What is this blog about ?

Earlier this year, SAP launched the first version of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), the next generation business suite designed to help customers run simple in the digital economy.

SAP recently also has introduced SAP Activate for an accelerated adoption of SAP S/4HANA. SAP Activate is a combination of SAP best practices, implementation methodology and guided configuration, offering ready-to-run business processes optimized for SAP S/4HANA.

To help customers and partners implement SAP S/4HANA, we plan to release a structured and regularly updated guide, the SAP S/4HANA cookbook, that links to relevant information around the implementation of SAP S/4HANA with SAP Activate.

Think of it as an entry point that guides you to all relevant information related to the implementation of SAP S/4HANA - not only the standard SAP documentation but also to SAP Best Practices, how-to guides, whitepapers and other background information.

Typical target audiences are project leads, solution architects, and similar profiles.

Since every implementation project is different, you might not find the exactly measured ingredients for your specific SAP S/4HANA implementation in those contents, but you hopefully will get a good understanding what you need to watch out for when preparing your personal SAP S/4HANA menu.

As said above, the journey has just started, and the itinerary will contain iterative content updates. Therefore, please regularly check back for new content.

Where and when will the cookbook be published ?

The cookbook will be published within the SAP S/4HANA community.

It will consist of a small set of HTML pages that contain summary information and hyperlinks to more detailed documents that let you dive into the respective subject matter.

In the accompanying SAP S/4HANA community, you can raise questions and suggestions for further content that should be covered in the cookbook.

Click on the image above for a first glimpse how it will look like.

We plan to release a very first version of the cookbook in July / August and continuously enhance it towards the launch of the next release of SAP S/4HANA in Q4/2015.

Best and stay tuned,

Joerg

Very often we get the question about the motivation for SAP S/4HANA, and while the value is clear - we thought it is best explained via concrete use cases. Those explain best the potential of this next generation suite - as we are developing new solutions every quarter based on the potential of the technology we have at hand. But technology is one angle, especially if you look at the disruptive potential we see while discovering the state of Digital Transformation most industries are in. The other one is: What is the outcome? Which benefit does it provide? How do I prioritize, what change do I need to foresee?

This is where we have been working in development on concrete use cases to speak to our strategic customers and partners and fine tune our offering via co-innovation approach with SAP S/4HANA.

Thus this series will always have 2 angles: The BUSINESS benefit view (a) and the TECHNOLOGY view (b).

LInk to the series:

#S4HANA use case series: 1a - next generation logistics (biz view)

And if we talk to customers, it is more about Segment of 1, lot size 1 and Internet of things where the interest is - so be assured that this is a priority we see and have taken for the series as well - as you can not fulfill for the above without a digitized core.

We will look at the different areas by Line of business or key innovation, touching all existing and planned areas of SAP S/4HANA, from the core to the edges.

The first one coming soon: #S4HANA - the use case series - Next generation logistics

And we are confident while this series unfolds, there will be plenty of feedback and discussions we are looking forward to. We trust you will enjoy and looking forward to your feedback, stay tuned and do  not miss the information sources described here Quick update - Learn more about SAP S/4HANA

And follow me via @SDenecken to stay on top of the latest

Ever since S/4 HANA was announced there was mention about Simple Finance and Simple Logistics. After Simple Finance release by SAP there is fair amount of documentation around key data model simplification and thereby leading to performance optimisation, but hardly any details on Simple Logistics is available in public domain. At the same time from business standpoint Finance and Logistics go hand in hand and surely consultants / partners / customers are waiting to understand how Logistics will be "Simplified". Drawing parallel from Simple Finance the expectation was to have key data model simplification and some key functional improvements in Logistics area. To compound the problem Logistics in core ERP is quite a broad functional area covering MM, PP, SD modules and lot of sub modules. In reality there is lot of expectation with the mention of "Simple Logistics".

In continuation of learning and riding ahead in S/4 HANA journey, I have been exploring on Simple Logistics for past couple of months. Even though my background is in Supply Chain Planning (APO in particular) in recent times there has been some concern on what will happen to SAP APO and how it fits in future S/4 HANA journey. This blog is a summary of my understanding on Simple Logistics and expectation from it based on public domain information available so far. The exploration and research is based primarily on recent openSAP MOOC on S/4 HANA Deep Dive, SAP product roadmaps recently updated / added in Service Market Place and digging into Simple Finance related documentation to understand fundamentally how the "simplification" is being architected. For sake of simplicity my focus is on S/4 HANA On Premise although I understand that same codeline is being used for Public Cloud and Managed Cloud offering.

So what is expected from Simple Logistics On Premise version that is expected to be available before end of this year (Q4 2015). Before going into that take a look at Stock Champion Demo from HAsso's keynote at SAPPHIRE 2015 and from Simple Finance, Simple Logistics Demo from TechEd Bangalore 2015 Keynote. Further look into the current openSAP course on S/4 HANA Deep Dive where in Week 3 Unit 2 Priti Prabhoo gives a glimpse of Simple Logistics Order Fulfillment use case.She highlights the transition of SAP ERP from a "System of Record" to an engaged "Decision Support System" in S/4 HANA.

What started as Business Suite Optimisation with ECC 6 Ehp 7 - Suite on HANA (SoH) gets extended significantly with "simplification" of Logistics data model. This is in line with new BSEG table named ACDOCA in Simple Finance replacing whole set of Finance and Controlling related aggregate and index tables. With the new MSEG / MKPF table MMDOCA or MATDOC (?) in Simple Logistics, whole slew of MM & IM related tables (like MSTB, MSKU, MSSQ, MCHB, MSTE to name a few - refer to Unit 4 of S/4 HANA in Nutshell openSAP course) will become redundant. Of course SAP will continue providing exact same views as the ABAP tables in Application layer so that existing standard and custom reports can continue to operate non-disruptively.

The primary benefit of this data model simplification would be the classic MRP run transforming it to real-time MRP. The tryst of MRP through HANA enabled optimisation LOG_PPH_MDPSX_READ was first in ECC 6 EhP 6 special version for HANA and ECC 6 EhP 7. Now with S/4 HANA the underlying data model "simplification" will usher in not optimisation but transformation of MRP. This is in fact mentioned as key business process scenarios undergoing significant change in S/4 HANA apart from Advanced Available to Promise and High-volume Inventory BackFlush as outlined in Week 4 Unit 4 of S/4 HANA Deep Dive OpenSAP course. Sadly there was no demo or more details provided in the course or anywhere in public domain. The advanced Available to Promise capability seems to be extension of APO GATP capability in S/4 HANA. One reason why this porting from APO to S/4 HANA i.e. ERP is because fundamentally all the interacting transaction data (Sales Orders, Deliveries and receipt elements) exist in ERP and was being brought over to APO via standard interface CIF in order to process data fast enough using the in-memory object-oriented relational database component of APO - liveCache. The key master data and associated configurations used in APO can very well be modeled in ERP and the power of In Memory and Parallel Processing capability of HANA can easily bridge the gap of ATP TimeSeries in liveCache technology in SAP APO. In fact considering APO PPDS and GATP functionality to be moved in S/4 HANA, I shall not be surprised if underlying order table is also merged to a single one similar to that in APO. The single order table with an equivalent ATP Category or MRP Element identifier can differentiate between various types of receipt and requirement order elements including stock (if required). Having a single order table will enable even superior READ-WRITE capability for Planning (MRP, MPS, DRP) functionality in S/4 HANA.

It would be worthwhile to review the S/4 HANA Roadmap (Q2 2015 release) available in Service Market Place under Product Roadmap - Cross Topics. Meanwhile those focused on SAP's Supply Chain Management application can refer this future simplified supply chain application embedded in S/4 HANA provided in Week 1 Unit 4 of the openSAP Course. Clearly the breakup of SAP APO PPDS and GATP capabilities and porting them into S/4 HANA is seen outlined along with better integration of Supply Chain Execution components like EWM, TM. You may also find SAP IBP components like Sales & Operations Planning, Demand and Supply mapped in here fitting in where APO Demand and Supply Network Planning would come in.

