What SAP S/4HANA 2021 Brings to the Enterprise Part 1

What You Need to Know about S/4HANA

Why is S/4 HANA 2021 a critical consideration for your business? Sure, there’s always the support window to consider on your current SAP system. 

But more importantly, what value does S/4HANA bring to the table? In Part 1 of 2, we highlight three distinctions that bring value to your enterprise: Real-time Insights, Solutions Embedded within the Core, and New Business Processes.

Real-Time Insights

With SAP S/4HANA, you’re operating on the HANA in-memory database, so from an operational core business process perspective, you have access to all of the operational information in real-time to be able to run your business.

• Configurable KPIs – There are a lot of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) available out of the box, but you can also configure your own to satisfy your business needs.
• Role-Based Overview Pages – For every role within the organization—whether you’re a sales rep, accounts receivable clerk, or work in manufacturing—overview pages provide you with a role-specific graphical interface. You can see, for example, how you’re performing and how that performance measures up to manage expectations.
• Exception-Based Management – The KPIs themselves enable exception-based management—being able to see an exception, to see a problem in your business from a KPI within your Launchpad.
• Insight to Action -You can then drill down in any of these KPIs or any of the overview pages to the details behind it, giving you the ability to immediately act on an issue or address a problem. You can do simulations and predictions within the system as well.

Embedded in SAP S/4HANA

The embedded analytics capability in S/4HANA is really crucial, and Illumiti as an organization has spent a lot of time looking at all of the out-of-the-box KPIs in particular, plus KPIs that we've delivered to specific industries for our customers. We've tried to manage and help our customers understand the real value of those KPIs. A KPI is more than just a pretty number on a screen in green, yellow, or red.

For example, if your “days of sales outstanding” (DSO) are particularly high, it means you’re not getting paid by customers on a timely basis. So you drill down to see what’s causing the problem. Customers could be paying late, which would be apparent as you look at your receivables. Or your collection process is not the way it should be. Or your credit management is not set up properly. Or you just have inefficient AR aging reports and you’re not seeing that people are not paying on time.

All of that becomes transparent when you drill down from these KPIs. Not only are you in a position to correct the issue, but you can add business process reviews to make sure the process is now working. In contrast to the past, when you would have had to download to Excel, pivot on that data, and probably uncover the issue later in the game, after it had become a bigger problem.

There’s also newly embedded functionality within the core of S/4HANA, making the IT landscape a lot less complex and reducing the cost of having all of these multiple systems. Transportation Management, Extended Warehouse Management, and the detailed scheduling capability PP/DS that used to be in APO are now all embedded in the core. Sales Force Support and Customer Management, which used to be part of CRM, are now in the core. And all of the industry capabilities are now embedded in the core so that you can have multiple industries supported without having to implement a solitary industry solution.

This consolidation within S/4HANA gives the core that end-to-end capability to manage your processes.

New Business Processes

New business processes have been added to the core to support the requirements of a digital economy. The long-awaited Create Sales Order App is now available to use on your mobile devices while you're at the customer site, for example, to create your sales orders.

Other examples are Demand-Driven MRP and a Graphical Review of Availability Check that makes the availability check a much more user-friendly exercise. Spatial Asset Management leverages sensors and the availability of assets within the core, giving you the ability to see where both your linear and discreet assets are. Looking at your Maintenance Backlog Overview is yet another example of new business processes added. And there are Additional Predictive Capabilities using the artificial intelligence that's embedded in the core to give you things like predictive accounting and predictive MRP within the system.

To summarize, the real-time insights available through SAP S/4HANA 2021, the embedded analytics and functionality within the core, and new business processes work together to deliver efficiencies, new capabilities, and a better user experience. But that’s just the beginning.

In Part 2 of our introduction to SAP S/4HANA 2021, we’ll showcase artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, out-of-the-box integration, and look to the future to round out the highlights of this powerful next-generation business suite.

SAP Platinum Partner Illumiti

Illumiti is an SAP Platinum Partner based in North America with a long history of implementing custom-fit SAP software solutions in over 120 countries and across a wide range of industries. As a modern system integrator and management consulting firm, Illumiti focuses on helping customers leverage the power of SAP to work smarter, faster, and leaner. Learn more about SAP S/4HANA at https://illumiti.com/solutions/sap-s-4hana/.

And watch for our follow-up post: What SAP S/4HANA 2021 Brings to the Enterprise, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence, Out-of-the-box Integration and Beyond.