAP HANA Business Suite 7, which came with a set of fully integrated applications and eased business processes facilitating optimum resource utilization and control. The comprehensive suite facilitated real-time business and provided end-to-end process support for core functions in enterprises.
Taking a notch forward, the latest offering SAP S/4 HANA will redefine enterprise management through better analytics and less processing steps and higher throughputs. SAP S/4 HANA industry innovations can be envisioned across core functions and business lines like HR, Finance, Operations, Logistic, and Marketing etc.
Key Features of S/4 HANA:
With a smaller total data footprint and higher throughput, SAP S/4 HANA will work seamlessly supported with faster analytics and reporting. Lesser processing steps, unlimited workload capacity, no locking, and reliance on historical data makes this fresh offering increasingly enabling and revolutionary. The Line of Business (LOB) applications like CRM, PLM, SCM, SRM, and few other minor LOB applications, data and processes will be packaged into S/4 HANA and it will be designed to connect to SaaS based applications like Ariba, SuccessFactors, etc. to extract and make use of that data as well.
In the context of SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA Cloud Platform serves as an extension platform. Extensibility in S/4HANA can be categorized into two main parts: side-by-side extensibility through SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and in-app extensibility through built-in capabilities. Furthermore, the new SAP Fiori holistic user experience makes it compatible for any device including mobiles, desktops and tablets.
1. Data footprint reduction:
SAP HANA as the underlying platform with increased speed, merge of analytical and transactional data (OLTP & OLAP merge) and in-memory compression to reduce data footprint. Having all data in memory, the need for a massive amount of Indexes to speed up the access to data goes away. Real-Time & Simplified SAP HANA allows us to simplify our applications and the underlying data model (no aggregates, no indices anymore) leading to higher flexibility & throughput and data footprint reduction. On S/4 HANA, the ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) functionality will be redesigned to take advantage of the data tiering feature.
2. Deployment options:
With choice of deployment options: on premise, cloud and hybrid, this wide-ranging system is highly user friendly and reliable.
1. S/4HANA Public Cloud: Simplified, HANA-based end2end solutions for lines of businesses operated in the SAP public cloud with full SaaS qualities
2. S/4HANA Private Managed Cloud: Full ERP-only version, partly simplified, fully HANA-based, ~30% Fiori-based UI (rest classical SAP GUI), operated and managed in the new Innovation-HEC along SaaS operation practices
3. S/4HANA on-Premise: Full on-Premise ERP version (equal to Suite on HANA) with Simplification Exchange Innovation add -ons for finance (sFIN) and logistics (sLOG)
SAP Simple Finance:
SAP Simple Finance has built a complete new financial data model for the SAP Financial modules, where all aggregates, sub-totals and consolidation tables have been eliminated. SAP Simple Finance comprises four software products: SAP Simple Finance 1503, SAP HANA Live 1503, SAP Fiori1503 for SAP Simple Finance and SAP Smart Business 1503.
1. SAP Simple Finance (sFIN) soon will be SAP S/4 HANA Finance; a comprehensive finance solution based on SAP HANA, which can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise.
2. Designed to be easy to use, it can deliver instant insight for finance professionals.
3. It enhances the current finance solution portfolio from SAP, preserving its functional strength while enabling non -disruptive migration.
The S/4 HANA is thus the next generation business suite that can make businesses leap forward and streamline processes. With integrated functionalities, this offering with a groundbreaking proposition is an investment worth making!
SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) is the extension platform for SAP S/4 HANA. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform offers organizations with a comprehensive set of innovative applications and services to quickly respond to their fast changing business needs. SAP HANA Cloud Platform extension capabilities easily enable customers to meet their unique demands around their digital core of SAP S/4 HANA. SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) offers standard tools and capabilities ( such as Fiori UX, Mobile services, Database services, Pre-packaged integration content and Analytics) to quickly extend the unique and customized needs for SAP S/4 HANA core solution. SCP extension capabilities are the recommended way of customizing SAP S/4 HANA.
Sodales Solutions is an award-winning SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) solution extension partner. Sodales was founded as a consulting company. During the year 2016, Sodales evolved into a successful application development company focused on developing and selling apps built on SAP Cloud Platform (SCP). Sodales has referenceable customers across industries and geographies for SCP apps. Sodales has expertise in SCP DBAAS, WebIDE plug-ins, S/4 HANA extensions, SAP SuccessFactors extensions and SAP Smart Business Apps, and is now expanding rapidly into the Ariba extension space.
If you are still in a dilemma on how to leverage this cutting edge technology, reach out to us by email to sana.salam@sodalessolutions.com or call us at +1.647.824.4286