Source: Unit 4 S/4 HANA in a Nutshell openSAP course

It is simply matter of time when what's exactly in Simple Logistics would be clear when it gets formally released but meanwhile we can hope all these expectations are fulfilled either in short term or near future. Only then can S/4 HANA realise the end game of true single integrated Business Process Platform having multitude of capabilities across business functions of Supply Chain Planning & Logistics, Order Management & Fulfillment, Procurement, Finance.

Extensibility for S/4HANA is a topic intensively discussed in recent blogs and interviews, see for example the interview by Bernd Leukert (http://www.isreport.de/news/sap-technikvorstand-im-exklusiv-interview/ , in German) and the discussion under the following blog post(http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2015/05/29/i-just-heard-sap-are-trying-to-kill-abap-once-again#comment-591915) and the following posts by Bjoern Goerke). It is heavily debated which extensibility capabilities are available for S/4HANA. A comprehensive view on S/4HANA Extensibility can be now found in a white paper (http://www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/en_us/downloadasset.2015-07-jul-08-12.sap-s4hana--extensibility-for-customers-and-partners-pdf.bypassReg.html ) that SAP published recently.

Of course, I recommend reading the paper, but as an appetizer, I want to rephrase some of the central points of the paper under the question “What changes”?

What are the changes for the on premise version?

Short answer: Nothing. You can use all extension techniques that you know from the Business Suite. Longer answer: you can use the techniques designed for the cloud and SAP recommends doing so. I will come to this point later, but let us discuss the cloud story first.

What are the changes if you decide to move to the cloud version?

First of all – to avoid confusion – let us recall Bjoern Goerkes answer in the aforementioned discussion: “SAP does not want all customers to be in the Cloud. It's the market that's tilting towards Cloud over on-premise in more and more application areas. It's customers who want to be there with parts of their solutions. Not all customers. And not with all their solutions. But significantly many. That's why SAP offers choice to customers to the possible extent.” (http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2015/05/29/i-just-heard-sap-are-trying-to-kill-abap-once-again#comment-592078 )

Now let us come back to the question:

A) SAP offers three flavors of extensibility in the cloud, which are complementary and can be combined:

1. Side-by-side extensibility is the capability to extend the applications by new functionality implemented on HCP – in Java and server-side JavaScript are the current development languages. Developers are the target group; the current tool set is SAP Web IDE (for frontend & backend JavaScript, and HANA development) and Eclipse (Java). What is about ABAP in HCP? Bjoern answered: “From a purely technical perspective, one could of course imagine to put an ABAP stack "into" Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) -- it's all just turing-complete software ; ). But it wouldn't comply with the cloud operations and lifecycle principles and requirements that HCP as a PaaS requires.” (http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2015/05/29/i-just-heard-sap-are-trying-to-kill-abap-once-again#comment-592154 )
2. In-app extensibility is the capability of extending the existing S/4 HANA applications which are implemented to the vast majority in ABAP (backend) and JavaScript (Fiori frontend) inside the ABAP stack. In-app extensibility in the cloud comes in two flavors:
   1. Key user extensibility: The target group is the business expert in the company or from a consulting partner aka key user), the tool set consists of web-based apps for end-to-end creation of extensions, for example custom fields, custom logic, etc. 
   2. Customer or partner “add-ons”: customers and partners can develop add-ons with a restricted feature set.  Developers are the target group; the current tool set is SAP Web IDE (for frontend JavaScript), Eclipse (ABAP) and the ABAP workbench. The add-on is developed by the customer/partner and deployed into the cloud environment – after passing a “cloud gate check” by SAP. This is called “Managed Extensibility” in the white paper.

B) The lifecycle management requirements dominate the extension process

In the cloud version, SAP defines the tact for software updates. For example, SAP ships a major update every quarter, regular fixes every two weeks and urgent fixes asap (just to give some example timelines from existing cloud products). For extensions, this means:

1. Extensibility artifacts must never block an SAP software update.
2. Extensibility artifacts must continue to work after an SAP software update without manual work; in other words: SAP software updates do not depend on the reaction by the customer.

All extensibility capabilities in the cloud must fulfill these requirements. This means, for example, that modifications to SAP objects are forbidden.

C) As a consequence of point B, extensibility artifacts use released, stable SAP extension points and APIs only. This has to be enforced by checks on customer side. On SAP side, checks must prevent incompatible changes to objects that are marked as extensible and have been delivered once. A deprecation mechanism must be available.

Points B and C are valid for side-by-side and for in-app extensibility.  In the on premise world, typically the extensibility requirements have clear priority – lifecycle management has to follow. In the cloud model, the relationship is just the opposite. Lifecycle requirements comes first, it dictates the limits of extensibility. (Side note: the SAP HEC offering does not follow this cloud paradigm, but the S/4 HANA cloud does.)

Only a limited set of extensibility use cases and APIs are supported for the first S/4HANA cloud version. However, there will be a high demand from customers for additional extensibility use cases. The existing extensibility concept of S/4HANA proposes that a SAP shared service center may fulfill additional requirements as long as they are not available in the standard extensibility tools. 

What changes for the on premise version (cont.)?

As mentioned, SAP recommends that you use the techniques designed for the cloud also on premise (see for example Bernd Leukerts answer in the aforementioned interview). Why? Going forward in this direction, on premise customers can benefit from the tools that are designed for the cloud to reduce their TCO. Why now? The migration to S/4HANA means that you anyway have to touch your code (see the article featuring Rudolf Hois http://www.news-sap.com/users-guide-journey-sap-s4hana-six-steps/ for a comprehensive overview). So it is a good time to change to state-of-the-art extensibility techniques in this project!

As the brochure about the extensibility of SAP S/4HANA has been published recently it is obvious for me that SAP is offering a wide range of choices for all partners for their own software of today and tomorrow.

http://www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/en_us/downloadasset.2015-07-jul-08-12.sap-s4hana--extensibility-for-customers-and-partners-pdf.bypassReg.html

Everybody has its own pace and priority when it comes to his own piece of software. Some are driven to rapidly innovate due to market demand and some can remain for a longer period. It depends on the application area, industry and country, educational and budget in the individual case.

In this situation the duo SAP S/4HANA and HCP play together as a team where each one has specific strengths.

The HCP is our first recommendation when you look for a development environment to start from scratch with limited upfront investment (edge applications). Additional use cases to that are if you want to

1. Reach out to external users and consumers, enable an external Fiori and Mobile user
   experience (e.g., customer service portal)
2. Enrich standard processes by before and after steps (e.g., customer service)
3. Manage choreography of several systems and data sources for new business processes
   (e.g., sensor data, IoT, Big Data)
4. Bridge applications between Cloud and On-Premise

The nature of these use cases is to be on the side of the business application SAP S/4HANA, so that we call it the Side-by-Side Extensibility.

If you are looking instead more in the direction of the following use cases like to

1. Enable an internal SAP Fiori user experience (desktop)
2. Create variants of standard processes and business logic (e.g., micro vertical
   solutions, localization)
3. Focus on company owned business documents (e.g., legal compliance and company
   policies)
4. Extend analytics, e.g., tailored operational reporting
5. Manage choreography with focus on S/4 HANA data and processes

you are actually working in the business application SAP S/4HANA, which we call in-app extensibility. These two approaches are described in detail in the brochure named above.

The huge advantage of the team (SAP S/4HANA, HCP) is that every partner now can pick what fits best into his specific situation. He can choose

1. the development language in accordance to his educational situation
2. the deployment option serving his existing customers and opening up new markets for
   him
3. the development infrastructure on–site or in the cloud
4. the industry he is successful in but also to look for other new areas
5. local customer specific solutions or global reach

But to remind everybody you cannot choose when it comes to innovation. SAP S/4HANA and
HCP is and will be the place for ongoing innovation like

1. Business processes in financials, logistics, …
2. User experience (SAP Fiori, Configuration,…)
3. IoT
4. and much more…..

