SAP S/4HANA and its Emerging Importance on Your 2020 Roadmap

In the markets of 2020, over 200 million cloud users working across 180 countries stand for their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform of choice: SAP. For this global community, SAP stands out for its leadership across business processes, intelligent technologies and for its four decades of innovation making it the world’s #1 cloud business software company

SAP S4/HANA leads the vanguard of the industry leader's market offerings. SAP S/4HANA is a digital transformation enabler, with that has millions of enterprises vying for its rapid adoption. SAP S/4HANA 1809, released in September 2018,  is the fourth annual release of a major update to the SAP S/4HANA ERP product. It is the most comprehensive and intelligent version to date and overrides the earlier SAP S/4HANA 1709 variant. With this new release, companies can leverage additional functions and features that make business operations seamless and transparent.

Bert Schulze, who heads the SAP S/4HANA Regional Implementation Group, dives deep into the 1809 release of SAP S/4HANA in his blog. Moreover, this video by Schulze can give you a first glimpse of what to expect from the new release.

Rapid Innovation
 

So far, SAP has released four on-premise versions – 1511, 1610, 1709, and now 1809. And the number of innovations powered by SAP S/4HANA products is growing rapidly, both on-premise and on-cloud, while enhancing flexibility and efficiency as they grow.

The 1809 release brought in a wide array of additional features, apart from changes in the Line of Businesses, foundation elements and industry-specific releases (which were also a part of previous releases). For instance, in one year alone, SAP added 1,400+ new features and innovation elements to S/4HANA (on-premise and on-cloud). That’s the pace at which SAP is unlocking new business opportunities for enterprises worldwide.

In a nutshell, here are the key features delivered in S/4HANA 1809.

Supply Chain

•     Inventory Management: Post Goods Receipt for Purchase Order, Inbound Delivery and Production Order
•     CDS Views for Inventory Management

Retail and Fashion

•     Retail Merchandise Management: Transfer products using RFID as input device.
•     Demand and Supply Segmentation enhancements

Finance

•     Production Cost Analysis enhancements
•     Manage Costing Runs - Estimated Costs
•     Manage Material Valuations

Asset Management

•     Technical Object Damage Analysis
•     Asset Intelligence Network Integration
•     Ability to find Maintenance Task List and its operations

Sales and Distribution

•     Creation of Sales Orders is now simplified
•     Ability to perform split analysis in sales billing and invoicing

Inventory Management

•     Predictive analytics model included to help you make faster decisions
•     Post goods receipt for the purchase order, inbound order and production order

Quality Management

•     Inspection Lot Analytics
•     Ability to Record and Process Defects
•     Record Results for Inspection Points

R&D/Engineering

• Manage Project Procurement: To monitor purchase orders and purchase requisitions associated with a project.
• Alerts in Project Currency
• Multi-project Overview

Here’s SAP’s release roadmap for the next 12 months

 

The Road Ahead for your Business

Gartner predicts that 30% of large enterprises will have moved to a platform and product-centric approach with standardized ERP capabilities at the platform core by 2022. With SAP S/4HANA, the company is poised towards building a digital ecosystem that makes business processes seamless. It is the path you can take right now to achieve rapid business growth.