With the release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 on August 29th, new innovations and enhancements were brought in all three S/4HANA Cloud solutions: SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud, SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud and the SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP is providing a new generation of business applications, listening closely to the needs of Customers and Partners in developing a rich scope that delivers a simple, yet efficient enterprise software for big data and agility.
SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud 1608 provides pre-configured content for core business processes, delivering advanced end-to-end, project-based services in the cloud.
The main steps of the end-to-end scenarios for Project-based Services integrate sales orders with project management, allowing you to create customer invoices for time and expenses, including external services recorded against a customer project, delivering a business outcome driven solution to prepare, plan, manage and execute projects end to end.
SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud delivers a complete project accounting in real time with detailed financial figures for projects and event-based revenue recognition, improving people utilization and external resources.
Invoices can be created on a time and materials basis, a fixed-price basis, or a combination of both. After the customer invoice is issued, customer payments can be monitored.
Period end closing activities, including accounting and financial, can be performed. This scenario also supports the analysis of project profitability based on project costs and revenues.
For customers looking for a non-disruptive, simplified transition to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, native integration to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP jam and SAP Ariba is available to run simple in the SAP cloud.
An intuitive user experience helps in managing customer and internal projects by providing a complete view on commercials, finance, procurement and the total workforce (internal and external) in real time.
The pre-configured content is based on SAP Activate and SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA that are tailored specifically to accelerate and simplify the adoption of SAP S/4HANA for faster time to value, by providing tested configuration, content and methodologies for ready-to-run business processes, optimized for SAP S/4 HANA.
The SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud helps you reduce time from projects delivery to cash collection and easily adopt and implement a solution with business content to drive margin, profit and utilization across the entire project organization.
Among the benefits, it will help customers with project definition tasks like define and manage projects in an easy manner, staff projects intuitively, with project monitoring tasks like drilling-down to project related analytics and KPIs (cost performance, work performance, commercial analysis) with flexibility, as well as project review tasks like recording project-related expenses and providing one source of truth, with no aggregates.
This release brings innovations and continuous improvements through all relevant involved business processes:
Event-Based Revenue Recognition - Project-Based Services – with which postings to relevant account assignment objects lead to revenue recognition calculations.
Customer Project Analysis - an analytical SAP Fiori application that provides rich visualization and analysis of customer projects based on margin, revenue, cost, and so on.
Utilization Analysis - an analytical SAP Fiori application which provides rich visualization and analysis of utilization rate of employees across several pre-defined analysis steps.
Accounting and Financial Close - Parallel Ledger - provides ledger-specific operation postings and ledger-specific period-end closing steps.
Asset Accounting - Parallel Ledger - provides ledger-specific transactions and reports.
Ariba - Integration for Finance - With the Ariba integration to SAP S/4HANA Financials, you can forward payment advices to your suppliers, and you can take advantage of discounts for early payment.
Statutory Reporting Framework Reports (not applicable for all countries) - deals with Statutory Reporting Framework Reports, the mandatory submission of financial and non-financial information to a government agency.
Bank Integration with Financial Services Network - With Financial Services Network, you can automatically connect to your banks for sending payment instructions and receive bank statements.
The SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud 1608 is covering 17 countries, with Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates newly added to the list, as well as 10 languages:
Countries:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, USA.
Languages:
English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Hungarian.
For a complete break-down of the scope, please take a look at the SAP Service Marketplace: http://service.sap.com/s4ps
As always, if you want a first-hand experience of SAP S/4HANA, you can start with the SAP S/4HANA trials: https://go.sap.com/cmp/oth/crm-s4hana/index.html
For user assistance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608, take a look at the SAP Help Portal: https://help.sap.com/s4hana_ce_1608#section1
For an overview of highlights for 1608 and a sneak peek on hot topics like the SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud, check out this blog: http://scn.sap.com/community/s4hana/blog/2016/08/30/product-management-update-on-sap-s4hana-cloud-16...
Curious what’s in store for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud? Now you can see what’s planned four quarters ahead. See the latest Roadmap updated on the 29th of August here: https://support.sap.com/content/dam/website/roadmaps/en_us/cross-topics/SAP%20S4HANA%20Cloud%20Road%...