All in all the team SAP S/4HANA and HCP is a safe bet for customers and partners.

Hello,

I'd like to share with your a few line on the questions we in SAP S/4HANA Outbound Product Management get very often: what is the strategy and roadmap for SAP solutions like SAP HR, SAP PLM, SAP SRM or SAP CRM. In this blog I will cover all of those solutions one by one, so always watch for the latest update.

1. Strategy and roadmap for SAP S/4HANA and SAP HR

What is available today for SAP S/4HANA and SAP HR, starting with the latest SAP S/4HANA June shipment? (see my other blog on the cloud edition). Parvathy Sankar from SAP SE has provided me with detailed information that we'd like to share with you.

The recent blog by David Ludlow gave a clear direction for SAP S/4HANA. We'd like to mention the implementation options customers have today for HR. Today, we have SuccessFactors Employee Central connected today to SAP S/4HANA cloud edition. SAP is providing productized integration between the two applications. For example, customer can send the cost centers from S/4HANA to the SuccessFactors. We also send the employee data, organizational assignments, cost center assignments and payroll postings to S/4HANA. As an example, project and engagement management utilizes employee information Commencing with a project and work package creation, staffing and assigning costs, procurement, creation of sales order, billing and finally project accounting, this scenario acts as a step-by-step project management solution As a part of project cost tracking, employees can automatically have access and manage their activities in timesheet that will be the basis for the billing and invoicing for projects.

What are the different implementation options SAP ERP HCM customers have today?

If the customers are ready to move to the SuccessFactors, they can start with a migration. For those customers who want to phase out the transition, we have different scenarios available. For the customers running SAP ERP together with on premise HCM on the same instance, they can move to S/4HANA on premise together with the SAP HCM and continue to leverage HR data in the rest of the modules of S/4HANA. Those customers who today run SAP HCM separately from ERP can connect the SAP HCM to S/4HANA on premise. However, SAP ERP HCM will not be simplified –HR started with user experience Renewal earlier. These features will continue to be available including the FIORI self-service applications for employees and managers.

Will the HR user experience be different for the SAP S/4HANA customers?

SuccessFactors started the journey to harmonize user experience and adopt Fiori design principles, and will continue this over the next releases. As an example, it is planned to have Workqueue usability on Fiori / SAP UI5 in the next 6 months. The Employee Profile in SuccessFactors already has a FIORI like user experience since 2014.

What is planned with the SAP S/4HANA on premise release planned for Q4 2015?

We will release a closer integration with the S/4HANA OnPremise to enable HR data from SuccessFactors and SAP ERP HCM to be used in the new functionality in November release of S/4HANA. We are very excited about this as this enables the whole enterprise to take advantage of a strong consistent foundation of HR data – information about people as well as organizational view.

Find more details on the SuccessFactors roadmap check here.

2. Strategy and roadmap for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Product Life cycle Management (SAP PLM)

What capabilities are available today with the SAP S/4HANA cloud edition 1506?

In the S/4HANA cloud edition, SAP Project System supports already various project accounting scenarios. In SAP S/4HANA, cloud project services edition for example, the new Release Billing Proposal Fiori app is available to support resource related billing scenarios of customer projects in Professional
Service. In SAP S/4HANA, cloud enterprise edition, customers can leverage PLM functionalities to create Work Breakdown structures for hierarchical project financial control purposes, as required for internal product development projects.

What is the intended PLM scope for SAP S/4HANA on premise planned for Q4 2015?

First of all, SAP has made a huge investment in SAP PLM over the last 24 months, and offers a rich portfolio of solution that helps customers accelerate their PLM efforts. SAP answer to today's market requirement is called SAP Connected Products. SAP Connected products delivers a product innovation platform that effectively manages, translates and integrates customer-driven engineering innovations throughout the enterprise and into the market by orchestrating all business functions and xBOM requirements. Just to name a few innovations added recently with SAP Connecter Product for Engineeringm Design or Project management: Visual Engineering, Product Lifecycle costing, SAP Engineering Control Center, and SAP Portfolio and Project Management (SAP PPM).

SAP’s goal is to make the transition from the SAP Business Suite and the recent innovations described above to SAP S/4HANA as simple as possible. SAP will enable a smooth migration and ensure all business processes can be covered as before. Second, SAP plans to transform the current on premise solution step-by-step towards a FIORI User Experience and plans to allow customers to follow that technology path step-wise.

What is planned beyond this for PLM?

SAP is planning to deliver an optimized and simplified version of SAP Portfolio and Project Management for SAP S/4HANA. One of the objectives in the Roadmap is to unify our portfolio of project management solutions. The SAP Business Suite currently contains SAP ERP Project System, SAP Portfolio and Project Management and SAP Commercial Project Management. SAP is taking efforts to find out how a unified and simplified project and portfolio management solution could be offered – both for on premise and cloud deployments.

Find more details on the SAP S/4HANA roadmap for SAP PLM (slide 13)

Next topic covered on this blog: Strategy and roadmap for SAP SRM and S/4HANA

Looking for concrete use cases to understand the value for business and IT : follow the Use Case series on SCN.

Follow me @ypeterschmitt

This week marks an important milestone for SAP S/4HANA, actually 3. Since the launch February 3rd we have come a long way, but this week is special as it marks the start of a intensive 3 months journey - till our next major release for SAP S/4HANA in Q4 - the 1511 update. It will be the next major update for the on-premise and the cloud edition, and in our discussions with prospects, customers and partners we feel a huge interest on further detail and support. Just recently we updated the roadmap on the SAP Service Marketplace - time to visit again. But below the 3 major topics from this week which we wanted to highlight in case you missed it.

Announcement of the S/4HANA cookbook.

Sparked by questions on how to implement SAP S/4HANA within a specific customer landscape, and created in order to answer those implementation questions, we plan to release a structured and regularly updated guide (the SAP S/4HANA cookbook) within the SAP S/4HANA SCN community here: SAP S/4HANA that links to relevant information around the implementation of SAP S/4HANA.

Think of it as a master guide that not only comprises the standard SAP documentation but also SAP best-practices, How-To guides, White Papers, background information, and so on. It will be regularly updated and the information will be public to support the success of customers and partners. Stay tuned, first content to be available in July already, and frequent updates as new content is created.

SAP Activate

To help businesses Run Simple, SAP Activate offers ready-to-run digitized business processes optimized for SAP S/4HANA. This new experience allows customers to flexibly choose the right approach for their business needs, be it a new implementation, integration or migration scenario. SAP Activate starts with SAP Best Practices packages for any implementation and uses one methodology for any deployment mode — cloud, on premise or hybrid.

This implementation methodology is a unique combination of SAP best practices, methodology, and guided configuration to help customers and partners to deploy SAP S/4HANA. SAP Activate also enables partners to extend the ready-to-run business processes shipped by SAP, which builds the basis on which partners could update their custom best practices and co-innovate with SAP. See more here: http://www.news-sap.com/sap-activate-three-steps-to-implementing-sap-s4hana/

openSAP course for SAP S/4HANA, the deep dive.

We finished the deep dive course which is structured along a customer lifecycle - starting with an intro by sharing more insights into the motivation behind SAP S/4HANA, the business value, and the strategy. After that, you will learn how to get started with SAP S/4HANA, how to test the product, and about onboarding. We then take you on a journey to discover the solution, including various lines of business, architecture, migration, and service aspects. Finally, you will learn where to get the appropriate support.

Please join this free course - it is still available here: SAP S/4HANA – Deep Dive - SAP S/4HANA experts, and more important give us feedback what we should focus on next in the openSAP forum.

