Illumiti Innovation Blog

Defining SAP S/4 HANA - Video Overview

Date: April 14, 2016
By: Lorraine Howell

SAP S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications (customer adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business processes and models) and innovations to drive instant value across lines of business and industries. In this video, Lorraine Howell, VP, Research and Development at Illumiti discusses what SAP S/4 HANA is and why it matters.

 

Transcript

What is SAP S/4 HANA?

This is SAP's tried and tested solution, nothing new with all the business capability, functionality, and all business process rules that were developed since the nineteen seventies.  The difference is it runs on an in-memory database, the SAP HANA database. This database gives us:

  • Real-time operational reporting with drill-down capability all the way to the detail because of the high performance of the in-memory database.
  • Completely eliminates all the reconciliation efforts that we deal with today. Why?  Because both the analytical and transactional data is all sitting in one database.
  • Completely reduces our dependence on IT. We can access the data sets and build reports using a tool called SAP Lumira, which is a visualization tool for our own reports.

In addition, the HANA database also compresses the data seven to ten times and sits in-memory. This has given SAP the ability to redefine the financial structures and the logistic structures within the system. For example, S/4 HANA Finance has one unified journal which is just one set of tables with all of the financial data. So now you have a single source of truth from this one set of data and all the financial reports come from that single set of truth.

Why does S/4 really matter? It matters because it takes the concentration of finance from a clumsy close process, wasting time worrying about how long reports take, to actually eliminating all of the reconciliation efforts so that now your finance department can  concentrate on things like compliance,  tax reporting, and how can we do better to bring value to the business.

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About the Author

Lorraine Howell

As Vice President of Innovation at Illumiti, Lorraine is intricately involved in determining how clients can effectively and affordably benefit from the innovations at SAP regarding business intelligence and mobile applications.

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