S4HANA 1610 – Latest news from TechEd Bangalore

TechEd Bangalore was as usual informative with booths, lectures and hands-on session keeping all busy for all three days. For those who missed TechEd there are several hours of recording of keynotes, lectures(incl slides that can be downloaded), Strategy talks and Interviews from both Las Vegas and Bangalore. See http://events.sap.com/teched/en/sessions.aspx?Year=2016.

After getting a flavor of Fiori 2.0 (co-pilot) in the keynote, the first S/4 HANA session that I attended was TEC964  Production Planning & Detailed Scheduling for SAP S/4HANA .  The session was presented by Jomerce and  he explained the features of PP/DS in the embedded version of S/4HANA. CIF is not required anymore. There are some master data simplifications.

This was the only techno functional S/4 area covered by TechEd. With 1610 releasing in October, I was expecting a more detailed techno functional coverage of S/4HANA but not sure why SAP gave this a miss. I was looking forward to deep dive into embedded EWM + PLM, code pushdown of AATP, simplification of rest of the modules, impact of getting Retail + Oil&Gas into core but none of them made it to the agenda.

I understand TechED is a Technology conference but then when do we get up and close with S/4HANA releases? Only after several months at the next Sapphire?

This was followed by TEC834 Roadmap Q&A: SAP S/4HANA by Sven Denecken & Sanjai K. A fully packed Q&A area with several standing and over 30 questions asked and answered. I feel this Q&A session should have been recorded for replay but since it was not recorded, I will summarize some of the key questions in this blog. The key message is 1610 would be released by end of October. The most asked questions (there was another Q&A session on Thursday as well) was on roadmap  and future of SRM,IBP-Logistics, CRM & IBP-F (in that order).

SRM is nearing end of life and is being replaced with S/4 HANA and Ariba. The future direction is to use Ariba. Customer running SRM can continue to run it side-by-side but message for net new customers was to implement Ariba. SRM functions continue to move to S/4 in 1610 and will continue into 1709.

CRM Service will eventually move to S/4. For Marketing SAP is recommending Hybris. The future of CRM and S/4 is still undecided as far as I understood. This blog should give you an idea on the direction: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/think-sap-c4-hana-mohan-shekar

SCM-PP/DS functionality is part of S/4HANA 1610. IBP (Logistics) will be only on the cloud. APO (DP,SNP etc) will continue side-by-side.

The next on-premises  version will be 1709 (releasing in Sep 2017). SAP will also be releasing a definitive roadmap for both cloud and on-prem versions showing what to expect in the next 3 release. On cloud in addition to Finance cloud SAP will be releasing the Manufacturing cloud in the future.

Thursday was spend doing some hand-on S4HANA conversion and migration.

On Friday I skipped Strategy Talk Your Journey into the Digital Age – Adopting SAP S/4HANA with Sven Denecken as I knew I could catch the replay later. Instead I attended  DMM221  Embedded Analytics in SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW on HANA to get a better understanding on  the topic. I was planning to attend the hand-on session later in the afternoon but had to skip that in favor of the following 3 back-to-back lectures.

TEC113: Fundamentals and Road Map for SAP S/4HANA Suite Cloud Solutions by Sven Denecken covered the roadmap in good detail.

TEC114: Lessons from First Customers of SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management by Sanjai K was probably one of the best 1 hr lectures even in TechEd history. He covered several key point that need to be covered by clients and consulting company to ensure a successful S4 implementation.

TEC115: SAP S/4HANA: The Digital Core(What Are the Technical Capabilities?) by Partha Sarathi Roy Chowdhury  was the last lecture I attended before heading home. He covered the digital core.

Recording for TEC113 and TEC115 are on the same event link.