Always check the available information sources here Quick update - Learn more about SAP S/4HANA, and stay tuned and follow me via @SDenecken

This blog has been posted also in the SAP S/4 Business Suite on SAP HANA (FAQ)  This happened on purpose and we will harmonize and consolidate thecontent in the future as SCN will be renewed - details in   Future of SCN - Another Update #1DXCOMMDEST

What are the S/4HANA capabilities to support customer and partner extensions, customization and modifications?

In general with S/4HANA, SAP suggests to differentiate between in-app and side-by-side (ex-app) extensions. This SAP white paper provides insights and guidance:

"Extensibility covers a broad spectrum of topics that allows customers and partners to adapt standard business software to their business needs. It ranges from business configuration; layout adaptation of user interface (UI), forms, and reports; custom fields and logic; integration; and custom terminology and translation to customer-specific applications. Extensibility in theSAP® 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"

Obviously the focus for the cloud edition is on ex-app extensibility to maximize SaaS capabilities, whereas for the on premise edition SAP continues to offer all traditional modification, custom coding (z-nnn) and customization capabilities as well.

For more details on HCP - HANA Cloud Platform extension capabilities, please see this link IoT Internet of Things and S/4HANA how HCP can support for example new IoT Internet of Things capabilities while we can maintain high-cadence innovations cycles for S/4HANA.

We will update this space as more details will be be made public.

For more background and different view points, please see also these discussions/pages

Will HCP HANA Cloud Platform be mandatory to customize S/4HANA? in S/4HANA - SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA overview

Overview of SAP S/4HANA Cloud options

Mastering SAP Technologies 2015 Melbourne and especially the corresponding comment section (over 100 comments and counting), where for example Bjoern Goerke;provides additional information.

Next-Generation Logistics: The Use Cases

In the last months you have probably heard a lot about the impact of the digital transformation on almost every aspect in life, society and especially on the way we work. This is dramatically changing expectations and behavior of customers who rather search for solutions than products. In combination with a smartphone, which disrupted already thousands of businesses alone, customers today are using many channels to the vendor - they are omnichannel.

The result is that businesses regardless of industry find themselves in a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) market nowadays and in consumer-to-business (C2B) soon, even those have been acting in a classical B2B market for decades. Many discussions and business guidelines only focus on the customer facing side. Most forget that it will affect the entire value chain of a company down to the suppliers. This is why we need to talk about the logistics of companies, especially goods producing companies and connect the dots between front and back-end.

If you really want to be successful in an environment ofsegment of 1, or lot size 1 - than you need to make sure you tackle it end-to-end. And if you have no glue what this is about, the problem starts right there as your business people are discussing - rather scratching their heads - exactly about this. But happy to explain further if you want, let us know. Back to the use case...

Use Case 1: Material Requirements Planning (MRP)

Most businesses today still follow the standard approach when it comes to material requirements planning, and yes - we have talked about this before.And yes, we have brought speed to the MRP process by leveraging our in-memory capabilities with SAP HANA before, with great success. But it is time to think ahead.

A MRP run is typically processed over a couple of hours, where sales orders and bills of materials are analyzed. At large customers with complex multi-level BOMs (Bill of materials) and many product variants, we even talk 48h. Running it over the weekend, on Monday, production planners and MRP controllers access these lists, print it out and do their planning step by step for the upcoming week, based on the data from last Friday.

But with bringing the customer to the center of action (segment of 1), evolving customer expectations business won’t be able to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the market space. Even if the market force them to provide their customers services level, they are not able to do so, because their backend systems simply doesn´t scale any more.

Typical workaround: increase inventory, thus costly.

Many MRP controllers don’t have insights in real-time. This leads to low inventory accuracy and revenue loss due to stock-outs or increased stocks that eat companies´ profitability. On-time delivery performance is critical for most businesses but a prerequisite to avoid customer churn and provide a seamless, personalized experience. Your competition is just one online-store (aka click) away.

How can supply and demand be matched in real-time?

To cater growing consumer demands, product planners and MRP controllers need instant access and prioritized view on material flow issues. Real-time alerting drives the responsible person to the exception, while the daily business is running without frequent interaction required decision making and finding the right supplier to order the right material has to be supported by system-generated solution proposals. Changing demand or orders placed at short notice has to be addressed by proactive decision making (produce to a lot size of 1). This can only be applied when inventory can be monitored in real-time and the creation of procurement proposals is automated.

The MRP Cockpit as part of the next-generation business suite, SAP S/4HANA, addresses these challenges

The MRP cockpit does not only improve visibility and speed but also work patterns. It delivers immediate and complete visibility on all crucial material KPIs and flow. In contrast to the classical approach, MRP can be run sub-daily and as frequently as required, not on a weekly base or overnight. As a result, demand information is propagated faster through the supply chain.

Access to inventory stock availability, lot sizes, manufacturing scheduling and sales orders, all in real time, helps MRP controllers to be exception handling-oriented. Flexible tailoring of available capacities and receipts help product planners to meet required quantities. Shortages can be identified before they happen enabled by personalized filters and attributes to analyze each shortage situation with high precision. Impact analysis of the entire material flow as required, identifies disruptions in the material flow. Get proposals for a solution based on existing orders, all sources of supply or inventory. Simulate the effect of a proposal by clicking on a solution guard and simply choose the best solution ready for real-time execution and ensure continuous improvement with a dynamic watch list of flags of materials.

You lead from instant insight to action, anytime, anywhere and from any device. The new MRP Cockpit actively taking all information and data into account, providing on the fly simulation and additional decision support directly provided by the system.

Stay tuned for the technical view of the use case above - 1b - next generation logistics (tech view) and follow me via @SDenecken for latest news.

In time before the summer break and right after our great 1 HY results with SAP S/4HANA an update in our FAQ series:

What is SAP’s latest SAP S/4HANA shipment, and what is the scope of that solution?

SAP has shipped SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition 1506 on June 18, and right on time for an important milestone in the cloud. SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition 1506 includes three cloud offerings:

• SAP S/4HANA, cloud marketing edition
• SAP S/4HANA, cloud project services edition
• SAP S/4HANA, cloud enterprise edition

SAP S/4HANA, cloud enterprise edition is an important step in the “cloud ERP” world is covers all the key business processes like procure to pay, order to cash in Logistics, and accounting and financial close, treasury and financial risk management in the Financial area. For more details on the scope of the 3 solutions checkthis blog.

SAP CRM and SAP S/4HANA: SAP has different solutions for customer relationship management. What solution should be use in which cases?

Let’s think in 3 pillars: the recommended solution for CRM sales and service functionality for the S/4HANA On-Premise Edition is the solution SAP CRM 7.  The recommended solution for sales and service functionality for the S/4HANA Cloud Edition is the solution SAP Cloud for Customer. The recommended solution for marketing functionality for both S/4HANA Editions, On-Premise and Cloud, is SAP hybris marketing.

What are the deployment options supported between SAP S/4HANA and SAP Customer Relationship Management?

SAP S/4HANA and SAP CRM can be implemented in a co-deployment model. All existing SAP CRM 7 systems are compatible with S/4HANA On-Premise Edition in a side-by-side or co-deployment model. More than a just a technical connection, the new SAP CRM 7 add-on option for SAP S/4HANA allows a simplified system landscape with a sharing of the SAP HANA database and the SAP NetWeaver stack. The CRM middleware is still needed, and SAP has a simplification roadmap for this middleware. From a user experience perspective, SAP is planning a harmonization starting with new Fiori skins for the SAP CRM WebUI.

What is the future of SAP Product Life cycle Management in the SAP S/4HANA context?

Over the last 24 months, SAP has made a huge investment in SAP PLM, and offers a rich portfolio of solution around “Connected Product” strategy that helps customers accelerate their PLM efforts. SAP’s goal is to make the transition from the current SAP PLM scope in the SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA as simple as possible. From a UX perspective: SAP plans to transform the current on premise solution step-by-step towards a FIORI User Experience and plans to allow customers to follow that technology path step-wise. Find more details on the SAP S/4HANA roadmap for SAP PLM (slide 13).

