First Glance at SAP S/4HANA 1709
Recently SAP conducted a webinar “SAP S/4HANA 1709 – Sneak Preview”. Let us have a quick view on few of the delta scope items expected in this release.
As per the road map, the next release of SAP Enterprise Business Suite, S/4HANA 1709 is on way to be released in September 2017 and the interest is building up for the delta innovations and functionalities coming up.
The 1709 will come with more innovations comparing to the earlier released versions 1511 & 1610. SAP continues with its theme of Principle of ONE and cloud first. Every release will have support for 5 years.
Let us have a quick view on few of the delta scope items expected in this release.
HANA2.0 – S/4HANA 1709 will be only on HANA2.0 platform and customers on lower version of HANA has to upgrade to HANA2.0.
Transportation Management – After EWM moved from Supply chain execution box in S/4HANA with 1610, SAP continuing the same of consolidation, with S/4HANA 1709, and Transportation Management will also move from supply chain execution box and will be embedded in S/4HANA. Customer whose business has considerable part of business demanding for tracking and tracing of materials internally and in shipping, will be benefitted with both EWM and TM integrated in S/4HANA optimizing their shipping functions and data harmonization.
Catch Weight Management (CWM) – The catch weight management was available with S/4HANA 1610 FPS01. Thought it was based on the earlier IS solution IS-CWM still was not identical. Till now it was available for new implementation only but with S/4HANA 1709 it will be available for conversion also from IS-CWM.
Commodity Management – Bringing functionality of commodity management in S/4HANA 1709 is really a very good move and respite for the customers whose core of the business is with commodity and have been using commodity management, as for them it was clear NO GO to S/4HANA as the business functions for the functionalities were switched off and no functional equivalent were available. S/4HANA 1709 extending pricing to commodity pricing engine enabling the possibility of procurement and sales with formula based commodity pricing engine.
Commercial Project Management – Commercial project management was available as add on, which will now be integral part of S/4HANA 1709.
Finance GRC –Now lean foreign trade functionalities legal control and export classification will be available and also existing intrastate functionality is expected to be released for more countries will definitely help clients who has requirement of lean functionalities and do not want to get to full-fledged GTS.
S/4HANA CRM – Consolidation extends in LOB sales and service with S/4HANA CRM, will come with FPS01 of S/4HANA 1709, The CRM will have functionalities Service request, order confirmation, interaction center along with business partner, pricing & billing. The CRM functionalities will be released with the S/4HANA 1709 FPS01.
Advanced Variant Configuration – Variant configuration is enhanced with Fiori UI configurator, new engine, simulation environment and embedded analytics for the same. New engine will have improved algorithm enabling precise restrictions, negative variant with optimized performance of the end to end functionality.
INDUSTRIES –
Few of the industry solutions will also have innovations with S/4HANA 1709.
Automotive which is having vehicles sales & distribution currently will have vehicle search as part of enterprise search, definitely most sought after functionality by OEMs.
Utilities – Fiori apps for meter reading and billing. Analysis of master and transaction data.
Oil & Gas – In upstream product and revenue accounting (PRA) and upstream operation will have integration. Downstream will have innovations in supply chain visualization, planning and analytics for Trader’s and scheduler’s workbench and integration of IS oil with commodity management.
Retail – There innovations in the area of retail omnichannel, merchandisement management, settlement management enhanced for wholesale. Also wholesale fashion enabled in S/4HANA 1709.
In addition to above functionalities like Procurement, Quality management, PLM & Hybris billing (FI-CA) will have innovations.
It seems we have to wait for some time to have exact next level details and license information till final release is announced.
Great sharing.
What would be interesting to look is - 1709 - is this ENOUGH for "wait-and-watch" install base clients ?? to "Start" their journey ?
Yes, according to me, creation Digital Transformation roadmaps gets a clearity, however Technical feasibility of end-to-end process remains a "to-check" concern for many.
What's say ?
Hi Aseem,
Thanks for sharing info. It will be good to see how Commodity Pricing Engine in new edition. Commodity pricing is more volatile and depending upon lot of factors.
Hi Aseem
thanks for sharing the information about 1709. In previous slide decks and within the roadmap, SAP made a statement about predictive analytics and machine learning. This point has not been mentioned within your blog. So I was wondering if you have any information regarding those two topics.
Thanks.
Regards, Dominik
Hi Aseem,
Thanks for summarising the webinar. I also attended the S4Hana 1709 Webinar yesterday and your blog is a good recap of the points covered in webinar.
Regards,
Smriti
Hi Aseem,
It would be interesting to know what is the roadmap for SAP CRM going forward. I am of a strong opinion that it should be made available as part of S/4 stack. Licensing would be something that SAP has to think about as some customers may just want to use CRM functionality. But as we know SAP CRM is mostly adopted by existing SAP ECC customers so they will save a lot of integration efforts and maintenance cost mainly for middleware issues.
Regards,
Sandeep
As per my study and understanding SAP CRM will be part of S/4HANA 1709 as Embedded version.
When can we get to know SAP CRM features we expect to see in S/4 HANA 1709 release.
Yash.K
HI
Thank you for the blog. It helps me to capture the overview of S/4HANA1709.
Now in the mid September. When will S/4HANA1709 be launched?
Best,
Ken