Test drive S/4 Hana – cloud edition.
The test drive is available for Project management, Finance and Marketing
You can create procurement orders as well. Available in Fiori style tiles. Looks good, also apprehensive if this style can match the utility value of the SAP GUI. This document covers the Procurement process only.
Procurement process:
- Basic difference is the Ux. The layouts are simplified and user friendly.
- Prompts on typing is not available. You need to go into search mode to pull up a vendor. Which is same as in SAP Gui
- While creating a PO, I wanted to add a few pricing conditions. Clicked on the item value link –but could not add new pricing elements
- WBS element is now called Work package name
- When you display a vendor you can get all information related to the vendor in one screen:
- Master data
- Info record
- Purchase orders, status and values
- Invoices
- Vendor balances, line items
- Payment blocks etc
- Similarly when you display a material –you get every information related to the material
- Collaboration is easy as there is an email link at each object
- But no other means of collaboration or social media seemed to be available
- The best way of retrieving my purchase order seemed to be via the purchase group. My PO would have been nice. Prompts and intelligent suggestions are missing. This is definitely a must in today’s world. Currently a significant area for improvement for S/4
- Goods Receipt: I had missed selecting a Storage location in the PO. During GR it just stopped me without allowing any way to enter the GR. Grrr…
- Back to PO create with storage location selected
- In the midst of GR creation, I thought lets check the PO and it had problems..
- So can I not operate on multiple screens? Right clicked on the PO link and no “new tab” option available.
- Could not post the GRN as the combination of Material, Plant with Storage location was not maintained. Looks like auto create of storage location has not been set.
- Invoice processing: Again searching a PO is not friendly enough. Posting is very unfriendly if some information like tax code is missed out in the PO.
Overall my sense is:
Pros:
- Nice screen layout, friendly to the eyes
- Functionality not compromised, I assume the configuration flexibility is still the same
- Reporting for objects are easy to find
Cons:
- Number of teething issues especially related to search
- If the initial document is not complete then subsequent transactions cannot be performed
- I see similar rigidity as core ECC
Questions:
- Given that all aspects need to be configured what is the timeline expected for cloud ERP deployment? Competitors claim 90 days. What is SAP’s take?
- Most of the changes I see are in the Ux, I am aware that the columnar data storage against each record is the other change with reduction in number of tables. This will drastically alter the performance. Is there anything else I am missing?