What are the different implementation options that SAP S/4HANA customers have for HR processes today?

If the customers are ready to bring all the HR process in the cloud, they can start with migration of their data to SuccessFactors and run all the HR processes in the cloud.  SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA are seamlessly integrated. For those customers who want to phase out the transition, we have different scenarios available. For the customers running SAP ERP together with On Premise SAP HCM on the same instance, they can move to SAP S/4HANA On Premise together with the SAP HCM and continue to leverage HR data in the rest of the modules of S/4HANA. Those customers who today run SAP HCM separately from ERP can connect the SAP HCM to S/4HANA On Premise. However, SAP ERP HCM will not be simplified –HR started with user experience Renewal earlier. These features will continue to be available including the FIORI self-service applications for employees and managers.

What is the strategy for analytics in SAP S/4HANA?

SAP S/4HANA analytics is the solution that SAP provides as underlying operational reporting and analytical engine in SAP S/4HANA, which enables business users, business analysts and IT to do real time process analytics and operational reporting on live transactional data. SAP S/4HANA analytics can be consumed as embedded analytics within SAP S/4HANA business processes.  This can be done through the use of hybrid transactional and analytical applications such as SAP Smart Business cockpits, which support closed loop decision making processes incl. drill-down, analysis, collaboration and embedded transactional functions. Beside this, SAP S/4HANA Analytics can be used in standalone analytic on premise use cases with the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite.

What will happen to SAP HANA Live and SAP HANA Live customers?

SAP HANA Live is based on Calculation Views in SAP HANA and will continue to be supported as an important native capability of the platform. Existing HANA Live content will remain valid with no changes/adaptations required, until customers decide to move to SAP S/4HANA and replace the traditional ERP data model with the new simplified one by activating the S/4HANA foundation package, at a time of their own choosing.

Can I test SAP S/4HANA on premise edition today?

Yes this is possible. SAP just announced the availability of the SAP S/4HANA, on premise edition trial. This offering allows you to get a first-hand experience of the value that SAP S/4HANA On-Premise can bring to your organization. The trial solution brings an up-and-running landscape with pre-activated Best Practices business content for localized end-to-end business processes across manufacturing, services, finance and controlling, powered by SAP Simple Finance 1503.  In addition, you will experience a next level of business operational efficiency and ease of use with embedded analytics – including preconfigured reports -- and the SAP Fiori user experience. Start the experience HERE (link).

Lets stay connected @SDenecken

Join John Appleby and me for a discussion about the journey to S/4HANA and how to build the financial case to make it happen. This is a free webinar on Thursday, July 30 at 1pm Eastern Daylight Time.

REGISTER AT THIS LINK

• Learn the different upgrade paths to S/4HANA
• Understand how to build a S/4HANA program
• Discover ways to financially justify the move to S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA, the next-generation business suite, is the brand-new offering fully built on the most advanced in-memory platform today – SAP HANA – and the modern user experience (UX) provided by SAP Fiori with embedded insight-to-action operational analytics.

To help you discover the potential and reimagine your business, the SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 30-day trial is available in the SAP Cloud Appliance Library (http://cal.sap.com). Hosted by Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com) this trial solution provides you the best opportunity to get a first-hand experience in your own private environment.

With the pre-activated SAP Best Practices content, you will be able to experience:

• End-to-end business processes across key business activities such as manufacturing, services, finance and controlling (powered by SAP Simple Finance, on-premise edition 1503); localized for US, Germany and China
• End-to-end Business processes for Chemicals and Discrete Manufacturing industries, localized for US
• The SAP Fiori User Experience
• SAP BusinessObjects and SAP Lumira reports
• Sample scenario using Personas UX technology

Access the 30-day license-free trial offering here and follow the “Quick Start Guide” to start your private trial solution. Read announcement in SAP News Center.

Two additional consumption channels are available for:

1. Securing your private landscape as long as you need, by purchasing an SAP Cloud Appliance Library Subscription Package. SAP software license is required. Access on SAP Store

2. Deployment in an on premise environment or in private cloud, SAP Partners with valid SAP Test and Development license can order a physical blu-ray shipment (material number 51049900), by following the instruction on SAP note 2041140

To simplify your business and make it more Agile, you want to avoid that your core system get´s too complex. Yet there is a need to configure, and often also a need to develop significant specific functionality – especially if you have differentiating business processes to cover. With SAP S/4HANA we developed a strategy for extensibility to level this out.

Extensibility covers a broad spectrum of topics that allows customers and partners to adapt standard business software to their business needs. It ranges from business configuration; layout adaptation of user interface (UI), forms, and reports; custom fields and logic; integration; and custom terminology and translation to customer-specific applications.

You might want to extend the scope with custom specific application logic, integration of other solutions etc. to address key topics like leveraging the Internet of Things, Business networks and the value of analyzing Big Data.

Or you want to extend the reach for more internal and external users, mobility etc., leveraging your mobile strategy connecting all people – learning from and leveraging social collaboration.

In all cases you want to increase your competitive with optimized business processes based on customer specific applications or extensions of your enterprise software.

In a pace layered approach custom extensions should be loosely coupled with core business processes, i.e. they need tight data and process integration, but the software lifecycle of extensions should be de-coupled from stable systems of records.

How do we approach this?

Let us start simple, enabling the business user. For example if you want to change order of columns in a table, hide tabs, change format of dates/numbers hide a few apps on Launchpad – and this changes should not affect other people.

Then a business expert or implementation consultant, you maybe want to add or change business rules or logic, add custom fields, tables, reports, forms or change the layout – and thee changes should affect people in your Line of business or the entire company.

And as developer, you maybe want to add or change complex business logic, while de-coupling software lifecycle of standard and extensions – thee changes should affect people in the company and the eco-system.

For this e focus on to complementing approaches: in-app and side-by-side extensibility.

SAP S/4HANA extensibility: technology overview

In-app extensibility mainly for context aware extensions focusing on tight integration, Starting from custom fields and tables, to change and add business logic (rules, BADIs etc.), analytics extensibility. Especially in On-premise (only): Full access to development tools (ABAP in Eclipse, SAP HANA Native etc.)

Side-by-side extensibility with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform - to learn from the outside and weave external content into your solutions. Like enable a SAP Fiori and Mobile user experience, integrate with other SAP Cloud and 3rd party solutions, leverage HCP application services (Mobile Documents, Output Management etc.) or full fledged development platform to build extension applications.

SAP S/4HANA extensibility: enable pace-layered IT with public API´s

What are we seeing in co-innovation projects?

• Fulfilling the need for faster cycles of innovations drives cloud-based extensions. HCP is a perfect fit, way beyond the traditional SAP environment.
• End users, business users and UX designers apply changes without risk and the core is kept stable so it can innovate much easier and more often
• Growing eco-system of solutions via the PaaS approach, leveraging the technology and infrastructure openness

And what benefit did they strive for? For the end user – a modern user experience with SAP Fiori-like UX and mobile usage of custom specific extensions,  Seamless integration in standard and 3rd party solutions plus easy personalization. For the business user to extend business processes and have faster cycles of innovations business users can easily apply changes without risk (rules etc.)

And for IT?

Combine cloud qualities and high degree of flexibility via fast implementation, with extensions that don’t impact operations. Patches and upgrade in regular cycles to scale by standardization and automation.

we achieve this today with SAP Fiori user experience and tools, flexibility based on managed extensions (e.g., rules) and new architecture. In on-premise: Seamless transition for existing extensions, managed and public cloud: Fast onboarding, short innovation & correction cycles. In-app extensibility (e.g., custom fields and tables), side-by-side with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform (e.g., extended reach for external users).

And planned innovation around rich in-app extensibility for all deployment models (e.g., breakouts with restricted ABAP, forms), Side-by-side development with HANA Cloud Platform for mixed deployment models (e.g., cloud based development of SAP Fiori apps, which will also run on-premise), integration of development tools (e.g., adding custom fields in Web IDE) a ell a enhanced Lifecycle Management for mixed scenarios (in-app and side-by-side)

More details on our extensibility concept you find in this whitepaper here http://www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/en_us/downloadasset.2015-07-jul-08-12.sap-s4hana--extensibility-for-customers-and-partners-pdf.bypassReg.html, also check out the blog from my colleague here SAP S/4HANA + HCP = Business Platform of Innovations and Choices.

Looking forward to your feedback and keep following me via @SDenecken.

Hi everyone,

in my earlier blog SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition 1506: what is the scope? i mentioned that i'll follow up with more details regarding cloud qualities and SAP's effort in that matter. For this I spoke to Stefan Batzdorf, from SAP SE, and we'd like to share this a couple of information with you.

YP: Stefan can you please first introduce yourself and your role in the SAP S/4HANA organisation?

Stefan Batzdorf: I am the responsible Global Program Lead of S/4HANA - SAPs next generation business suite fully designed and built to run on SAPs advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA. Together with my team I globally coordinate and drive development execution for all products - S/4HANA Cloud
editions and S/4HANA on-Premise - across the organization.


YP: Stefan, first question, what is meant by cloud qualities?

SB: Under the umbrella term “Cloud Qualities” we summarize all investments that we take in order to standardize the product experience for a public cloud offering and to reduce the TCO for both customers and SAP for all our cloud products. This integrates such investments as:


• Consumer grade UI for faster roll-out and higher end-user adoption

• Reduced TCO and TCOps for economies of scale - Higher standardization and best practice business processes leading to less need for customization & individualization (allowing for example a company template approach in the cloud)
• Simple configuration for faster adoption of change
 -  Less upgrade testing as extensive regression tests are with the solution provider
• Development in short cycles to frequently release new innovations
 - Decoupled lifecycle of solutions and customer/partner extension

YP: In which area did SAP invest for the 1506 release?

SB: We mainly invested into consumer grade UI (delivery of Web-access only for all UI transactions) and into lifecycle management automation in order to automate our cloud operations processes. In addition to this we enhanced the available business processes in the Cloud by offering customers the S/4HANA Cloud Enterprise Edition. Let’s have a look into the three spots:

• The product is Fiori-enabled because technically it needs Fiori for being a web-enabled cloud product that is state-of-the-art and enables UI modifications in future releases if UI designs and strategy might change or adapt. The product is role-based; it focuses on the primary user of a certain business process, puts the necessary information into business context and by this enables a ‘System of Me’. The merge of OLTP and OLAP enables embedded analytics and is the start of every transaction – decision and facts driven – and the system allows the user to focus on problem and decision solving tasks.
• In addition I give you a concrete example for LM automation: system provisioning is standardized and automated leading to the fact that
  customers can order a cloud trial system which is provisioned within hours and the move from a starter edition to a Quality/Test/Productive system is done within a day. Customer specific configuration and system setup can then start subsequently.
• The “Starter Edition” can be seen as a standard pre-configured system giving new customers the option to start right away in the Cloud with their system implementation: uploading master data, migrating on-premise business data, adopting the standard configuration and the standard user templates and roles. This reduces the implementation efforts to only weeks.


YP: What are the benefits for the end users in the 1506 release?

SB: End users have the benefit that they access the system via web only, anywhere and anytime from any device. Beside this, end users have the power, freedom and tools to configure, modify and monitor the software — without the need of a local IT department. Four you as an end-user, all tasks like modifying the UI screen, monitoring your batch jobs and output processes, your integration processes, enhancing the output forms, fine tune system configuration can be done by key and end users. No access to system administration or system transactions in the backend are required anymore.

YP: What is next regarding "cloud qualities" for S/4HANA cloud customers?

SB: In the Cloud we release quarterly new innovations to customers. Our focus for the next releases are
— increasing the Fiori coverage to 100% along a roadmap
— covering more industry solutions on the cloud (besides the Professional Services industry)
— enhancing the language and country scope to allow for more regional implementations. This is done based on feedback from first customers.
— enhancing the functional scope in the S/4HANA Enterprise Edition based on first customer feedback
.

YP: What are the technical benefits for customers now as the operations are owned by SAP?

SB: Let me give you a concrete example of customer benefits in the area of configuration & customization — a process that normally involved hundreds of consulting days. You will see that our cloud paradigms also benefit on-Premise customers. It is a prerequisite for a cloud product to be easily configurable via the web – for on-Premise this is a major step to simplify how systems can be adapted. Therefore in S/4HANA the guided configuration approach is introduced. It provides a fully configured system with sample data and ready-to-run standardized business processes (e.g. Quote2Cash) as a starting point for an implementation project. Based on this starting point, a key user can use self-service configuration applications to adopt the processes to customer requirements. Thus a key user is capable to activate a new business process where foremost a technical consultant was needed to perform this task.
For example activating a new organization leads to an automatic (under the hood) activation of multiple checks and writing of 300–400 data fields to allow the system to perform correctly. These SAP Best Practices enable customers a fast start, enable them to learn iteratively and – especially for the public
cloud – provide highly standardized and optimized business processes for the cloud to efficiently automate system provisioning and provide the system with
the best services. The guided configuration approach also addresses the simplification of system updates and upgrades, e.g. via allowing to provision additional business process pre-configuration automatically after initial go-live.


YP: in what sense can "cloud qualities" be beneficial to on-Premise customers?

SB: SAP S/4HANA is build and designed for public cloud qualities. Qualities for the cloud also drive the value for customers in on-premise as well and ensure fast innovation through a shared code line, libraries and qualities for all deployment options under S/4HANA. Enhancements in simplified access and configuration, web-only access for all actions, sub-second E2E performance, permanent innovation with quarterly deliveries and fast system provisioning times with low cost and efforts are key value propositions. Let us have a look at some examples where on-Premise customers concretely benefit from our cloud qualities:

• A simplified and guided configuration (end user enabled) also reduces configuration and implementation efforts on-Premise.
• Our new end-user enabled extension concept (for field extensions and analytics extensibility) can be leveraged on-Premise as well asa guideline for low TCO if manual custom code can be omitted
• Our lifecycle management automation (system setup and software update) such as near-zero downtime management also reduces efforts for on-Premise system operations if the cloud guidelines are kept (such as to work only against released APIs)
• Our ‘Principle of One’ paradigm: Customer problems are resolved with one solution only – therefore an S/4HANA system has no redundancies or duplicate processes; neither in features, processes, nor data. With the quarantine process we remove redundant functionality or components and we modularize the software thus delivering new efficient end2end business processes. This gives investment protection to our customers.
• And last but not least our approach for “Cloud first delivery” (quarterly delivery of innovations in the cloud) delivers well-proven innovations to our on-Premise customers (on a yearly basis).

Thanks a lot to Stefan for sharing his insights with us. Happy to get your feedback on this post and your view on cloud qualities.

Start the SAP S/4HANA cloud experience with the trial edition.

Follow me @ypeterschmitt

In the corresponding Business value blog #S4HANA use case series: 1a - next generation logistics (biz view) we have explained why to cater towards growing consumer demands, product planners and Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) controllers need instant access and prioritized view on material flow issues. Real-time alerting drives the responsible person to the exception, while the daily business is running without frequent interaction required decision making and finding the right supplier to order the right material has to be supported by system-generated solution proposals.

Today´s blog will shed a light on what has changed with SAP S/4HANA from a technical point of view to address the need of a Production Manager to adjust the production in real-time according to customers’ demand. In other terms, how optimizations and simplification can improve the Material Requirements Planning monitoring.

MRP is a critical business process and by far more than a simple calculator. A Material Planner is responsible for making sure the production plant never runs out of materials, components or sellable products. For example, if a material is produced in-house, the MRP calculates the dependent requirements. The quantity of components required to produce the finished product or the assembly, by exploding the Bill of Material (BOM). If a material shortage exists, Production Orders or Purchase Orders are created at every BOM level to cover requirements.

Simplification by code optimization

The MRP within SAP S/4HANA runs entirely on the in-memory platform SAP HANA which has been optimized and improved the overall performance. The internal logic to read the planning elements from the database to the internal table has been fully redesigned to run in-memory planning. And large parts of the application logic in the database server were implemented in SQL Script (15.000 lines of code).

Furthermore transactions were rewritten and tables simplified. The example below shows a code optimization.

With the new transaction code the MRP planners are able to run transactions close to real time which were classical batch processes in the past. More filter functions provide a broader flexibility to parametrize the MRP.

In the classic implementation approach, the application server calls the database server many times to read relevant data. The data were transferred from the database server to the application server. Tables are read sub sequentially. The additional roundtrips required a significant bandwidth to load the data. With SAP S/4HANA tables are read in parallel. The calculation engine within the database is directly hosting the calculations, which eliminates data load into the application layer.

All optimizations superpose each other to optimize the elapse time by a factor 10 (example from 30 minutes to 3 minutes for the same requirement calculation). POC results of up to factor 20 have been achieved as well, the more data a customer have and the longer the elapse time have been, the more reduction can be achieved). In the same way, the memory/data footprint is reduced by factor 5. Based on this achievement it is now possible to run the MRP on a much higher frequency - which is completely changing decision processes. Planner can meet the vagaries of production better and service levels can be increased.

Simulations as the base for real-time optimizations

Aggregated material views are historical necessary to achieve reasonable response times for specific views. An increased number of inserts and updates into redundant tables have been the price to pay. Customers transferred Analyzes into Data Warehouse Systems allowing a flexible reporting at reasonable response times. But again, this added complexity.

OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) is designed for fast row inserts, updates and selections. OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) is designed for long lasting queries. An OLAP database is populated with rows from OLTP database. This requires complex data extraction, transferring and loading mechanism. The mechanisms are usually slow and executed once a day submitting batch jobs during night time. SAP S/4HANA, build on an in-memory database, eliminates this overhead and allows OLTP and OLAP in one single system. It manages to preserve the fast OLTP transactions as well as achieve up-to-date data for OLAP queries.

Increasing speed of execution and analyses are the key capability to meet the new requirements of the market, introducing also a new generation of business applications that are used to create new business models and processes. With the integration of the analytical part in the same system, customers can address today’s demand for real-time business insights.

With the MRP a perfect storm is created bringing all this aspects together. Identifying solutions to material shortages traditionally, several ERP transactions have to be executed (see Figure). In the MRP within SAP S/4HANA, data is pulled in real time from all areas of material management including procurement lead times, inventory stock availability, lot sizes, manufacturing scheduling and sales orders across multiple sites. The system goes one step further and suggests potential solutions for the shortage through Solution Cards. In fact, Solution Cards has all information needed to resolve the material shortage (e.g. Reschedule Purchase Order, Increase Purchase Order, stock transfers). As this system is on one common base, financial data can be mixed directly into the process to rank proposed solutions. Each proposed solution is evaluated in real-time and the Material Planer can preview viability and impact before accepting a solution.

The second example is the way how SAP S/4HANA is transforming the user experience. In fact, the material resources planner will completely change the way work is done, because it can now optimize daily work tasks by focusing on exceptions and on the most urgent problems with the highest financial implication.

Do to the merge of OLTP and OLAP; we can use the real time analytical capabilities directly on the transactional processes, and propose simulations possibilities for the user.

Starting from the current state of the supply chain and including the existing MRP algorithms, the simulation computes the future inventory situation in detail. The optimization algorithms make use of the simulation to find the ideal replenishment strategies and parameters. E.g. with this ability to simulate and compare the ways of resolutions, the Material Recourses Planner can compare, for example, the effectiveness of an external replenishing compared to a replenishing via a production on an industrial site. Additionally all financial implication of the proposed solutions is visible.

In conclusion, with SAP S/4HANA, the Material Planner´s work environment will be role based and exception driven.

Stay tuned for the next use cases and follow me via @SDenecken for latest news.

SAP Simple Finance – Simplified Consumption Experience is this week’s TechEd “Lecture of the Week”. The lecture introduces how you onboard to SAP Simple Finance.It actually describes a earlier version of what is now evolved into SAP Activate.

It starts with a free trial in the cloud. Within minutes you can get an impression about the solution via an interactive guided tour. Try it out here.

Furthermore, the lecture describes the configuration process in the cloud. Configuration is based on pre-configuration with SAP Best Practices and easy-to-use Fiori-based Self-Service Configuration UIs that replace IMG in the cloud.

The pre-configuration content and the Self-Service Configuration UIs are complemented by a drastically simplified test experience. SAP delivers – besides the pre-configured business processes – also pre-defined test scripts and test automation tools for the pre-defined business processes.

See the lecture on how simple this now works.

While summer is a great time to take vacation, relax and get outdoors it is also a good time to get ahead on learning. This is why we are bringing you a one day, SAP Virtual Event ‘Simplifying with SAP S/4HANA’. Consider it your SAP S/4HANA Summer School.

The virtual event on August 18, 2015 will kick off at 11:00am EST / 8:00am PST with keynote, Reimagine Business in a Digital World, with special guest, Mike Walsh, futurist and author of best-selling book FUTURETAINMENT. From there, event attendees will have access to live and on demand sessions about the SAP S/4HANA customer journey, top use cases, on-premise, cloud and hybrid deployment options, industry specifics and more.

Here is a sneak peak of three must-attend sessions:

1. Panel Discussion: SAP Simple Finance at Work, LIVE Session 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST

Listen in on panel discussion about how SAP transformed its own financial operations with SAP S/4HANA solution SAP Simple Finance. Panelists will include Michael Golz, SAP North America Chief Information Officer, and Thack Brown, SAP General Manager and Global Head of Finance Solutions.

2. Business Digital Transformation Use Cases with SAP S/4HANA, On Demand

Today’s world is increasingly digital and networked. Macro trends like the Internet of Things, Big Data, Mobile and more are reshaping the business landscape and impacting all business functions. Join Mark Labedz, SAP Global Product Marketing Director, for a walk through of concrete SAP S/4HANA digital transformation examples and use cases.

3. Taking the SAP S/4HANA Journey, On Demand

SAP S/4HANA is the next-generation business suite of applications designed for the digital and networked economy. Attend this session with SAP Services Experts to learn how your organization can benefit from SAP S/4HANA to gain greater efficiencies while driving business innovation.

In addition to these product specific sessions, you will also have the opportunity to hear from SAP Industry experts and watch session s with SAP Customers including Swiss Re, Ascend Performance Materials, and Florida Crystals, about their experiences using and deploying SAP S/4HANA.

Take a day to brush up on your knowledge of SAP S/4HANA and connect with our experts, customers and partners.

Register Today >

Event sponsored by SAP Partners

In my last blog I wrote about the new white paper on SAP S/4 HANA Extensibility: S/4HANA Extensibility – The new White Paper

In this blog I would like to point you the user assistance pages that describe the Key User Extensibility features of the 1506 S/4HANA cloud version. You can find the link here: https://cp.hana.ondemand.com/dps/d/preview/1a93686c176845f0832a2a73221dd90b/1503%20000/en-US/frameset.htm?3ccb50e724b045508fea8b2cf1774b2b.html

Inside the user assistance, see the video with a tour on the available extensibility tools. It shows the apps for creating new custom fields, new custom logic (ABAP in the cloud) and for transporting the extensibility content from you q to the production environment.

I personally like that the user assistance of S/4HANA cloud contains a video that shows the features instead of a “lengthy” textual description (the old SAP documentation style). Do you like it, too?

I have read with great interest the book “The in-memory revolution” by Hasso Plattner and Bernd Leukert, and my goal is to transmit the key ideas of the book in the form of a blog series to the SCN community.

While wondering what would be the best way to carry across the message of the book, I’ve hesitated a lot on the format of these posts. The book itself does a marvelous job to explain and summarize the architecture of HANA, and how this architecture is allowing SAP to rethink and redevelop enterprise software into ways previously unthinkable, giving multiple real life examples along the way.

In order to apply this new knowledge, versus just summarizing the book, I’ve elected to present my article in the form of an imaginary interview with a customer’s CIO who would be unfamiliar with SAP HANA, and make with him/her this voyage of discovery into the promises of the in-memory revolution.

Part 1 – The in-memory revolution

CIO - So as you know, we have in production a big SAP footprint. Mostly ECC6, but also some older versions in some subsidiaries, and some non-SAP ERP of course. Of course, there are things we’d like to improve, some processes that are too complicated, and it’s difficult to bring new users to the platform, but overall we’ve been very satisfied. It is the backbone of our enterprise. And now you come to talk to me about “revolution”, and I’m a little scared at the idea of having to “revolutionize” my IT platform.  We’ve heard about new technology revolutions before.

Me - Of course, I understand your reservations when it comes to touching to the backbone of your enterprise. But let me first explain the technology, and why we believe it’s a revolution. And you’ll see it’s not just about a groundbreaking new technology, it’s also about being able to take advantage of it now, it’s about bringing this new technology in a non-disruptive way.

CIO - You mean, not restarting from scratch?

Me - Absolutely. Even better, keeping your existing processes, but immediately bringing (potentially enormous) improvements to them.

CIO - How would that be possible?

Me - It all started with a reflection of Hasso Plattner, who brought it to his students at his Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Postdam. Imagine you have a zero-response time database. What would be the consequences for enterprise software?

CIO - But do you have a zero-response time database?

Me - Well you’re right, let’s start from the beginning. Yes we do, it’s SAP HANA. It is the basis of everything.

CIO - How can you achieve that?

Me - Again Hasso’s breakthrough idea: with a zero response time database, all the constructs of computer history - that is aggregates, redundant tables linked to the usage of aggregates, caches, indexes - are not needed anymore.

Aggregates help to manage, but impede change. Aggregates bring with them a static view of the enterprise. They cannot convey a dynamic view of the enterprise. New trends remain hidden within.

Then here is the revolutionary idea: just keep transactional data, everything else will be calculated on demand.

The consequences are huge: it means OLTP + OLAP on the same system. It translates not only into faster reporting, but also into faster transactions thanks to removed redundancies.

It allows SAP to concentrate on business logic, not on performance enhancing constructs.

CIO - All this sounds absolutely great, but doesn’t tell me about your zero-response time database.

Me -You’re right. Here we’ve been taking advantage of progress and innovation in the hardware space. The key developments have been the rise of multi-core CPUs and 64 bit architecture. For example, today, we can have CPUs with eight 15-core sockets. The largest HANA machines today can accommodate up to 12 TB of RAM.

CIO - My ERP has more volume than this…

Me - Of course, I’ve just talked about hardware innovation so far. Let’s talk about the HANA architecture difference:

1- HANA is a columnar database: in an in-memory database with columnar organized tables, only populated columns consume main memory. This especially reduces data footprint in standard software as no single customer is using all attributes.

2- Dictionary compression: data is encoded with the help of dictionaries and stored as memory-efficient integers. Additional compression techniques for numerical attribute vectors reduce the storage space even more.

3- No aggregates or additional indexes: HANA being in-memory delivers zero-response time, hence does not need redundant data. Neither aggregates nor additional indexes that would require additional memory. Data is only stored at the highest level of granularity. All aggregations are calculated on demand.

4- Data tiering: Enterprise data can be split into actual and historical data. Historical data seldom accessed could be stored on disk, while only actual data needs to always be loaded in memory. This can even more reduce the data footprint.

CIO - Interesting. Do you have examples of such database footprint reduction?

Me - Absolutely, we (SAP) were among the first to take advantage of our new product. Our ERP volume on anyDB was 7.1 TB. Only by moving to HANA (what we call Suite on HANA, that is without any changes to the data model), the volume went down to 1.8 TB. It was an absolute non-disruptive move, essentially a database migration. But this is only the beginning, SAP has taken advantage of the HANA platform to redevelop its flagship ERP - this is S/4 HANA, we’ll talk about it in detail later - by removing all aggregates from his data model, and then we went down to 0.8 TB, 0.2 TB of which are actual data. As a result, the actual partition is reduced to about 3% of the size of the original ECC6 system.

CIO - Wow! That’s impressive but before moving to the actual ERP, I’d like to understand more things about HANA. You mentioned earlier OLAP and OLTP on the same platform. Isn’t that contrary to the established practice?

Me - Precisely! Another revolution. Most “established practices” come from earlier hardware and software limitations. Hasso’s paradigm is to restart from zero, but with today’s hardware, and with 40 years’ experience of developing enterprise software. OLTP was separated from OLAP because of performance issues. Once those issues are taken care of, there are no more obstacles to bring OLAP back to where it belongs. Again, it’s all about simplification and removing redundancies. The immediate consequence is being able to do real-time reporting on the actual data.

CIO - Indeed, this is great for reporting and read-only applications, but won’t database locks keep impacting transactional speed?

Me - Indeed, it could have remained an issue, but we worked on this as well. First, the removal of transactionally maintained aggregates means a sharp drop in database updates operations. Database updates are not only costly, but can cause data inconsistencies and database locks. We have chosen instead to perform update operations as insert-only operations, meaning that the old entry is invalidated and a new entry is inserted. This not only prevents database locks but allows application simplification.

CIO - Nicely thought out. So you said the first step on this journey is to migrate to HANA, but surely, in-memory alone won’t be giving you all this benefits?

Me - You’re correct, in-memory alone will above all speed up reporting, but to leverage even more of its benefits, enterprise software can be optimized to thoroughly take advantage of the new technology, which brings us to S/4 HANA.

Part 2 – S/4 HANA, the agile ERP

Will be published after my vacations, the week of August 31st. Stay tuned!

Maybe you might ask yourself how the Integration path of S/4HANA is being used in the context of SAP cloud solutions? Here is the answer:

SAP S/4HANA is the next-generation business suite product which provides innovated and tightly coupled solutions that supports end-to-end business processes integration between SAP S/4HANA Core components and SAP SaaS Cloud Solutions. Both the on-premise and cloud editions of SAP S/4HANA offer integration capabilities with other cloud-based SaaS products. This can be SAP solutions such as Ariba, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, Concur, Hybris, SAP Cloud for Costumer, SAP Financial Services Network, or other third-party solutions depending on the available API’s to those.

  Figure :Integration path of SAP S/4HANA, On-premise and Cloud Edition

To understand and explore the whole picture of the Integration capabilities of SAP S/4HANA to SAP cloud solutions, please check out the following link: Integration capabilities of SAP S/4HANA to SAP cloud solutions

All latest and greatest information on S/4HANA can be found at: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-64980

What is the benefit?

• SAP S/4HANA is providing choice of integration and deployment options for On-premise and Cloud Edition
• SAP S/4HANA is closely integrated to the SAP Cloud solutions such as Ariba Network, SuccessFactors Employee Central, and Concur etc.
• SAP S/4HANA offers Integration technology options based on the deployment selection: SAP Process Orchestration, SAP HANA Cloud Integration and Web services
• SAP S/4HANA is easy to integrate leveraging preconfiguredbest practices, guided configuration, onboarding either for the Cloud or On-premise deployment model
• SAP S/4HANA is designed with SAP Fiori UX and integrated user experience with simplified  usability on any device

Stay tuned for more details on this exciting enhancement and functional aspects of each S/4HANA Integration scenarios.